Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog: Deming, lean thinking, innovation, customer focus, continual improvement, six sigma.
September 18, 2008
Webcast on the Toyota Development Process

Kenji Hiranabe talks about Toyota’s development process (webcast). Kenji shares a presentation he attended earlier this year by Nobuaki Katayama, a former Chief Engineer at Toyota, and the lessons he learned from him.

The webcast takes awhile to get going. If you are impatient you might want to start at the 6 minute mark. Some thoughts from the talk:

  • Voice of the Customer is diffuse. A strong concept (for a project - new car for example) is very important to focus thought, listening to voice of the customer is important but must use strong concept to avoid losing focus (due to diffuse customer feedback).
  • Honest face to face communication is important. Bad news first - present bad news first [don't try to hide bad news - my thoughts in brackets, John Hunter].
  • Everyone must think about cost reduction, many efforts add up to big impact [the importance of reducing waste everywhere].
  • benchmark, not to copy others, but to learn from what others do well.

The webcast includes a nice (though short) discussion of agile management in software development and lean manufacturing (the different situation of manufacturing versus software development). Kenji Hiranabe has also translated several agile and lean books into Japanese including Implementing Lean Software Development.

Related: Kenji Hiranabe’s blog - Marissa Mayer Webcast on Google Innovation - Articles and webcasts by Mary Poppendieck - Future Directions for Agile Management - Interview with Toyota President

Leave a Reply



Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog © curiouscat.com 2005-2008 powered by WordPress

Internal Links

Author

John Hunter

Tags


Full tag could

Other

Search Blog

Web Search

Management Improvement web search

Recent Comments

  • Anonymous: Insightful. I like this. Will try to see whether the information provided herein is useful or not by the...
  • Tim: Our state passed a law a few years back making it illegal to import drugs from canada, isn’t that a...
  • Shawn: I agree completely. The mainstream press is either lazy, biased, or both, and reports manufacturing job loses...
  • Doug Mikaelian: I couldn’t agree more about “saying no” to individual incentives. But I also...
  • Ian Pratt: Great article and so true, the best management book I have ever read was 15 years old, the surprising...
  • Colleen: I hate that TV program TMZ, but I was thinking they could do some good for a change by harrassing those...
  • shaun sayers: Couldn’t agree more with your view on new management books. However when you have a good long...
  • Anonymous: Another one of Google’s open source projects is Google Chrome. Its one good browser and is where you...

Archives

September 2008
M T W T F S S
« Aug   Oct »
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
2930