How to get quality in Important Systems

One of my biggest gripes about British industry is our seeming lack of concern for quality and at least our inability to understand the basics. If you do not understand quality, why are you surprised when things get lost/stolen/broken?
Well here are some tips about quality, some baseline assumptions which you need to consider when planning a quality policy or just plain old development processes.

1. People make mistakes. It doesn't matter how experienced they are. People don't consider all possible uses and abuses of a system so make sure you have a way of checking work. This doesn't guarantee lack of mistakes but reduces the likelihood.
2. If you reduce the likelihood of problems over a whole range of 'attack surfaces' then you will massively reduce the likelihood of problems. For instance, if you have a web site, it is not enough to lock-down the web page itself. You need to lock down every level from the web site right down to the hardware running it. This allows someone to break the front end but still not get anything useful.
3. You cannot predict the future. Just because something works now, does not mean it won't be broken in the future by someone more determined/able/with faster computers.
4. Nobody is expert in everything. Get a range of people with different expertise to look at all the different facets.
5. Don't forgo testing. People who develop products rarely use them in the way that an end user would. They find problems that an end user wouldn't and miss things that would easily be found by basic testing in a real-life scenario.
6. If something goes wrong in the finished product analyse what happened and work out how you can change things to avoid it happening again. For instance, was it caused by someone too junior making the final decision, you might decide to run all ideas past someone more senior but ask honestly whether the problem would have been avoided rather than trying to blame people.
7. Listen to the people at the bottom of the pecking order. If they have ideas to improve things, honestly find out whether they would and implement them. Don't have that "manager knows best" mentality because they don't!
8. Spend time looking around for what other people do/use in similar cicumstances. Perhaps you need some training/tools/people.
9. You might have to spend money! Don't expect world class products on a garden shed budget.
10. Don't make loads of big changes. Quality should be incremental. Start with a decent foundation and then make small changes over time so that quality always increases. Identify redundant parts of the process and get rid of them.
    

The Great British Rail Ticket Farce

Buying train tickets should be really simple. You buy a return between two stations right? Well, if you want the cheapest tickets, it is not that simple. Here is a simple and general guide to saving money on tickets.
Firstly, there is a general balance between the cheapness of the ticket and its flexibility. In other words if you want to travel at any time on any train, these tickets will cost more than if you name a train(s) and travel after the rush hour so a good general rule is to try and book ahead as much as possible. Bear in mind that depending on other factors such as engineering works, you might not be able to book all of these advance tickets (since the company might not know if your named train is going to run). Generally more than 2 weeks in advance allows you to get cheap tickets on a first come, first served basis (some trains seem to only have about 50 available).
Secondly, after privatisation, the government decided to protect certain ticket prices from being overinflated by the train operating companies and pricing everybody of the trains. These tickets such as "saver" tickets and most season tickets are tied to inflation + 1% currently and are often good value for money. However, because the train companies don't like having their prices dictated, some offer single tickets that are cheaper than half a "saver return" to entice people from the government protected tickets (and perhaps one day get rid of the protected ones?). Always check on a return if two singles are cheaper but bear in mind that again due to availability, you might be restricted to certain trains if you want the cheapest singles and usually the singles are for a single train company and might restrict the route that you are allowed to travel.
The third and most bizarre condition is related to the way in which fares are calculate that run over more than one company's rails. Although the track is owned by Network Rail, for fares, it is treated as being owned by the main operator over that line who get to say how much it costs to run over that section. This can create savings for 2 reasons. 1 is that each company charges different amounts of money for similar routes and the other is that you are allowed to travel, using standard tickets, any reasonable route between two places. For instance, if you buy a ticket from London to Glasgow, you could travel from Kings Cross, Euston or St Pancras even though the fare will be based on only one route. The clever thing to do here is to "break your journey". As long as your train stops at a station (you do not have to alight) you can buy a set of tickets to cover the whole journey rather than one return ticket. This enables you to take advantage of off-peak returns (cheap day return), saver returns (limited in distance) and journeys over cheaper lengths of track. For example, suppose you need to go from Cheltenham to Weymouth for the day but you need to leave at 9:15. You cannot buy a cheap day ticket because it is before 9:30 so generally you would end up with a saver return which is about £30. You change trains at Bristol so by getting a standard return from Cheltenham to Bristol and then a cheap day return from Bristol to Weymouth, you save about £5. Note that the train must call where you "break the journey" but you do not have to alight at that station. With a bit of investigation, you can potentially save hundreds of pounds. The ticket office must sell you these sets of tickets but they will not usually offer them to you because they say it takes too much time.
Let me leave you with an example that Barry Doe the expert recounted on the BBC web site. You want to travel first class return to Manchester so the open first return is about £220 BUT you can alternatively buy a first return from London to Falkirk (yes in Scotland and which is set by East Coast railways) which is £100 cheaper and then you opt to choose the west coast route via Manchester and get off at Manchester. Bargain.

More wind power - I love it (not)

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/22/wind_intermittency_study/

Not sure why but people who are practical about such things as saving the planet don't seem to given much of a voice or they are labelled as cynics or nay-sayers but unfortunately, it is the practical people who have the job of planning these projects for power generation into the next century and they cannot plan on airy-fairy ideas or idealism. It seems fair enough to say that England could benefit from a lot of wind energy. The wind is reasonably common here and we could tap it BUT, BIG BUT, it cannot be relied on 24 horus per day 365 days per year yet the energy requirement for the country although it varies, is still required all the time. The report mentioned above basically says you cannot have a large amount of wind energy making up your output, only as much as the other power stations can make up for if the wind dies. The only way you could use wind effectively would be to use it for things like water heating or battery charging where drops in the output would not have an immediate or drastic effect but people don't talk about that. In addition, you need to litter the countryside with these things and although they have an architecural elegance, you wouldn't build the Gherkin building in the middle of the Cotswolds so why build turbines? They are not massively powerful for their intrusive size and there is only so much energy available in the wind in the best case at the optimum speed. So overall, their output might only be 40% of their rated output (or less) over a year. This means installing 100Gw to get 40Gw on average (perhaps 100Gw some times and 0 at others!).
We need to forget this white elephant and look at more useful things like reducing energy consumption in houses (existing as well as new builds) and installing things like solar water heaters as standard which are massively useful to most people!
Bring the revolution.

To Privatise or not to Privatise

Was reading about National Express having their East Coast franchise taken back by the government for underperforming or something. Everyone blames everyone else. Government blames the company, the company blame the lack of people due to recession, the people blame the government for privatising it. I'm sure a lot of people don't actually understand the theory of privatisation and why it was done like it was so here goes:
Railways are expensive to run. Governments don't like spending money on anything other than expenses, hospitals, schools and the army so when people in the Tory government went over the papers, they didn't like the amount of money it cost to run them, especially since the public had to pay to use them so why were they still costing a few hundred million per year? Of course, it is because to provide a service, you have to have regular trains even when not many people are travelling. You hope that the rush hour pays for these ghost services but what if they don't? What do you cut? You cut a service and some people will stop using your trains which is even less income albeit with less services to pay for (ignoring the fact that you are probably still employing the driver and own the train). In order to avoid this, the government helps prop it up. Also the Tories thought (apparently incorrectly) that the railways were inefficient and wasteful. I have read however that for the level of subsidy from the government, good old BR were the most efficient in Europe and this despite the ups and downs of government investment. Logical conclusion? Run it all privately, the private companies can run stuff for zero government investment, charge whatever they need to (but kept in check) and then use their private initiative to make cost savings so everyone is happy. There were loads of problems with the system however, the assumption that it is possible to run a service that is both cost effective and convenient, both of which were required, is at best ambitious and at worst simply untrue. This is what happened in the 60s when the government decided that underused lines simply had to close to the chagrin of those affected. Secondly, to get competition to force people to keep costs down, you need capacity on the lines, something we basically don't have in many places, the monopoly of services on most routes means that there is little competition. Also, in order to tempt people who would not have invested the massive amounts required, everything was sold off cheap to the private companies and because they wanted competition, the government decided that they needed Railtrack to own the infrastructure and lease it back to the operating companies. Of course, they could charge whatever they needed to and since the level of safety etc was down to Railtrack, their costs were huge and the operating companies were paying hundreds of millions per year. It doesn't end. Buying trains is hugely expensive for someone on a 5 or 10 year lease so they get hired from leasing companies who again can make large profits without much come back.
What do I think? I don't know. Re-nationalise it and you risk government interference like you get in schools and the NHS (and the railways in fact) and you get variable investment year-on-year depending on the governments priorities. You also get that sad but true fact that public companies are generally unaccountable for waste and are difficult to keep productive. Not sure why but they are. What do we do? We need to look at it and decide what is the one best model for our situation and decide whether it will always be the best model so we can stop changing it all the time, we have had 4 eras of railways plus the war years and every change is incredibly expensive. Perhaps the government need to accept the thing is expensive and just pay for it.