Applying "the simplest thing that could possibly work" principle

What problem are organizations trying to solve with incentive pay?

Is an incentive plan the simplest, most effective way to address the problem?

Most managers believe that incentive pay plans encourage the desired behavior, drive performance improvement, and reward (individual) achievement. That may be the case, with certain kinds of work.

But before looking to incentive pay to improve performance, look at the work system.

What are the organizational impediments that might be preventing desired performance?

What else might be preventing people from achieving the desired results?

Do people have a clear understanding of how their work contributes to the bottom line and the companies mission?

Do people have a clear expectation of what's expected of them day-to-day?

Do people have the tools to perform?

Do they have the skills?

Are they receiving feedback from the system and from their peers and managers?

Will individual incentives actually encourage the behavior the organization says it wants?

Will the side effects of incentive pay help or hinder the organization?

These questions need to precede the decision to use incentive pay to drive behavior and results.

As Ann Bares, writing for Workforce.com says,

Much as our management "customers" might like to believe the contrary, incentives are not a sound substitute for an effective organizational structure, good management practices or clear and regular communication.

So work on improving the system and managing well before looking to incentive pay to improve performance and results. That's the simplest thing to do. Plus, for interdependent work, incentive pay is likely the wrong level to pull.

Read Ann Bares' full article here (requires free registration).

15 Things Bob Sutton Believes

From Bob Sutton's Work Matters blog:

15 THINGS I (Bob Sutton) BELIEVE

1. Sometimes the best management is no management at all -- first do no harm!

2. Indifference is as important as passion.

3. In organizational life, you can have influence over others or you can have freedom from others, but you can't have both at the same time.

4. Saying smart things and giving smart answers are important. Learning to listen to others and to ask smart questions is more important.

5. Learn how to fight as if you are right and listen as if you are wrong: It helps you develop strong opinions that are weakly held.

6. You get what you expect from people. This is especially true when it comes to selfish behavior; unvarnished self-interest is a learned social norm, not an unwavering feature of human behavior.

7. Getting a little power can turn you into an insensitive self-centered jerk.

8. Avoid pompous jerks whenever possible. They not only can make you feel bad about yourself, chances are that you will eventually start acting like them.

9. The best test of a person's character is how he or she treats those with less power.

10. The best single question for testing an organization’s character is: What happens when people make mistakes?

11. The best people and organizations have the attitude of wisdom: The courage to act on what they know right now and the humility to change course when they find better evidence.

12. The quest for management magic and breakthrough ideas is overrated; being a master of the obvious is underrated.

13. Err on the side of optimism and positive energy in all things.

14. It is good to ask yourself, do I have enough? Do you really need more money, power, prestige, or stuff?

15. Jim Maloney is right: Work is an overrated activity

A fine list. What do you believe?

How much to automate

In my experience it's *really* difficult to do agile development (or be agile) without the frequent feedback provided by automated tests. But automated tests can be expensive.

An interesting post on the topic from Elisabeth Hendrickson:

In some contexts, particularly where there is a legacy code base that was created without automated tests, the cost to create and maintain each automated test is extraordinarily high.

Further, the value of those tests is often less than it could be.

The value in any test is in the information that it provides. But when many of the test failures are because the tests, and not the code, are wrong, the information provided by the whole suite of tests is deemed unreliable and untrustworthy. Information only has value to the extent that we can trust it.

Thus, the automated tests in that kind of context are both insanely expensive and low in value. Some years ago this was the norm. In many organizations, sadly, this is still the norm.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Successful Agile teams typically follow at least a subset of the XP development practices like TDD and Continuous Integration. Oh, sure, you can be Agile without doing TDD.

But teams that do practice TDD and ATDD wind up with large suites of automated tests as a side effect.

Read the full post here.

Self-organizing Teams Interview

Bas de Baar and I had a little video chat about self-organizing teams a couple of weeks ago. Video is here. (Thanks to Andres and George for pointing out the empty link.)