(2021-11-16) GeePawHill MMMSS The Intrinsic Benefit Of Steps

GeePawHill: MMMSS - The - Intrinsic Benefit of Steps. Imagine we’re at some point on our way to a horizon goal. There’s a fork in the road and we have three paths in front of us, all of which, we believe, will take us to that goal.

In path A, we have one ready-to-ready step of size 10 stride-lengths. Path B has five steps of size 2. The third path, C, has 15 steps of size 1.

We all know that old-school theory will choose A, a single step of size 10. Rework avoidance theory is indifferent to stride-length altogether

The experienced MMMSS practitioner will nearly always prefer 15 steps of size 1. The reason: it will most likely get us there faster. Understanding this is today’s mission.

Ready-to-ready steps sometimes have extrinsic benefit. When we get to the end of the step, our value stream will be improved in some way.

But ready-to-ready steps also bring intrinsic benefit.

We’re going to look at eight intrinsic benefits from taking more smaller steps. They break into two rough groups: benefits that focus on the responsiveness or handling of the producing system. And benefits that focus on the human makers doing the producing.

The responsiveness benefits are interruptability, steerability, reversability, and target parallelism.

The human benefits of many more much smaller steps are scope, rhythm, autonomy, and safety.

there’s no eliminating the possibility of error, even in small steps. The trick, tho, is that small steps only create small failures with small costs to undo or re-direct.

My own RAMPS, an amplification and extension, says the key motivators for most folks include Rhythm, Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose, and Safety.

This is actually about change, not specific to programming, but generalized to all change towards horizon goals. (agile)