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Building Adoption of Management Improvement Ideas in Your Organization

Posted on December 8, 2010  Comments (5)

Continuation of How to Get a New Management Strategy, Tool or Concept Adopted

Target something that actually provides a good story. It often helps if there have been failures in attempts to solve a problem in the past. That makes the new success more impressive. Something that is relate-able to the audience you are trying to win over is also useful. Even if senior management cares about an issue, if the solution is so technical they are completely baffled, they will be happy with a solution but they won’t be as excited about expanding the strategy you are trying to encourage when they can understand the process that lead to a solution.

Favor efforts that will help you build organizational capacity to do more of what you want going forward (adopt lean thinking, use design of experiments…). Some of this is about building expertise in the organization. It is also about building your circle of influence. Growing your ability to influence how the organization grows will help you encourage the improvements you believe in.

It is very helpful to show connections between individual efforts. Often you build using various tools: in several instances using PDSA cycle to guide improvement, in others mistake-proofing to cement improvement, in another adopting one piece flow to make problems visible and encourage improvement, in another assuring the respect for people to build the right culture for improvement, and in another using an understanding of variation to make evidence based decision rather than jumping to faulty conclusions with limited information. These management tools, concepts, methods and ideas any many more, are used together for a reason. They support each other. So it is very helpful if you tie them together. As you start adding new tools, ideas and concepts to the management system show how they support each other. Individual tools can help. But the gains they offer are minor compared to the gains possible with a systemic change of management.

Another good strategy is picking the right people to involve in an effort. If you are trying to gain support, find those people in the organization that set the tone that others follow (which are not merely those with organizational power due to their job title). It is nice if you can find such people that have generally positive outlooks and like new challenges (this is often the case). If the culture is very toxic you may well have some who are likely to try and discourage hope in others (often because they have been disappointed so many times themselves they have finally decided not to be disappointed again). Often (though not always) you can win these people over.
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No True Lean Thinking or Agile Software Development

Posted on November 22, 2010  Comments (0)

“There is no true value of any characteristic, state, or condition that is defined in terms of measurement or observation.” – Dr. W. Edwards Deming.

The value depends on your operational definition.

Once you operationalize management ideas in a real organization it necessarily should have differences from how it is operationalized elsewhere. As Deming said there are no effective simple recipes for management. It is one of the frustrations people have with Dr. Deming: that there is no cookbook telling you what you should go do as a manager. You need to understand things like: interactions, variation, psychology, systems thinking, how we know what we know (and what we “know” that isn’t so). And then you need to make decisions about how to apply these concepts in your organization.

There is value in being able to think and discuss ideas in a broader context than your organization. You lose a great deal of learning opportunities if you can’t. And having common idea about what common principles a lean thinking organization or agile software organization should have is helpful I believe. That is aided by abstract ideals of these management practices.

Dilbert comic on the futility of process and arbitrary deadlines

One of agile’s guiding principles is individuals and interactions over processes and tools. I am a Deming follower and that emphasizes the importance of process and system. The words in agile are anti-process. But in my experience it is really a specific type of process – and that is basically idiotic adherence to process that the software developers are sick of. This attitude is best summed up in Dilbert. There are plenty of what I would call process in the practice of agile – sprints, kanban, work in process limits, define what done means, using user stories, retrospectives, build in quality… Basically I think it is important to understand what the principles mean, but don’t get locked into dogmatic ideas.

There are principles that seem to me necessary to, for example, consider an effort as lean management. There must be respect for people in lean management. If it isn’t there, then I don’t think it is lean. It might be management using some ideas and tools from lean, but it isn’t lean management. Exactly how respect for people is manifest is up to the organization. The same thing holds for other principles.

Thoughts on No True Agile, No True Lean, No True Latte

Related: Dr. Deming: There is No True Value – How to Manage What You Can’t Measure – Involve IT Staff in Business Process Improvement – The Illusion of Knowledge

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Airport Security with Lean Management Principles

Posted on November 16, 2010  Comments (1)

The ‘Israelification’ of airports: High security, little bother

We [Israel] said, ‘We’re not going to do this. You’re going to find a way that will take care of security without touching the efficiency of the airport.”
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“The whole time, they are looking into your eyes — which is very embarrassing. But this is one of the ways they figure out if you are suspicious or not. It takes 20, 25 seconds,” said Sela. Lines are staggered. People are not allowed to bunch up into inviting targets for a bomber who has gotten this far.

Lean thinking: customer focus, value stream (don’t take actions that destroy the value stream to supposedly meet some other goal), respect for people [this is a much deeper concept than treat employees with respect], evidence based decision making (do what works – “look into your eyes”), invest in your people (Israel’s solution requires people that are good at their job and committed to doing a good job – frankly it requires engaged managers which is another thing missing from our system).

The USA solution if something suspicious is found in bag screening? Evacuate the entire airport terminal. Very poor design (it is hard to over-emphasis how poor this is). It will take time to design fixes into physical space, as it always does in lean thinking. It has been nearly 10 years. Where is the progress?

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Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election March to Keep Fear Alive
A screener at Ben-Gurion has a pair of better options. First, the screening area is surrounded by contoured, blast-proof glass that can contain the detonation of up to 100 kilos of plastic explosive. Only the few dozen people within the screening area need be removed, and only to a point a few metres away.

Second, all the screening areas contain ‘bomb boxes’. If a screener spots a suspect bag, he/she is trained to pick it up and place it in the box, which is blast proof. A bomb squad arrives shortly and wheels the box away for further investigation.

This is a very small simple example of how we can simply stop a problem that would cripple one of your airports,” Sela said.

Lean thinking: design the workspace to the task at hand. Obviously done in one place and not the other. Also it shows the thought behind designing solutions that do not destroy the value stream unlike the approach taken in the USA. And the better solution puts a design in place that gives primacy to safety: the supposed reason for all the effort.
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Good Process Improvement Practices

Posted on November 8, 2010  Comments (2)

Good process improvement practices include:

  • standardized improvement process (pdsa, or whatever)
  • Going to the gemba – improvement is done where the work is done. You must go to the where the action is. Sitting in meeting rooms, or offices, reading reports and making decisions is not the way to improve effectively.
  • evidence based decision making, data guides decision making rather than HiPPO
  • broad participation (those working on the process should be the ones working on improving it and everyone in the organization should be improving their processes)
  • measurable results that are used to measure effectiveness
  • pilot improvement on a small scale, after results are shown to be improvements deploy standardized solutions more broadly
  • visual management
  • Standardized work instructions are used for processes
  • one of the aims of the improvement process should be improving peoples ability to improve over the long term (one outcome of the process should be a better process another should be that people learned and can apply what they learned in future improvements)
  • quality tools should be used, people should be trained on such tools. The tools are essentially standardized methods that have been shown to be effective. And most organization just ignore them and struggle to reinvent methods to achieve results instead of just applying methods already shown to be very effective.
  • the improvements are sustained. Changes are made to the system and they are adopted: this seems obvious but far too often process improvements are really just band-aids that fall off a few weeks later and nothing is done to sustain it.
  • goals, bonuses and extrinsic motivation are not part of the process
  • The improvement process itself should be continually improved

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Management Improvement Internal Experts

Posted on November 3, 2010  Comments (0)

Having a group of internal experts in Deming, lean thinking, six sigma, etc. can be an good way to help the organization transform but they must 1) practice respect for people and 2) focus on building organizational capacity. Having, for example a few experts that are very focused on lean thinking and can be tapped by others in the organization I think can be very useful.

That group might well also serve as “change agents” which can make some people get mad at them. They can help push the organization to change. While it might be nice to think you can just show the wonderfulness that is lean thinking and everyone will immediately drop all their old habits and embrace lean thinking that often doesn’t happen. You might well have to push middle mangers (and others) outside their comfort zone. And you might well have to push people to really try this stuff and they have become so disheartened over the years by promises of new, better, ways to work. They just see this as one more lame pointy haired boss attempt and they may well not want to play.

A big focus should be on making improvement in the performance of the organization, obviously, but also on making it clear that this new way of doing things is helpful and will make it a better place to work. The role of internal management improvements efforts is to build the capacity of the rest of the organization to improve. Six sigma efforts often instead put the emphasis on six sigma experts doing the improvement instead of coaching and providing assistance to those who best know the processes to improve, which I see as a mistake.

Response to The “Lean Group” Syndrome
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The role of leadership in software development

Posted on August 30, 2010  Comments (0)

The webcast of Mary Poppendieck’s talk, The role of leadership in software development, at Google. As usual Mary does a very nice job of providing some good historical background while exploring wise management practices (tied to software development but plenty useful for any manager).

via: Sheep of a different fold

Related: Lean, Toyota and Deming for Software Development – Webcast on the Toyota Development Process – Don’t Use Performance Appraisals – Lean Software Development – The Leader’s Handbook

Management Improvement Carnival #101

Posted on June 20, 2010  Comments (0)

The management blog carnival is published 3 times a month with select recent management blog posts. Also visit the Curious Cat Management Library for online management improvement articles.

  • Why C level executives don’t engage in lean by Steven Spear – “Either they’ve been led to believe that it is the work of the shop floor technocrats for which their responsibility is hiring and funding, or they’re unprepared to lead, engaged in discovery and development, as is actually required.”
  • A Systems Approach to Business by Gregg Stocker – “Coach and mentor people to increase the level of understanding throughout the company regarding how each job supports other areas in the achieving the fundamental purpose.”
  • Toyota to Reduce Span of Control in Engineering by Jon Miller – “Shoichiro Toyoda, the father of current Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda, who is leading this latest reorganization towards smaller span of control for engineers.”
  • Some Bosses Live in a Fool’s Paradise by Bob Sutton – “It turns out that followers, peers, superiors, and customers consistently provide better information about a boss’s strengths, weaknesses, and quirks than the boss him or herself.”
  • Effective root cause analysis techniques by Gojko Adzic – “After the initial set of problems is identified, start popping the why stack and get to the “fifth why”. Every moment you should be either writing down why something happened or asking ‘Why?’. This keeps the discussions short and focused.”
  • The Theory of Constraints: The Fundamentals by Pete Abilla – “The rate of throughput is determined by the system’s constraint… If Internal: eliminate waste at the constraint; place inspection steps upstream from the constraint; and other methods to free-up the constraint from non-value activities.”
  • Motivation, Insight, and Introspection by Mike Cottmeyer – “To maintain passion and enthusiasm for my craft, I have to contribute, I have to feel like I am making a difference, and I can’t feel like every interaction is something to be monetized.”
  • The Role of Middle Management in Toyota or a Lean System by Tracey Richardson – “The traditional mindset of most management (all levels) is that the team member ‘works for them’ on a daily basis. The paradigm shift in thinking comes when the mindset becomes – ‘I work for them’.”

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Management Improvement Carnival #100

Posted on June 10, 2010  Comments (6)

I started the management improvement blog carnival in 2006. At the time the number of blogs posting useful management ideas had already grown to a large number. It took years after I started my Curious Cat Management Improvement site, in 1996, to have even a handful of consistently useful web sites for those interested in improving the management of organizations.

Blogs really started the explosion of good management content online. Now we have more great blogs nearly every month. This jumbo sized edition could be much larger and still not run out of great posts to include. Hopefully the regular carnivals help you keep up with great management posts from blogs you already enjoy, and introduce you to new blogs to add to you RSS (blog feed) reader.

Photo of Arches National Park

Arches National Park by John Hunter, Curious Cat Travel Photo Blog

  • What’s Deming Got To Do With Agile? by Dennis Stevens – “If you equate Kanban with manufacturing you won’t be successful. You need to understand what Deming has to say about knowledge work and how management is responsible for creating an environment for success. Kanban brings an easy to implement – low friction implementation of Deming’s philosophy.”
  • Remember – We Want to See Problems by Bryan Zeigler – “Well if you designed your system to truly follow the lean ideals, you have problems! That’s the whole point! Make your problems visible instead of hiding them with inventory, extra labor, long lead times, etc.”
  • Control Systems and Feedback Loops by Tom Foster – “why don’t we change this control system into a feedback loop? Why don’t we have the feedback loop tell the team, and why don’t we run the feedback loop in real time? The manager just gets in the way.”
  • My Favorite Southwest Airlines Moment by Rachel Barry – ” If you live with gratitude, you will have reached life’s highest ideals. And your letter is grateful. You are a wonderful woman. Thank you, thank you, for being you and for writing me. The truth is, it just doesn’t get any better than that. ” (Southwest encourages people to act like people [and treat customers like people not numbers] instead of cogs in a machine. Not amazing when put that way but when contrasted with most other large companies it is an amazing difference. – John)
  • Organizational Kryptonite: Fear of Confrontation by Kris Dunn – “Because the world is full of people who suffer from fear of confrontation, giving good, direct, honest feedback in a professional way is often the best way to stand out as someone who can be trusted.”
  • The False Theory of Meritocracy by Nigel Nicholson – “A true theory of meritocracy would acknowledge that we all have multiple talents and motivations; and that we all can learn and improve in most of the roles in which we are placed — though how much and how fast will vary from person to person.”
  • Corporate Renewal, Waste, and Turnaround by Pete Abilla – “Each of us has a responsibility to improve those areas where we have influence. Given that, what are you going to do today to improve the business you are in? Help the people you work with? Improve the world around you?”
  • Show Me the Results by Mike Wroblewski – “Despite our efforts to make all results objective and quantifiable, in many cases, subjectivity remains. Overlooking this problem, we obsess over results… In our obsession with results, do we actually miss something, perhaps something greater?”
  • Drucker’s Surprising View of Corporate Social Responsibility by William Cohen – “Drucker concluded that considerations for workers in and out of the workplace were the responsibility of the corporate leader just as much as the profits, survival, and growth of the business or organization. Therefore, he taught that there were social responsibilities of business.”

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The Toyota Way – Two Pillars

Posted on April 15, 2010  Comments (8)

Toyota is receiving plenty of criticism now, much of it for good reason. There is also a large amount of psychology involved. From what I have seen, the insurance companies still see better claims history (fewer and lower cost claims) against Toyota than other manufacturers. And there is another strain that seems to enjoy criticizing what has been praised. Toyota does need to improve. But that is improvement of the existing management system, not a need to radically change the management of the company.

I think Toyota, even with the problems, is a fantastic example of a very well managed company. Yet even with all the study of lean manufacturing even basic ideas are overlooked. For example, the two main pillars of the Toyota way are “continuous improvement” and “respect for people.” For all of us, it is valuable to refocusing on core principles. We are too often looking for the next new idea.

This is one way of looking at the pillars of the Toyota Production System, from the Toyota Technical Center – Austrailia

Image of Toyota's pillars of management: respect for people and continuous improvement

Continuous Improvement means that we never perceive current success as our final achievement. We are never satisfied with where we are and always improve our business by putting forth our best ideas and efforts: we are keen to create better alternatives, question our accomplishments and investigate future definitions of success.

There are three building blocks shaping our commitment to Continuous Improvement:

1. Challenge – we form a long term vision, meeting challenges with courage and creativity to realize our dreams;
2. Kaizen – we improve our business operations continuously, always driving for innovation and evolution
3. Genchi Genbutsu – we go to the source to find the facts to make correct decisions, build consensus and achieve goals.

Respect For People refers to our own staff as well as the communities and stakeholder groups that surround us and we are part of. We respect our people and believe the success of our business is created by individual efforts and good teamwork.

Respect For People is translated in:

1. Respect – we respect others, make every effort to understand each other, take responsibility and do our best to build mutual trust
2. Teamwork – we stimulate personal and professional growth, share the opportunities of development and maximize individual and team performance.

These elements combined define our corporate DNA, provide a way of operating that is recognised by each and every Toyota-member around the globe and enables us to sustain our success in the future.

Back to Basics for Toyota by Akio Toyoda

When my grandfather brought Toyota into the auto business in 1937, he created a set of principles that has always guided how we operate. We call it the Toyota Way, and its pillars are “respect for people” and “continuous improvement.” I believe in these core principles. And I am convinced that the only way for Toyota to emerge stronger from this experience is to adhere more closely to them.

While recent events show Toyota obviously needs to improve, that has been true all along (it is just more obvious lately). Some may see this as an indication that these lean manufacturing ideas based on Toyota’s practices are no better than other management practices. I don’t believe this. I feel just as strongly about the value of lean management as ever. I think that the recent events show you that no matter how well an organization in managed there is plenty of room to improve. Toyota never was close to perfection. They have much to improve, but they are still one of the best managed companies in the world.

My comments in 2005:

I think the instances of such failures are just a sign that even Toyota still has quite a bit to improve. I think this announcement likely is a result of common cause variation (it is the natural result of the current system). The natural result (of the system) is not that they have this particular failure, but that this recall is consistent with the % of vehicles that required a recall of this general character. I believe they are getting better over time but they still have a long way to go. With a result based on common cause you want to look at the entire system when designing an improvement plan not at the root cause of the seat belt issue. See Responding to Variation online and the book, Forth Generation Management, by Brian Joiner.

Related: Toyota Stops Lines – Lots of Lines – Akio Toyoda’s Message Shows Real Leadership – Deming Companies – Respect for People Does Not Mean No Criticism

And my comments in 2007:

I don’t agree that they need to rethink their purpose in life (I have a feeling that is taken out of context). They need to maintain and maybe even increase their commitment to their purpose in life.

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Toyota’s Journey to Lean Software Development

Posted on March 18, 2010  Comments (0)

Toyota’s journey from Waterfall to Lean software development by Henrik Kniberg

Toyota builds cars (duh). In the past that didn’t involve much software, and the little software that was needed was mostly developed by suppliers and embedded in isolated components. Toyota assembled them and didn’t much care about the software inside. But “The importance of automatic electronic control system has been increasing dramatically year by year” said Ishii-san.

A modern car is pretty much a computer on wheels! In a hybrid car about half of the development cost is software, it contains millions of lines of code as all the different subsystems have to integrate with each other. He mentioned that a Lexus contains 14 million lines of code, comparable to banking and airplane software systems. Ishi-san concluded that “Therefore Toyota needs to become an IT company”.
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Most of Toyota’s ideas about how to do Lean software development resonated well with me. My feeling was that they are on the right track.

One thing bothered me though – the extreme focus on detailed metrics. I agree with the value of visualization, standardization, and data-driven process improvement – but only if used at a high level. My feeling was that Toyota was going to far. They say engineer motivation is critical, but how motivating is it to work in an organization that plans and measures everything you do – every line of code, every hour, every defect, how many minutes it takes to do an estimate, etc?

via: Justin Hunter

Related: Toyota IT Overview – Toyota Canada CIO on Genchi Genbutsu and Kaizen – Lean Software Development – My First Trip to Japan by Peter Scholtes – Toyota IT for Kaizen

Improving Software Development with Automated Tests

Posted on March 8, 2010  Comments (7)

Automated software testing is a mistake proofing (poka-yoke) solution for software development.

The way automated testing works is that software code is written that tests the software code of the application. This automated testing code test that business rules are correctly being followed by the code in the application.

So for example, a user should not be able to create a new account without entering password. Then you create code that does not allow an account to be created without a password. And you write a test that passes if this is true and fails if it is false.

The best implementation will then not allow deploying code to your production environment until the code has passed all the automated tests. So if a software developer changes the code, the automated tests are all run and if there is an error noted by the automated testing the code cannot be deployed to the production environment. So, in the example above, if somehow the changes made to the application code somehow now let an account be created without a password the test would fail, and the developer would know to fix the problem before putting the code into production.

Thus automated testing mistake proofs the process. Now the mistake proofing is only as good as the test that are added. Software development is complex and if the code has an error (based on the business rules) that is not tested then the code can be deployed to production and affect customers. But it is a huge help in preventing many errors from affecting customers.

It seems pretty obvious but until the widespread adoption of agile software development techniques and frameworks that make it easy to adopt automated testing (like Ruby on Rails) this sensible process improvement tool was used far less often than you would think.

Related: Combinatorial Testing for Software – Metrics and Software Development – Checklists in Software Development – Google testing blog – Hexawise software testing blog

More Reasons to Avoid Layoffs

Posted on February 11, 2010  Comments (1)

Lay Off the Layoffs by Jeffrey Pfeffer

As its former head of human resources once told me: “If people are your most important assets, why would you get rid of them?”
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In fact, there is a growing body of academic research suggesting that firms incur big costs when they cut workers. Some of these costs are obvious, such as the direct costs of severance and outplacement, and some are intuitive, such as the toll on morale and productivity as anxiety (“Will I be next?”) infects remaining workers.
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research paints a fairly consistent picture: layoffs don’t work. And for good reason. In Responsible Restructuring, University of Colorado professor Wayne Cascio lists the direct and indirect costs of layoffs: severance pay; paying out accrued vacation and sick pay; outplacement costs; higher unemployment-insurance taxes; the cost of rehiring employees when business improves; low morale and risk-averse survivors; potential lawsuits, sabotage, or even workplace violence from aggrieved employees or former employees; loss of institutional memory and knowledge; diminished trust in management; and reduced productivity.
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As bad as the effects of layoffs are on companies and the economy, perhaps the biggest damage is done to the people themselves. Here the consequences are, not surprisingly, devastating. Layoffs literally kill people. In the United States, when you lose your job, you lose your health insurance, unless you can afford to temporarily maintain it under the pricey COBRA provisions. Studies consistently show a connection between not having health insurance and individual mortality rates.

Related: Five Managerial Fallacies Concerning Layoffs – Honda has Never had Layoffs and has been Profitable Every Year – The Trouble with Performance Reviews by Jeffrey Pfeffer – Cutting Hours Instead of People – Firing Workers Isn’t Fixing Problems

Management Improvement Carnival #82

Posted on November 22, 2009  Comments (1)

Mike Wroblewski is hosting the Management Improvement Carnival #82 on the Got Boondoggle? blog, highlights include:

  • A Problems First Culture by Mark Rosenthal “‘Problems first’ is one of the mantras used by Phil Jenkinson, the CEO character in The Lean Manager by Michael and Freddy Ballé. Now that I have had a few weeks to let it sink in and synthesize with my mental models, I am seeing a concept that is so fundamental I would think it would be hammered into students in every management and leadership course taught in the world.’”
  • Keeping Lean Japanese by Brian Buck “There is a trend towards removing the Japanese language or jargon from Lean transformations in the U.S. I understand why organizations would want to make lean thinking and the corresponding tools easier to digest, but I think we should seriously consider keeping it Japanese.”
  • Lean is about More than the Myths by Tim McMahon “It’s important when you are starting out your lean journey to understand what lean is really about.”
  • 17 Lessons I learned from Japanese Consultants by Jeff Hajek “Over the years I have worked with some premiere lean consultants from Japan. Here are some of the many lessons I learned from them.”
  • The Kipling Method vs. the Ohno Method by Jon Miller “Are you a Kipling person, taking the accepted tool or situation as given, or are you an Ohno person, constantly challenging the norms and looking for better ways?”

Related: Management Improvement Carnival #64 – Be Careful What You Measure – Do you Read Instructions Carefully Before Assembly?

Lean Inventories Do Not Excuse Failing to Deliver

Posted on November 20, 2009  Comments (2)

Low inventory levels do not mean failing to have products available for customers. Now, if you manufacturing in huge batches and can’t respond to customer feedback then it might mean failure to predict customer demand does mean failure to deliver. But lean thinking has shown how to avoid this problem. People need to adopt lean manufacturing practices and gain the benefits of low inventory levels without the costs of failing to deliver what customers want.

Sorry Santa, We’re Out of Stock

The “it” gifts this year could swiftly vanish from store shelves, as retailers, with nightmares of Christmas 2008 markdowns dancing in their heads, have slashed inventories to some of the leanest levels in recent memory.
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Retailers themselves are battle-scarred by last year’s fourth-quarter fiasco. Following the financial meltdown of September 2008 and amid the most severe economic crisis since The Great Depression, consumers retrenched.

That’s when stores hit the markdown panic button, slashing prices upwards of 75 percent. The result was the worst holiday selling season since 1970, according to The International Council of Shopping Centers.

But although leaner inventory levels should drive profit margin gains this holiday, “retailers might not have enough inventory to fully satisfy demand,” said Citigroup retail analyst Deborah Weinswig, in a research note. It is a risk they are willing to take.

“They would rather lose a sale than take the markdowns they had last year,” said Goldman Sachs analyst Adrianne Shapira.

The retailers need to design their systems with lean thinking in mind (not lean – as in cut expenses without thought). And they need to work with suppliers using lean manufacturing principles.

Related: Be Thankful for Lean Thinking – Guess What? Manufacturing in the USA is a Good Idea – Tesco: Lean Provision – Zara Thrives by Ignoring Conventional Wisdom – Operational Excellence – lean manufacturing articles

Learn Lean by Doing Lean

Posted on November 13, 2009  Comments (6)

In response to: Developing Your Lean Education Plan

If you actually let the lean leaders practice lean management you are probably doing more to help them learn than anything else. Reading is great, but 10 times better when reading to find solutions you need to deal with issues you have in place. Same for going to conferences. Consultants can be a huge help, but if you just bring in consultants without allowing the changes needed to improve they are not much use.

Far more damaging than not approving training, or giving the lean leaders any time to learn, is not giving them freedom to adopt lean practices and actually make improvements in your organization. That is what kills learning, and the desire to learn.

A great lean education plan: give them opportunities to apply what they know. As they gain knowledge and have success give them more opportunities. I think often lean leaders (and management improvement leaders) have to spend so much effort fighting the resistance in the organization they don’t have the energy to seek out much new knowledge. If you can reduce the effort they have to spend on fighting the bureaucracy most lean leaders will naturally focus on learning what they need for the current and future challenges.

Related: Building Organizational Capacity – Helping Employees Improve – People are Our Most Important Asset – Respect People by Understanding Psychology

Management Improvement Carnival #80

Posted on November 3, 2009  Comments (0)

Jamie Flinchbaugh is hosting Management Improvement Carnival #80 on his new blog, highlights include:

Nominate your favorite management improvement posts.

Management Improvement Carnival #77

Posted on October 1, 2009  Comments (2)

The Curious Cat Management Improvement Carnival provide links to recent blog posts for those interesting in improving management of organizations.

  • A lesson in strategy, taught by a Cat by Mark Hurst – “Without direction, we’re presenting our flipcharts and our powerpoints to the Cheshire Cat. And he just griiiiiiins.”
  • Respect for People, Underutilized People, and Waste by Pete Abilla – “Worldview and Values matter – those dictate the behaviors of everybody in the company. When ‘tools’ don’t work, that is because the values don’t support the ‘tools’. Focus on Worldview and Behavior – then the rest will follow.”
  • Top Ten Things Programmers Hate About Agile by Damon Poole – “If you want Agile to succeed, you need to point out, and be sincere about it, that Agile will affect the whole organization, management included.”
  • AT&T, I’m Begging You to Take My Money! by Kevin Meyer – “I’ve had automatic bill pay for three years so every payment was on time, with the iPhone being one of their more expensive plans… But she couldn’t authorize the credit for me to get a FREE phone.”
  • Why is asking “why” so important? by Tracey Richardson – “the next time you are at the GEMBA remember a few of these rules to effectively getting to root cause and past a symptom. This will not only help your team members but effect cost and productivity as well.”
  • The Importance of Going to the Gemba by Tim McMahon – “You can’t solve problems at your desk. Going to the Gemba is a great way to get the entire team involved in identifying and solving problems. It is grounded in fact finding using actual conditions from the actual workers who perform the work”
  • Genchi Genbutsu on the Retail Floor Jon Miller – “The facts that will transform our businesses don’t come from the boardrooms but from the floor (sales, production, hospital, etc.). We need to go see how customers are actually using our products and services in order to improve. Often there are unexpected differences between the design of the product, service or process and how customers use them.”
  • After Lehman: How Innovation Thrives In a Crisis by Scott D. Anthony – “Today, a company that enters the S&P 500 index will stay on it for less than 20 years… Increasingly, companies that buck the trend and last 30 or more years will do so only by mastering the ability to perpetually transform themselves.”
  • Key Measurements in Implementing Andon by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “no measure or indicator will tell you half as much as being on the floor, in the process, observing how people are using the system. You need to test people’s understanding and use of the processes. You need to see the responders methods and capability.”

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Baking in Quality to Software Development

Posted on August 15, 2009  Comments (2)

One of the reasons my organizations switched to Ruby on Rails for software development was the great integration with automated testing. We always wanted to have good test coverage on our software applications (which are web applications – some used only inside our organization) but didn’t actually find the time to do so. Since we adopted Ruby we have been doing much better in this regard. It isn’t just the switch to Ruby, of course, but the switch to Ruby coincided with the beginning of many improvements to our software development practices that have continually improved over the last couple of years.

Here is a post on How to build quality software by an agile, Ruby, lean software developer

I’ve mentioned previously about baking-in quality and not having developers throw code over a wall to testers.
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Everyone on the team is concerned with not only assuring quality in what we deliver, but making it visible to ourselves and the business.

We work in an agile manner, iterating through development with extreme programming practices and Behaviour Driven Development. Facilitating our relationship with the business is Scrum and we utilise kanban principles and systems thinking to maintain a speedy throughput of high-quality work. This mixture allows us to communicate effectively, develop the correct features properly and continuously deploy our work when it is complete, thus maximising business value. I should also mention that we are fortunate enough to have our business people/customer sat across from us.
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Without testers or a QA team there is no wall over which work can be thrown and the responsibility for quality absolved.
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The inspection typically carried out end-of-cycle only yields bugs that were low severity and of no real impact to the end user.
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An agile testing must-have, we use TeamCity to continuously run our unit tests on each check-in. We also execute our Cucumber acceptance tests on scheduled runs. The status of the builds are visible on dedicated monitors around the office as well as a nice 6′ projected screen.

via: @benjaminm

Related: Combinatorial Testing for Software – Checklists in Software Development – Software Supporting Processes Not the Other Way Around – Software Development and Business Process Support – Top Blogs for Software Development – Hexawise: more coverage, fewer tests (my brother’s company)

Don’t Hide Problems in Computers

Posted on August 11, 2009  Comments (3)

Making things visible is a key to effective management. And data in computers can be easy to ignore. Don’t forget to make data visible. Paul Levy, CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston recently hosted Hideshi Yokoi, president of the Toyota Production System Support Center and wrote this blog post:

Together, we visited gemba and observed several hospital processes in action, looking for ways to reduce waste and reorganize work. It was fascinating to have such experts here and see things through their eyes. Mr. Yokoi’s thoughts and observations are very, very clear, notwithstanding a command of English that is still a work in progress.

The highlight? At one point, we pointed out a new information system that we were thinking of putting into place to monitor and control the flow of certain inventory. Mr. Yokoi’s wise response, suggesting otherwise, was:

“When you put problem in computer, box hide answer. Problem must be visible!”

The mission of the Toyota Production System Support Center to share Toyota Production System know-how with North American organizations that have a true desire to learn and adopt TPS.

Related: The Importance of Making Problems Visible – Great Visual Instruction Example – Health Care the Toyota Way

Bogus Theories, Bad for Business

Posted on August 6, 2009  Comments (0)

The Wall Street Journal has a book review of The Management Myth by Matthew Stewart. The book flushes out the ideas Matthew Stewert explored in a previous article in the Atlantic about the failure of management to mature as a discipline.

Mr. Stewart quotes Bruce Henderson, the founder of the ­Boston Consulting Group, who describes consulting as “the most improbable business on earth” and who goes on to ask: “Can you think of anything less ­improbable [sic] than taking the world’s most ­successful firms, leaders in their businesses, and ­hiring people just fresh out of school and telling them how to run their ­businesses, and they are willing to pay ­millions of dollars for their ­advice?”

I’m not sure about the book, I have not read it but that is a great statement. And I firmly believe managers need to become experts at managing and by and large they have quite a long way to go. Dr. Deming talked about how we “know” what we know in the aspect of his management called the theory of knowledge (which is not included in any other management philosophy I have seen). That area (with interactions in other areas) explores why people often believe what is not so. And management seems to have a surplus of beliefs that are not based on sound theories.

Read this good article I have mentioned before on this topic by Carlie and Christensen: The Cycles of Theory Building in Management Research.

Related: Righter Incentivization – Another Quota Failure Example – Management Advice Failures – Why Extrinsic Motivation Fails – Innovation Strategy – Does the Data Deluge Make the Scientific Method Obsolete? – Data Based Blathering – Doing the Wrong Things Righter – Harvard’s Masters of the Apocalypse
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