Improving the Process

As the development of all products that Tompkins manages continues, new adversities appear. In chapters 13 and 14, the process improvement is the main idea that is discussed and some new characters are introduced. The challenge of these two chapters start by a new Belok’s intervention. If one remembers, Belok is the substitute of NNL while he is not in the country. The intervention placed by him is an institute which is in charge of process improvement.

It is good to be continually improving process to achieve more complicated and robust goals. And these improvement programs can make a big impact on performance for long term projects. But, they cost time and money, and they can be a setback instead of an improvement if not applied to a good project candidate. It is a two edged weapon, because there is the danger of missing chances to take important shortcuts if the standard process is there.

The real challenge here is that the process improvement that is offered would have caused Tompkins several months of stopped progress. For him this was absurd, so, to solve the problem, he would have to go to the institute where this was managed and try to convince the superiors to not apply de program that Belok asked for.

In this section of the book there is a good advice from ex-General Markov to Tompkins. Which states that when you try to convince someone to do something for you, one must not see that person as an enemy. You must like that person so that when the other sees that, it will respond in a better way than fighting and talking in a rude way.

By using Markov’s advice, Tompkins meets the director of the institute, whose name is Aristotle Kenoros. He is a very interesting character because of him being bored in top of the institute building, sleeping and waiting for Tompkins to arrive. When this happens, Tompkins convinces him to cancel de process improvement program with the condition of giving Aristotle a job with him.

After all of these events the problem is resolved, but there is still a big incognita. How can the process be improved without adding programs like that and wasting time?

Aristotle answers Tompkins question with a very clever solution. He states that even though the programs work but take time, there is another way of achieving process improvement, which is substracting things to do. At first it was quite confusing, but then Aristotle asked Tompkins to tell him which of the processes is taking the longest. Mr. T. answer with the debugging process. And Aristotle answered that the solution for that and applying the other way of finding process improvement is to substract the time it takes to debug and focus on design so when the code is being written, there would have to be less bugs and even none.

These two chapters where really interesting for me because I can apply them in my real work environment to see the difference and experiment to have the right amount of process improvement. Also, I really liked the avise from Markov about caring for others so they can get to do some things for you.