A global and agile exercise

Category: Editorial

Last year I went to a talk by Adrian Shooter of Chiltern Trains in which he contrasted the success of the development of his railway, with many small developments, against the problems of the West Coach Mainline, which had been a huge engineering undertaking beset with delays and cost overruns. His belief was that large gains can be achieved effectively if made in small steps.

We have had similar experience. Last year - or was it the year before - we undertook a major overhaul of the Brefi Group web site. It went on and on with no short term benefit to users. We have just built a completely new site for Brefi Network using an 'agile' approach in which we build the minimum, then release it and then improve it.

We have done this very quickly and effectively using 'Ruby on Rails' and the philosophy of Getting Real, a book by software developers 37signals. Getting Real is about skipping all the stuff that represents real, and actually building the real thing. This lets you get the interface right before you get the software wrong. It is about iterations and lowering the cost of change and delivers just what customers need and eliminates anything they don't.

Getting Real delivers better results because it forces you to deal with the actual problems you're trying to solve instead of your ideas about these problems. It forces you to deal with reality. 37signals specialises in 'underdoing' its competition. They produce just what is needed and then evolve in response to strong customer demand. They do not try to produce the comprehensive solution to every possible problem - that leads to large complicated programs in which many parts are rarely used. It is an application of the 80:20 rule.

Although Getting Real is about writing software, its application can be relevant to any activity.

The focus is on big picture ideas. Even if your company typically runs on long-term schedules with big teams, there are still ways to get real. The first step is to break into smaller units. When there are too many people involved, nothing gets done. The leaner you are, the faster - and better - things get done. Brefi Network was developed by a team of two. Bite off a little bit at a time and do that and respond to feedback. Give the users bite size pieces that they can digest. The faster you get user feedback the better. Ideas can sound great on paper but in practice turn out to be suboptimal.

Brefi Network was launched at HRD 2006 less than a month ago. Since then there have been many changes and developments based upon out own learning and feedback: -

• Individual skills are shown in the search results (and on the home page)


• 
  There is now an active hyperlink from your own web site address (if you have entered one), which will help raise your search engine profile


• There is a facility for you to promote your own courses


• There is an "invite a friend" facility - please take advantage of this and help us all build a critical mass more quickly.


• We have redesigned the personal home page to be more user friendly

Getting Real means staying flexible by reducing obstacles to change. change is your best friend. The more expensive it is to make a change, the less likely you'll make it. And if your competitors can change faster than you, you're at a huge disadvantage. If change gets too expensive, you're dead.

Accept that decisions are temporary; accept that mistakes will happen and realise it's no big deal as long as you can correct them quickly. Execute, build momentum and move on. Knowing that you're going to revisit issues is a great motivator to just get ideas out there to see if they'll fly.

Keep dividing problems into smaller and smaller pieces until you're able to digest them.

Even though the Brefi Network site has hardly been found by the search engines so far, we have had 2,200 page views in the last week, with 30% coming from Google and 25% coming through the Brefi Group web site, which now links into the Network directory. The remaining 45% is accounted for mainly by direct access as a result of our promotion at HRD and recent enquiries.

We have had visits from Canada, USA, Europe, Middle East, Asia and Australia. So the magic is already working.

You can read about Brefi Network in this week's Coaching Notes. I recommend that you also obtain a copy of Getting Real; it's only $19.

USEFUL LINKS 

• Subscribe to the CorporateCoach RSS feed


• Brefi Network


• 37signals


• Getting Real


• Chiltern Railways

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