Tapping with a Sledge Hammer

Last week brought a most excellent event: pinewood derby.

Oh yes. Pinewood derby.

Pinewood derby is a cub scout event where dads cub scouts take a block of pine wood, four nails, and four plastic wheels and create a car. They then race the cars along a track against all of the other dads cub scouts. Dads Cub scouts look forward to this event all year long.

Talk about a rich environment for potential blog entries!

We got the car painted the night before (an improvement over past pinewood derbies) so we planned to wait to put the wheels on the car until the next day when I would "get home early."

Of course we had a late meeting the next day. I live almost an hour away from the office so I called Lani to let her know I would barely make it. We decided that she would bring Alex, the car pieces and a hammer to the event.

A hammer. Not a sledge hammer--a hammer! The axles for these things are tiny little pieces of metal. If you're not familiar with pinewood derby, there are tons of legal tricks you can employ to make your car faster: lubricate the axle, use a drill press to drill new holes closer to the edges, make one of the holes a little higher off the ground than the other three, carve out most of the body and add weight to the back, etc, etc, etc. But no tricks will compensate for bad wheels or bad axles. And in my hand were four tiny little nails and a gigantic hammer. Since we seemed to have no other choice, we lay the car on its side and prepared to insert the axles by pounding them into the soft wood.

A friend stopped us and held up a tiny little hammer. "Try this," she said with a smile.

Back in November I wrote about matching great systems with great people to increase effectiveness. The point, in the conext of this metaphor, was that if people aren't getting the job done, check that you've got the right tools before you blame the worker.

Unfortunately, we often try to do too much with tools and process. We use a sledgehammer for a small job.

In our shop, we have a process we use for accomplishing projects. Most feel the process is too cumbersome and slow. However, when faced with some kind of persistent problem the same people who complain about the burden of the current process want to add more steps or controls, making it even slower or bureaucratic feeling.

If you assume people have good intentions, you can often accomplish the same things through simple training. In our department, we have a number of requirements for software development projects:

• Language must be Java or .NET.


• Code coverage for unit tests must be a certain percentage.


• All of the functional disciplines (like interaction design, development, QA, database, etc.) must be consulted on the plan.


• Resources must be freed up and ready to go.

When we began implementing process in Church I.T. we had a tendency to put controls and process in place to make sure all of these things happened.

However, process shouldn't be used as a gate unless it's absolutely necessary. Rather, people should be trained to understand expectations and they will, more often than not, comply!

Why use a sledge hammer on a pinewood derby car when you can use a tiny little tapping hammer?

Assume people are well-intended and teach them what they need to do to be effective!