Conduct experiments to get there. This is where the Kaizen come in. Sometimes it was automation (Jidoka), sometimes it was mistake prevention (Poka-Yoke) and other times it was just eliminating the need for the task.

The question was though, who are the first to conduct these experiments. I later read about the ski slope analogy in Sooner Safer Happier by Jonathan Smart and it was the sort of thing I was trying to avoid. That is, getting everyone to make changes all the time all at once. I wanted people to volunteer to try new things rather then telling them. So next I had to figure out where everyone fit in the curve of diffusion of innovation. Here’s what happened when I told the team I’d help them install Eclipse and booked a short meeting to do so.

  1. Some folks read the instructions, installed Eclipse, and let me know it’s done. I canceled the meeting. They were the innovators.
  2. Some folks did all the work and waited for the meeting to confirm they did it correctly. The meeting was done in 5 minutes. They were the early adopters.
  3. Some folks waited for the meeting, went through the instructions with me. The meeting ended on time. They were the early majority.
  4. Then there were folks who just weren’t comfortable with installing software. For them I needed more time in the meeting or more meetings. I also had to update the steps to be even clearer. They were the late majority.

  5. Then came the laggards. There were two types:

    1. There was the one person who was against the idea of installing Eclipse :). Not because they preferred IntelliJ or NetBeans but because they thought everything should be installed all at once only once I figured out all the steps that everyone on the team should take. They didn’t like the approach of small changes, it had to be big bang changes once every few months. This was a contractor and eventually when we became efficient enough I let them go.
    2. There was the one person who installed Eclipse more than once. Every time she thought she was starting Eclipse, she was basically restarting the setup and installing multiple copies of it with multiple work-spaces. Despite that, she was still able to make progress.

By the time the Eclipse exercise was done, I knew in what order I’d be training people to ski.