I finished reading “The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement” today (a sunny and windy beautiful day in Boston btw) which Joel pointed to a couple months back. Like Joel, I’ll find it useful should I ever need to run a factory, it also struck a chord with me on some non-programming level, more business like level. One of the takeaways from the book was the description of what the goal of a for-profit organization should be:

“… so I can say that the goal is to increase net profit, while simultaneously increasing both ROI and cash flow and that’s the equivalent of saying the goal is to make money…. They’re measurements which express the goal of making money perfectly well, but which also permit you to develop operational rules for running your plant. Their names are throughput, inventory and operational expense… Throughput is the rate at which the system generates money through sales…. Inventory is all the money that the system has invested in purchasing things which it intends to sell…. Operational expense is all the money the system spends in order to turn inventory into throughput.” (pg 59-60) Selling physical widgets is a much different ballgame than selling services or selling software, so I’m having a hard time imagining how this might apply to a web shop like MINDSEYE, but it’s an interesting mental exercise nonetheless.

Another interesting concept (which I’m guessing is covered in the Critical Chain book) is the idea that in a multi-step synchronous process, the fluctuations in speed of the various steps result not in an averaging out of time the system needs to run but rather in an accumulation of the fluctuations. His example was a hike with 15 Boy Scouts, if you let one kid lead the pack and that kid averages between 1.0 and 2.0 mph, the distance between the first and the 15th scout will never average out but will gradually increase with time because “… dependency limits the opportunities for higher fluctuations.” (pg 100). In this case, the first scout doesn’t have any dependencies, but each of the next 14 do: the person in front of them. Thus, as the hike progresses, the other 14 can never go faster than the person in front of them and so on and so forth. This actually does have some usefulness within our daily jobs as programmers. Each of us does depend on someone in one way or another whether it be for design assets or IA docs or a software function. A breakdown in one step of a project can sometimes be made up through sheer willpower and alot of caffeine, but most likely will result in the project being delayed. The same thinking can be applied to software that we write: slow functions, rather the statistical fluctuations in functions (fast or slow) don’t average out as much as they accumulate, which I guess is kind of obvious, but worth noting.

Other nuggets to chew on this morning: “The maximum deviation of a preceding operation will become the starting point of a subsequent operation.” (pg 133)

On bottlenecks within an operation: “… Make sure the bottleneck works only on good parts by weeding out the ones that are defective. If you scrap a part before it reaches the bottleneck, all you have lost is a scrapped part. But if you scrap the part after it’s passed the bottleneck, you have lost time that cannot be recovered.” (pg 156) Do you have expensive (in terms of processor cycles) operations in a computer program after which you then scrub the data for quality? Why not put the scrub before the expensive operation saving yourself some cycles.

On problem solving: “… people would come to me from time to time with problems in mathematics they couldn’t solve. They wanted me to check their numbers for them. But after a while I learned not to waste my time checking the numbers — because numbers were almost always right. However, if I checked the assumptions, they were almost always wrong.” (pg 157) Next time someone asks you to review some code that isn’t producing the correct results, attack their assumptions before going over the code with a fine tooth comb.

BTW, the book is written as a story so if like reading stories and want to stretch the business side of your brain, but don’t enjoy business textbooks, this book is for you!

Update: Jeff Sutherland has a great review of the book from a technical perspective here.