Q1 - The Poppendiecks

Q1.  Hi Tom and Mary,  I suppose I should have started this blog with you two since it was your book (actually, an early draft of your book) that got me into this business, but I didn't, so please forgive me :) It must be about 5 years now since you started writing the book, but can you step back even further than that and tell me about your lives before that?  Several people have emailed me to complain that there's too much techie stuff in this blog and not enough romance, so how'd you two meet?  Was it love at first sight?  I'd also like to hear more about your "pre-LSD" lives - correct me if I'm wrong, but your resumes don't hint strongly that you were both headed towards gurudom ...

Mary replied:

Life before Lean Software Development

When the professor was calling role the first day of our college physics class, he asked some guy in the front:  “Are you the one who won the high school science fair a couple of years ago?”  At the end of the class he asked us to choose a lab partner, and since I didn’t know anyone in the class, I made a bee line toward the guy in front who was smart enough to enter and win a science fair. Meanwhile, that guy was looking around for a female lab partner, and so we met. It was certainly not love at first sight, it was all about getting through physics class with a decent lab partner. 

But by the end of the semester, we were serious about one another, and I had finally learned to spell “Poppendieck”.  The professor had graded all of our lab reports and put them in a pile for us to claim.  As Tom and I dug through the pile to retrieve our lab reports, time and again Tom would laugh and say – look at how you spelled Poppendieck this time!  Yes, there are many ways to spell the name, and when our kids were young, they discovered that there are also a great number of nicknames that can be derived from Poppendieck.  When they complained, I would tell them “Talk to your father.  He grew up with the name – ask him how he handled it.” 

I proceeded to get a masters degree in mathematics (before computer science programs were widely available), while Tom supported us by teaching physics in high school.  Then he went on to get a PhD in physics, while I supported us by working as a programmer in the physics department at the University of Wisconsin.  We lived in married student housing, where the apartments were so small that we refused to share our meager space with a TV.  Parents traded babysitting script for evenings out, and Tom took our daughter to a day care center on the back of his bike.   

My job was to teach one of those new things called mini-computers to digitize bubble chamber film and send a preliminary analysis to tape for later number crunching on the big Univac computer on campus.  Tom got his PhD by analyzing the (100) surface layer of silicon in ultra-high vacuum.  Eventually Tom ended up getting a job as assistant professor at Hamline University in St. Paul.  I asked my local DEC salesman in Madison:  “Who’s buying DEC mini-computers in the Minneapolis area?” and I quickly found a job in the engineering research department of 3M, exploring options for mini-computer control of processes.

After a few years as a physics professor, Tom found himself bringing the first computers into Hamline University.  He remembers crawling through the heating tunnels stringing cables, and eventually helping the school establish the policy that all students should have access to a word processor.  I was glad that Tom was a professor, because I was traveling quite a bit starting up process control systems in 3M plants.  Professors have free time to take kids to the doctor and dentist, and they can even stay home most of the day when kids are sick. 

But then our jobs changed.  Tom’s university decided to formalize the job he was doing and call it “Director of Academic Computing”.  He was asked to apply for the job.  I suggested that if they were going to have him apply for his own job, he might as well send out some resumes and see if anyone else would want to hire him.  Within two weeks, Tom had a job working for Honeywell designing a product data management system for a division which developed inertial laser gyroscope based navigation systems for commercial airplanes. 

At about the same time, I was offered a job as IT Manager in a nearby 3M plant where I had just overseen the installed a process monitoring system.  This was my first management job, and my first encounter with the quality movement and with just-in-time.  Tom encountered the total quality movement, activity based management, and just-in-time at Honeywell at about the same time.

After a few years, I returned to 3M headquarters and worked in new product development, while Tom went on to become a software consultant.  When 3M was spinning off Imation, I was offered an early retirement package I couldn’t refuse.  So in the late 90’s I abandoned Minneapolis for a year and moved to California, working for a start-up company specializing in high purity polymer that I had taken an equity position in while I was at 3M.  Meanwhile, Tom traveled extensively, trying to help companies as far away as Brazil use IBM’s “SanFrancisco” framework.  We ended up in the same city every weekend – sometimes home, sometimes California, sometimes Las Vegas, or wherever. We had two tandem bikes – one in California and one home in Minneapolis – and we usually went on a long bike ride together every weekend.  Our vacations were almost always week-long bike rides across some state or other.

Back home in Minneapolis, I was looking for some way to make a bit of money for a few years, after which my pension would kick in and pay the bills.  Tom said there was a great need for project managers, and I figured that I could get back into software development easily enough, having plenty of background in programming and IT management. I started up our business and got a job gathering requirements (using JAD) for a state government project.  JAD I understood, I had used it before.  This thing called “Waterfall,” however, was new to me; I couldn’t figure out how that could possibly work – and actually it didn’t.  I ended up as the third project manager of that project, trying to rescue it when it got into trouble, with mixed results.  When it was over I decided to write a book about how ideas from the quality movement and lean manufacturing offer a better way to develop software.

Part way through the book, an economic downturn caused Tom’s consulting firm to falter and thus Tom joined me as author of the book and as a partner in the business.  At first we worked separately, but one November I was invited to give a talk at XP Days in London.  Airfares to London were so cheap that I thought it would be nice if Tom joined me.  That trip turned into a whirlwind tour of Edinburgh and Malmo, and as we were struggling with the luggage and the logistics I said to myself:  “I was going to come here alone?  How dumb was THAT?”  And we have never traveled separately overseas again.

We have found that we love to travel and see new places, we love to meet people and talk about lean software development, and we are very fortunate that people want us to share our insights with them and give us more insights to share with others.

Comments

[Richard Karpinski]

If you asked Mary to tell you about the phonebook, it would be interesting. Thanks for passing her words along.

Do you cover "Competitive Engineering" by Tom Gilb as well? He doesn't self identify as Agile, but his guidelines are adept and his way of choosing which week long task to undertake next is superior. He calls it impact estimation