Gemba Panta Rei

Should the "wrong" approached be replaced by a path more closely following the one Toyota has taken? The "Training Within Industry" modeled approach to developing people and Toyota's hyper cost-focused management style may not bring results quickly enough to satisfy Wall Street or win out in a competitive market. I say this because we are talking here about changing people, rather than changing things. It's the right way to do it, but it appears to take much longer. If a gradual, incremental, enterprise-wide improvement is what is needed, as opposed to dramatic change in a relatively short period of time then this approach may be appropriate. This is like boiling the ocean, and by itself iis not good enough for most of us when competitors are taking shortcuts and improving faster.

To paraphrase some of Art Smalley's other writing, we think that it's important to build a stable base of operations for the Lean transformation by having a central planning, training and implementation group. Just as you need stable and reliable processes before you can flow, you need this foundation (centralization of Lean) before you can flow Lean out to everyone (decentralization of Lean).

For those of us who are on the side of the chasm opposite from Toyota, it's important to have this 'centralized' core team studying the tools and developing expertise, planning the implementation and scouting ahead to make sure the business and the people in it are ready for change. Having a good read of Art Smalley's article should be on the agenda of this core team, as it shows us the other side of the chasm at the Toyota engine factory in West Virginia.

In the case of my friend's hospital, and many organizations attempting Lean transformation, the problem may be one of management's hesitation at investing in a central group or "Lean promotion office". These organizations typically balk later at allocating a percentage point or two of the workforce's time on continuous improvement. They look into the chasm and go pale.

So why aren't more organizations attempting a Lean transformation aware that there is another side to the chasm? They wonder why they aren't making progress, when like Wile E. Coyote they have run off of the chasm and are buried in a wall on the other side.

There are other reasons for failing to cross the chasm. In some labor markets such as the Pearl River Delta, turnover is so high that most companies would not dare spend the hours on team leader training, only to lose them to a slightly higher paying factory down the street. But keeping our eyes on American manufacturing, starting be developing a core team of experts and placing a large emphasis on the people development approach in preparation for 'decentralization' of Lean efforts makes business sense.

Some companies attempt to leap across the chasm, or take the decentralized approach from the beginning. Perhaps if you have a "running start" you can leap it. In other words you must have very stable and mature processes, growing demand for your product, solid and professional management and a foundation of trust and investment in people. Adding kaizen and TPS to this mix might rocket you across the chasm. It may have happened, but I have yet to see it.

Some fail by centralizing, but not distributing the knowledge. In essence, this means not empowering people. This is a common criticism of six sigma, and other highly bureaucratic continuous improvement efforts. These typically place a great deal of focus on the tools, owned by a small team of experts, away from the gemba.

Another typical failure is empowering people but not providing sufficient direction. These companies are buried in improvement suggestions that do not promote flow, streamline the overall value stream, or solve urgent problems leading towards productivity, quality and ultimately profitability. Empowerment fails when it is just another "tool" and not backed up by people development and linked to profit.

You can do all of this but still fail by not supporting Lean efforts with a sound long-term business strategy to make sure that the "savings" of productivity, space, etc. are realized as additional contribution margin through additional sales. You might make the leap, but there is not "other side" left when you are ready to land.

We know all of this, yet also we know that in the short term the leadership of our largest and most progressive firms will not wake up and suddenly see that their shortest route to success is the long way around, of developing people and robust processes rather than waving the latest banner and implementing the tool du jour. As one executive confided to us, when his senior VP level people do not expected to be in the same position, much less the same firm, for more than 3 years it is difficult for them to think and plan for the long-term development of the people and processes.

As Lean managers, change agents, and consultants we are henchmen helping the people who hire us to implement Lean as best as they will allow us. As idealists we would prefer to work only with people who recognize that there is this chasm and who want to go abou Lean transformation in the right way. As practical people, we recognize that our best chance of doing this is to get this message out to as many people as possible, and in the process finding true believers and making converts, even if it means at times participating in inadequately designed Lean efforts in the mean time. This is probably the one greatest source of frustration we hear from fellow Lean practitioners.

But there are some encouraging signs. Over the last several months we have received RFPs for worldwide Lean training from several prominent global manufacturers. Invariably these organizations state that they have been working on Lean for several years within one of the divisions, have seen success, and now realize the need to go global. It’s like the CEO woke up one day, connected the dots, and asked “How soon can we get all sites to do this?” These can be some of the best types of implementations, since the small Lean promotion office now has credibility, budget and executive support and can give input on how to “do it right”. Getting there required toiling for years fighting traditional manager and applying Lean tools as best as they could, inappropriately at times.

Is it better to do Lean the “wrong” way than not do it at all? I think so. We're standing on one side of the chasm, and as long as we keep our eyes on it the other side is within reach. Do kaizen any way you can, just don’t stop because you don’t succeed right away. They don’t’ call it continuous improvement for nothing.

Posted by Jon Miller at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A friend of mine who is a VP of Operations at a Midwestern hospital asked me two questions a few days ago. The first was "What is the percentage of Lean implementations that fail?" This is a loaded question, and not one for which I have a ready answer. If anyone has done the research and has the answer to this question, please share it with us.

The second part of her question was "Do most organizations have a centralize office or a person overseeing Lean efforts?" Combined, these questions indicate that her organization is standing at the brink of failure or success, deciding about crossing the chasm of Lean transformation.

Her question helped identify something about Art Smalley's article that was nagging at me. Art Smalley made a good observation in his article that it’s not about using tools, it’s about developing people and focusing on what make you money that makes Toyota as Lean and successful as they are. This and his many other points I agree with, but somehow his comparison of the Toyota factory in West Virginia with the rest of the manufacturing world attempting a Lean transformation did not fit for me.

The expression is a bit overused in management literature, but I think “Crossing the Chasm” is appropriate to describe the situation many organizations (including my friend's hospital) attempting to implement Lean find themselves in. The process of Lean transformation is to change the culture of the organization into one that believes in and works towards continuous improvement of profitability by developing people and processes. In the case of Art Smalley's article the chasm is between companies who think Lean is about applying the tools of Lean and those who make problem solving and working towards cutting cost to improve profit part of the fabric of management.

In the case of my friend bringing Lean to her hospital in the Midwest, the “chasm” is that between companies using Lean specialists, kaizen teams, and "centralized" Lean promotion offices to those companies where Lean has truly become “the way we do things around here” by having kaizen be "decentralized" or persistent and pervasive as part of the company culture. As "crossing the chasm" indicates, we think you need to start with one and advance to the other.

Art Smalley's Toyota factory in West Virginia has crossed this chasm, long ago. Most of the rest of us are still trying to evolve from event-driven, tool-focused, "show Lean" to making the elimination of waste a daily habit for everyone. While Art Smalley's article did a great job of raising the issue of the need for organizations to cross the chasm, the question of how to get there is not addressed, and leaves the reader feeling mistaken for implementing Lean tools but not the Toyota culture.

The "event-driven" Lean, the "value stream map everything" approach has come about partly because in the absence of Toyota telling us in a detailed way how to get Lean, authors and consultants have filled the gap. This is not necessarily a bad thing, when it is effective. But by itself it has not proven to be sufficient so voices like Smalley's are important.

Posted by Jon Miller at 10:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the greatest evils that kaizen and Lean manufacturing attempts to eliminate is overproduction, one of the 7 wastes. Overproduction hides true capacity, exacerbates quality problems, builds inventory, and generally amplifies the other wastes. Today was Boxing Day, so called in English-speaking places other than the U.S.A. Boxing Day needs kaizen.

The highway ramps to Bellevue, Washington were filled with cars (worse than morning rush hour(which is plenty bad) when I drove past today at 2PM. This is not unique to Bellevue, it hapens all over Shoppingland, America.

The Boxing Day phenomena in the U.S. are the after Christmas sale, people returning gifts or cashing in on their gift certificates, and people generally getting out in their automobiles for some exercise after having eaten too much on the last two days. The aftermath of overproduction.

The seasonality spike created by Christmas shopping affects several of our customers Lean manufacturing efforts. It affects just about every manufacturer whose orders increase around Christmas season. It's the part of the 12 month demand profile that defies Heijuna (leverling out and averaging demand and mix). They have to forecast, build ahead, create waste, and miss their forecasts. Year after year.

Why do we do this to ourselves? Asking that question is the first step to kaizen.

Posted by Jon Miller at 11:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Edson Oda
Senior Operations Consultant

It was funny to see some puzzled faces and hear some comments and jokes from those who had seen the NEC Lean manufacturing slogan or heard the Lean team shout loudly 'Faço, Faço, Faço Já! Faço Primeiro e Penso Depois!" Some people were very curious. Some were asking "Are they nuts?"

I decided to post some of my comments here about it because I thought it would be interesting to share a little more about how the Japanese managers taught Lean at NEC in Brazil. The Brazilian operations had decided to start implementing Lean manufacturing in the middle 1990’s because the Japanese manufacturing sites were implementing TPS. Since the early 90’s and they had been achieving striking business results in a short period of time.

The Japanese sites were battling against the monster of 7 wastes because they were trying to be more competitive. One of main reasons was because most of their manufacturing lines were being shifted to lower cost Southeast Asian countries at that time. To keep the jobs in Japan they were battling to get rid of all the 7 wastes to reduce the costs as much as they could.

The original Lean innovation motto practiced by NEC in Japan at that time was "Yazuro, Yaruzo, Yaruzo! Yattemitekara Kangaero!" This translated to English means "I do, I do, I do now! I do first and think later!" In Portuguese it is "Faço, Faço, Faço Já! Faço Primeiro e Penso Depois!"

For those of us who were aware of what Lean concepts and tools can do it means "if you see any kind of waste, try to get rid of it quickly". Do not spend too much time thinking of it. Go to the gemba and do it and think quickly. With this first try, you are going to be able see the next kaizen step. The reasoning is the same as when any of us using a Value Stream Mapping tool. As we draw the current state, many ideas of improvements for the future state start to come up. The more you do kaizen, the more you see.

Was the Lean Team nuts? To us it seemed like what we were doing before we learned Lean was nuts!

Posted by Jon Miller at 11:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Earlier this week I visited a customer who is just starting out with their Lean transformation. They are an engineering firm. They have toured another one of our clients who has succeeded in implementing Lean in their transactional areas. They have good support from senior management and they have already identified some opportunities for kaizen to cut out waste.

But there is one problem. They have a very nice office, and the managers all enjoy killer views of Lake Washington. Why is this a problem? Taking down the walls would give a near 360 degree view of the lake to everyone, as well as improving performance. The problem is the COO's statement that their President has already said "We're not taking down any walls."

Is it essential to take down walls to have a Lean office? We think so. Just today this e-mail to one of our consultants from another one of customers was forwarded to me:

Hi Brad,

Paul

The common objections to taking down walls are noise and the fact that it will be easier for others to listen in on discussions around them. The noise issue can be resolved through talking more quietly, headphones when needing to concentrate, 'war rooms' for lively discussion, etc. Sensitive business discussions are typically held behind closed doors. At your desk during work hours is probably not the most appropriate time or place to be talking about personal medical, legal or counseling issues in any case.

Then there's the "Just because I said so" objection from the boss. This is an emotional reaction to a big change, and it's understandable. The easiest way to address this is to quantify the cost of maintaining the status quo (walls up). We have found that no walls improves productivity easily by 20% or 30%, reduces errors, and speeds cross training. Let the decision maker choose between the improvement impact and holding onto their "just because" reason.

At Gemba our office is an open office with no walls. Information flows quickly and we catch errors and find improvements opportunities sooner, because information is not "batched" behind walls or in e-mail inboxes. If a consulting company like us that does not have a large number of people in the office can see these types of benefits, imagine these benefits in an engineering or customer service office 100 or 1000 times for a larger.

Posted by Jon Miller at 7:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Edson Oda
Senior Operations Consultant

On the Evolving Excellence blog today Bill Waddell admits he doesn’t speak Japanese, warns against drowning your Lean efforts with Japanese lessons, and takes on the Japanese for not being curious enough to visit and learn from his website. Bill, the Japanese are not hitting your English website because despite being the world’s number two economy, Japan’s English language educational system is completely broken.

Bill begins with a justified criticism of the comments on India by Kenichi Ohmae, a Japanese management guru. Turned off by Ohmae, Bill concludes that there's not much to learn from Japan, aside from Toyota. Ohmae is newsworthy because he is provocative. He no more speaks for Japan than does Tom Peters for America.

Edson Oda is a senior consultant in our Sao Paulo, Brazil office. He told me that in Brazil there is a near 100% acceptance of things from Japan being good. This is due to a century of history of Japanese immigrants helping develop agriculture and industry in Brazil. If it’s better than what you have, you copy it. Brazil has been a developing country and has much to learn from Japan, the U.S. and other countries. They have not copied Japan’s English educational system, thankfully.

I support using Japanese terms, though only to the point that it makes senses. Why use Japanese terms? “Kanban” is a lot shorter and more precise than “production control signal cards”. Kaizen means something different, and more nuanced than “continuous improvement.”

With apologies to Bill, I’ll introduce another Japanese phrase to the Lean vocabulary. The phrase yattemitekara kangaero means “Give it a try first, then think about it.” Edson introduced me to this expression that the Japanese managers of NEC in Brazil used as a way to teach their kaizen philosophy. It’s learning by doing rather than by reading the theory and trying to completely understand it first. I prefer the Portuguese: Faça primeiro e pense depois.

When a Japanese factory manager who has had “do first, think later” drummed into him receives the "why" question from his Indian subordinates, you can hardly blame him for wanting them to learn by doing rather than through discussion. Ohmae has not thought deeply enough about this issue, and he completely fails to make this connection. My advice to Japanese doing business in India is to put respect for people first, seeking understanding of the national culture and how this affects business culture. Ask Toyota how it’s done.

The biggest challenge I have heard from our clients who have operations or suppliers in India is that the infrastructure there today is terrible. India’s higher education system is very good, and people in India are inquisitive and eager to learn. They are also more individualistic and confrontational than the Japanese. This presents an opportunity for a culture shock for the Japanese factory managers in India.

My Japanese teachers of kaizen, for all of their faults, had great insights into the work culture of people in various countries. Leading change as they did in high-pressure environments around the world week after week they needed to understand quickly which cultures like to talk for hours before trying anything (Germany) and which cultures meant “never” when they said “tomorrow” (Mexico). Stereotypes exist because in general, they contain truth.

Why should we learn from Japan? We should learn from everyone we possibly can. Today, Japan is still the place where you fill find the best examples of the thought of Ford, Deming, Ohno, and Shingo in action every day. The Japanese certainly don’t have all of the answers. Toyota certainly doesn’t claim to either. Anyone who claims to hasn’t thought deeply enough about the problems.

Posted by Jon Miller at 1:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Predictability can be a good thing or a bad thing. A friend of mine named John Cass is a guru in the areas of PR and corporate blogging. John pushed my buttons by pointing me at an article by Knowledge@Wharton from the Wharton School of Business. He knew it would raise bristles and cause me to blog.

The article is titled TQM, ISO 9000, Six Sigma: Do Process Management Programs Discourage Innovation? Ah, another one of those “creativity versus process” articles. My answer to this question, doing my best Ted Stevens impersonation, is no.

Professor Mary J. Benner calls for a more measured application of process management tools. Her research found that process management limits innovation. "…the risk is that you misapply these programs, in particular in areas where people are supposed to be innovative," and "brand new technologies to produce products that don't exist are difficult to measure. This kind of innovation may be crowded out when you focus too much on processes you can measure." Don't focus too much on processes you can measure. I'm all for moderation. How much is too much focus? Any, according to the article.

Professor Benner says "Our message is this: Companies that have process management in one area must realize that it can bleed into other areas of the company, and you must prevent that from happening. Use these approaches where they make sense — and deliberately do not have them in areas that are focused on innovation."

To process people, them are fightin’ words.

In calling for balance, the authors say that we should keep the process people and the innovation people under one roof but separated. In other words TQM, Six Sigma, and ISO are all good, but don’t apply them to your innovation processes. Following their “ambidextrous approach” you would have the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.

Where have we heard this before? About 100 years ago craftsmen building automobiles in barns probably said the same thing to Henry Ford as he was ushering in modern manufacturing with his assembly lines featuring flow, synchronization, and economy of motion. And we still hear this today.

The professors cite research in the drop in innovation in firms that pursued ISO certification in several industries. It seems to me that the rather obvious conclusion is that they were too busy pursuing ISO to pursue innovation. It’s more than once that I’ve walked out of an information session with a prospective client shaking my head because they were “too busy” with ISO certification or ERP implementation to introduce Lean and kaizen to their organization right now.

Kaizen is noticeably absent. Either the authors were not aware of kaizen or that they are aware of the fact that kaizen, a much less rigorous process than TQM, ISO of six sigma which in our experience would do far less to stifle innovation and would not support their argument. Uninvited, I come to the defense of the TQM, ISO and six sigma schools of continuous improvement.

Performance management is about measuring what you do and improving what you measure. This can be difficult for innovative and creative processes.

There’s a useful tool for evaluating the maturity of processes that comes from the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute called the Capability Maturity Model. This one was designed for software development processes but they should be familiar to anyone who has done a Lean process assessment. These concepts fit well to manufacturing, design engineering, or innovation.

To paraphrase into Lean lingo, the five levels are:

Level 1: Process is undefined. “Heroic effort”
Level 2: Process is defined but not documented. “Tribal knowledge”
Level 3: Process is defined and documented. “Standardized”
Level 4: Process is controlled. “Predictable”
Level 5: Process is continuously improved. “High performance”

Just today I visited with a COO of a client of ours. They are a high-end design engineering firm. As part of a discussion of their needs for Lean in transactional and program management areas, we discussed their level of process maturity. “We’re at level 2” he told me.

A high performance organization needs to be continuously improving based on controlled and predictable documented standards. Processes don’t have to be minutely detailed procedures for “how to innovate” but they must be beyond levels 1 and 2. Be honest and do a quick self-evaluation of your innovation processes based on these five categories.

Software development and other types of innovation areas are notorious for producing wonderful new products behind schedule and over budget. These are typically some of the smartest people trying as hard as they can. So why is the performance so poor? Toyota tells us to always “blame the process, not the person”. How do you do this if you don’t have a process?

In defense of the authors, even Drucker himself argued that the performance of knowledge workers should not be managed in the same way as those who turn wrenches. Every generation has said "Mankind will never..." and they have been proven wrong in the subsequent generations when more precise or powerful tools and new knowledge become available and make "never" into "now"..

Kaizen is all about defining, stabilizing, documenting and improving processes to the degree that they make things better and improve profitability. Innovation is not exempt.

Posted by Jon Miller at 7:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Dueling views on the role of kaizen events in a Lean transformation were expressed in the latest SME Lean newsletter.

George Koenigsaecker makes an attempt at answering the question Why aren't there more lean successes? I just finished reading a review copy of Bill Waddell and Norm Bodek's new book Rebirth of American Industry. Keep an eye out for it from PCS Press. This book does the best job of answering this question I've seen so far.

Back to the duel. “There are a couple of ways to answer this question” starts Koenigsaecker, and goes on to list three.

Koenigsaecker says that lean thinking is counter-intuitive and difficult to integrate into daily management behavior. He continues "we don't actually believe that improvement can be continuous. We don't actually believe that the whole point of a lean transformation should be to build a lean-learning culture, where continuous improvement is what we expect every day--forever."

Excuse me? Who is this "we" who doesn't believe that Lean transformation = improvement that continues forever? Maybe I've been drinking my own Kool-Aid - or have I been blessed with exceptional clients and staff around me?

He also cites the lack of "true lean sensei" such as the people who came from Toyota suppliers to form Shingijutsu and taught Koenigsaecker. "Here's one of those leadership lessons: Lean tools take a long time to learn at a fundamental level." The connection is that there's not many sensei because this stuff is hard to learn, it takes a long time. Maybe that's true for leadership folks.

We've found it's quite easy to teach people lean fundamentals. It's really a matter of how deep the grooves in your head are after decades of batch production experience, and how willing you are to give it up, be humble, and say "teach me". To quote Edwards Deming, "Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival." Spend most of your time pouring knowledge into open minds, and any time you have left prying open the closed ones.

"The basic learning element for TPS is the week-long Jishukin or Voluntary Study event--what we usually call a kaizen event..." This may have been true for the suppliers who went through a Lean transformation as part of the Toyota Autonomous Study Group 20 years ago, but it is not how Toyota would describe themselves. Ask a Toyota person "How many kaizen events do you do each year?" and you'll get a puzzled look. It's the same one you'll get when you ask Toyota about their six sigma program.

I don't want to claim to speak for Toyota. But by my observation the primary way Toyota does kaizen is by making their creative idea suggestion system a part of every employees' and every managers' job description. One Toyota manager who shared his wisdom with us during one of our benchmarking trips to Japan summed up the job description of every Toyota person: Follow Standard Work, and find a better way. How elegant.

Koenigsaecker says you need 100 kaizen events under your belt in the factory and office before you can be called a "sensei". That's 3 to 4 years in the life of an average kaizen consultant. We're talking "just realizing how much there is to learn" not sensei.

I half agree with Koenigsaecker's last point on the role of leadership. The leader should be more hands on with Lean transformation. If you are a C-level executive, regardless of the letters that follow the C and the particular focus this places on your day-to-day, what more important work can there be than doing kaizen? After all, you are trying to improve the company. But, leaders should definitely delegate. Build a volunteer army of lean people under you, or perhaps "missionaries" would be more appropriate. Make sure you have people who really get it, and trust your people. Don't worry about all of the details of Lean not making sense to you, as long as you trust enough not to get in the way when things get counterintuitive.

Jamie Flinchbaugh takes nearly the opposite position to Koenigsaecker writing 'Event lean' prevents a company from becoming genuinely lean. "Event lean" is bad, says Flinchbaugh, because it can be turned off and on if it is seen as separate from the operation of the organization, and also because it does not engage everyone all of the time. He continues “event lean is separate, distinct, and disconnected, and never becomes an integral part of an organization.”

To set the record straight, kaizen, by definition is never bad. The “event lean” Flinchbaugh describes is a certainly a poor strategy for Lean transformation. Flinchbaugh's bio places him at Chrysler prior to his consulting career. Koenigsaecker's experience with "event lean" at Danaher and Hon Industries was no doubt considerably more successful.

How very different three people who fancy themselves voices on Lean can see the same topic. Take all of this with a grain of salt and keep in mind that the articles of Flinchbaugh, Koenigsaecker, and Miller (this blog) are all corporate PR. Like all corporate PR, the ultimate message is "buy our stuff" whether it's a new book or consulting expertise. Think deeply on this topic, add your experience and make the best of this freely given advice.

Posted by Jon Miller at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The December 16, 2005 USA Today article titled Optimism Puts Rose-colored Tint in Glasses of Top Execs is an interesting study on strength and weakness of top executives, particularly their sometimes delusional optimism.

The main points of the article are that the most effective leaders have in common their ability to:

- See the big picture with limited information
- Attract followers through a combination of caring and charisma
- Be optimistic, even against prevailing facts

A striking tendency towards optimism was found in a variety of recent surveys and is illustrated with famous and infamous American executives in the news. An interesting insight is "When CEOs are right, they know they are right. The problem is, when they are wrong, they know they are right."

Why is this? Maybe it's because of a sense of security their golden parachutes and massive executive compensations provide. They are optimistic because even if their company fails, they have millions in the bank. The vast majority of workers do not.

Delusional or not, optimism is an important characteristic for both corporate executives as well as leaders of kaizen and Lean transformation. Henry Ford summed it up best nearly a century ago, "If you think you can or you think you can't, you're right."

In defense of big egos, the article states “A lot has been written in management literature about how true leadership is humble, not egotistical” and cites the lack of ethics of executives at Tyco, Enron, etc. for their failures, rather than their lack of humility.

I disagree, and maintain that you don’t need a big ego to succeed. Part of humility is a proper respect for people, which precludes such egregious lapses in ethics. Humility simply means you are open to admitting that you might not have all of the answers, and that you are secure enough to accept the possibility of being wrong occasionally.

The article made me think about the parallel to leadership on a much smaller scale, the workplace team leader or a kaizen team leader. The characteristics that make them effective are remarkably similar. Optimistic leaders can see a better future. Kaizen team leaders and facilitators of rapid improvement can see a better future because amongst all of that waste they see tremendous opportunity. They know how to apply Lean tools to make things better.

While corporate executives can be skewed towards the delusional because they are disconnected from the realities of the gemba, and because their reports tend to tell them what they want to hear. A kaizen team leader with an understanding of genchi gembutsu and the value of cross-functional team input can avoid these pitfalls while remaining highly optimistic.

Posted by Jon Miller at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

We don’t manufacture automobiles, but I know a bit about how it must feel when automobile companies issue a recall and have to ask many thousands of customers to bring in their vehicles to fix a flaw they have discovered.

We found out last week that between July 2005 and December 2005 more than 1,400 incoming e-mails had been diverted to an unused mailbox on our server. This is appalling.

Out of these, approximately 300 were requests for information and 1,100 were junk mail or spam. This is also appalling.

I would like to apologize again on behalf of my company to everyone who was inconvenienced.

There were 189 people who needed attention, once we took away the duplicate requests and the people who had called in or otherwise contacted us when their e-mails were not answered. Marcie MacRae and Michell Niebuhr from our office spent most of two days responding and apologizing. Kent Bradley also helped out. They did the work of 5 months in less than 3 days. Talk about batch production.

Thanks Marcie and Michell for doing this unpleasant job.

What does a company that believes in kaizen and respect for people do when faced with a problem like this? What they don’t do is ask “Who is to blame?” and fire them right away. One of the things we did is to create an A3 Report to understand the root causes so that we could take root cause corrective actions and prevent reoccurrences of similar problems. Here is how our A3 Report turned out:

Finding the true root cause is the difficult part, and we still have work to do for this A3 Report. As a result of this experience I expect that our customer service will improve.

E-mail is a good way to reach us, but keep in mind that you can always call us if you need to speak to someone. We will help you when we can, and either direct you towards another resource or tell you frankly if we can not help you.

Posted by Jon Miller at 3:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

General Motors Chairman Rick Wagoner asks why U.S. automobile manufacturers are doing so poorly when foreign ones are doing so well in the December 6, 2005 Wall Street Journal editorial A Portrait of My Industry.

"Despite public perception, the answer is not that foreign auto makers are more productive or offer better-quality or more fuel-efficient vehicles" says Chairman Wagoner, and continues to tout GM's quality and performance while blaming external factors. Sadly, it appears the hole needs to be dug a bit deeper before GM will be able to crawl out of it.

This sentiment seems to be blowing about Detroit lately. Dr. Womack eloquently takes issue with Ford Motor Chairman Bill Ford in a December 4, 2005 opinion in the Washington Post titled Mr. Ford’s Wrong Turn.

During a speech in Washington D.C. on November 22, 2005 Chairman Ford asked the legislature to "dramatically increase" tax credits for R&D of alternative vehicles as well as for tax incentives to help US manufacturers modernize factories. The Ford Chairman also said to the National Press Club "With the right investments, America and American manufacturing can win, but we can't get there alone" and then that Ford "can compete with Toyota, but we can't compete with Japan."

Part of this is politics. Ford is lobbying to raise emissions standards so that they will benefit from their new push to hybrids. By appealing to the media and the public that there is a case for unfair competition due to subsidies by the Japanese government, U.S. politicians may be more inclined to act to please their constituent voters. Is it working? Chairman Ford's statement that Ford can compete with Toyota, but not with Japan, has been the source of howls from various quarters.

One outspoken blogger says "No, you can't even compete with Toyota." and goes into detail why. Quite a number of liberal blogs and watchdog groups are taking Chairman Ford to task for the request for federal support. Among others, corporate watchdog group Reclaim Democracy is calling Ford's request for help a bailout.

It was unfortunate that Chairman Ford coupled the request for increased federal R&D support with the claim that Ford can compete with Toyota. There is certainly a strong case for increased industrial R&D spending. The U.S. government should aid not just Ford, or the automotive industry, or manufacturing, but a wide range of strategic industries in the private sector through policies and research and development subsidy.

Ford can't compete with Toyota because of the huge gap between the Toyota operational model and the Ford operational model. Ford has to work on that. Ford can't compete without good U.S. government policy to provide cover. The Japanese government has helped Toyota, and other Japanese manufacturers, for years with their policies. Fair or unfair is not the question. That's all in the past. "What's the way forward?" is the question.

Here I'll put my taxes to work by relying on our friends at the Central Intelligence Agency for research facts on the U.S. economy.

"The US has the largest and most technologically powerful economy in the world... In this market-oriented economy, private individuals and business firms make most of the decisions... US business firms enjoy considerably greater flexibility than their counterparts in Western Europe and Japan in decisions to expand capital plant, to lay off surplus workers, and to develop new products... they face higher barriers to entry in their rivals' home markets than the barriers to entry of foreign firms in US markets. US firms are at or near the forefront in technological advances, especially in computers and in medical, aerospace, and military equipment; their advantage has narrowed since the end of World War II. The onrush of technology largely explains the gradual development of a "two-tier labor market" in which those at the bottom lack the education and the professional/technical skills of those at the top and, more and more, fail to get comparable pay raises, health insurance coverage, and other benefits... Long-term problems include inadequate investment in economic infrastructure, rapidly rising medical and pension costs of an aging population, sizable trade and budget deficits, and stagnation of family income in the lower economic groups."

This is a clear-headed assessment of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to the U.S. economy.
What does CIA research tell us about the Japanese economy?

"Government-industry cooperation, a strong work ethic, mastery of high technology, and a comparatively small defense allocation (1% of GDP) helped Japan advance with extraordinary rapidity to the rank of second most technologically-powerful economy in the world after the US and third-largest economy after the US and China, measured on a purchasing power parity (PPP) basis. One notable characteristic of the economy is the working together of manufacturers, suppliers, and distributors in closely-knit groups called keiretsu. A second basic feature has been the guarantee of lifetime employment for a substantial portion of the urban labor force. Both features are now eroding."

Here again, are a few hints. When giants like GM and Ford start to wobble, it's partly because they are not Lean and well-balanced, and it's partly because the ground they are standing on is not as stable as that of certain foreign auto companies. A healthy industrial policy for the U.S. would look at their biggest competitor, for instance Japan, and figure out how to align policies so that key U.S. industries stayed ahead.

Something else that caught my eye in the U.S.A. page of the CIA Factbook is the "NA" (as in "Not Applicable") entry under "Political Pressure Groups". Pressure groups are defined as organizations with leaders involved in politics, but not standing for legislative election. This is less than a clear-headed characterization. But lobbyists and other pressure groups who gain political clout without standing for legislative election already have the influence to prevent the CIA from listing them as such. But I will step off of that soap box for now.

On the National Science Foundation website, under the Science and Engineering Indicators section, on a page titled International R&D Trends and Comparisons there is a quote that outlines the importance of R&D to innovation, competitiveness and the strength of a nation's economy:

"Increasingly, the international competitiveness of a modern economy is defined by its ability to generate, absorb, and commercialize knowledge. Most nations have accepted that economic policy should focus not only on improving quality and efficiency but also on promoting innovation. Absolute levels of R&D expenditures are important indicators of a nation's innovative capacity and are a harbinger of future growth and productivity. Indeed, investments in the R&D enterprise strengthen the technological base on which economic prosperity increasingly depends worldwide. The relative strength of a particular country's current and future economy and the specific scientific and technological areas in which a country excels are further revealed through comparison with other major R&D-performing countries."

Finland, Ireland, South Korea, Canada, Sweden and Japan all spend more than the United States on manufacturing R&D according to NSF statistics. So when a major industrialist such as Chairman Ford requests government support or R&D and innovation, I tend to agree. The cries of "bailout" need to be addressed separately through better accountability of corporate subsidies, pork and corporate governance. It doesn't change the fact that the U.S. is not investing as much in the in the future as other countries, when it comes to manufacturing.

Some politicians get the idea. A December 8, 2005 article in the Florence, South Carolina Morning News
interviews Senator Jim DeMint after a factory tour and he says “It’s the way we tax, the way we regulate, the cost of health care and the cost of litigation,” and also “I’ve had people tell me they can build a plant in China before they can even break ground in the U.S. for a plant because of permitting and regulations.” He says he is pushing for a “lean government” regulatory process that helps industries build plants in the United States more quickly.

"Japan isn't his problem; Toyota is." says Dr. Womack. I would say the failure of the U.S. government to prioritize broad policies of industrial development and manufacturing R&D is the problem. Government may not be the solution for GM and Ford. For many of the rest of us, Toyota is not the problem. Toyota is the solution.

Posted by Jon Miller at 7:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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Posted by Jon Miller at 4:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

I’ve been a fan of Korean food for a long time, but now I’m also a fan of Korean kitchenware. I've always thought the steel chopsticks were particularly a good idea. Here's my dinner on a washable, reusable dinner tray used in a cafeteria in a factory in Korea.

Why is this Lean? The typical process for the "lunch line to dishwasher" cafeteria value stream is:

1. Get tray
2. Get plates
3. Get food
4. Eat food
5. Return plates
6. Return tray
7. Wash plates
8. Wash tray

The Lean process used at this factory cafeteria in Korea is:

1. Get tray
2. Get food
3. Eat food
4. Return tray
5. Wash tray

This way instead of wasting a tray (which is most often not dirty at all) and plates, bowls, etc. the kitchen just washes one utensil, the metal tray-dish. What a good idea!

I'd like to call special attention to these Korean steel chopsticks. They are reusable unlike the softwood type you get in teriyaki restaurants which come in paper or plastic packages and need to be thrown away at the end. Waste! Get with the program, rest of the chopstick-using world!

It may be only seconds saved each day by Lean thinking like this, but over the years it adds up, especially if you keep looking for time and energy saving kaizen ideas like these everywhere.

As an additional benefit, the shallow sections only fit so much food so you stay "lean" by eating this way.

Mmm, good!

Posted by Jon Miller at 9:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

During a Kaizen Blitz a cross-functional team makes rapid improvements in a focused scope of work over a short period of time. This is done based on observing processes, trying new things out and measuring the results. This is very applicable in making project teams more effective. There are many types of kaizen, a few of which we've covered this week, so first let's put them in perspective.

The Kaizen Blitz in Perspective

Projects you may not think of as a type of kaizen, but in that the goal of most projects is to improve something or create something new and better, I think of them as a type of kaizen at the macro level. They tend to last weeks or months. Six sigma projects would fit in this category.

Jishuken are a type of Kaizen Project Team that we did not discuss this week. Jishuken are kaizen projects that are conducted by a workgroup or a self-directed team. They focus on one topic such as productivity improvement, and typically last 3 months or so. This could be done by a workgroup but would most likely involve people who are not workgroup members also. A Kaizen Blitz can be part of a jishuken activity

Kaizen Blitz is described in this post by Norman Bodek which captures the spirit of a 5-day event in a factory as conducted by Japanese consultants. Call it a kaizen event, kaizen workshop, or kaizen blitz for project teams, the common elements are:

#1: A cross-functional team
#2: The emphasis on quick action
#3: Improvement focused on the gemba (actual work place)
#4: Decisions are made based on facts through direct process observation

QC Circles are small groups of individuals who do similar work (workgroups) who meet on a regular basis to discus and analyze problems, consider solutions, and test them in their daily work. The kaizen focus originates from, but is not limited to Quality Control (QC). These are perpetual teams, though the membership changes as workers transfer in and out of the area.

Kaizen Suggestions are the small and local. They are most often ideas you can implement yourself. As a rule, in an effective suggestion system the team leader or supervisor will review and approve (or provide coaching to improve the suggestion) within the same day that it is submitted.

Out of these the Kaizen Blitz is the most high profile type, and it is perhaps the most familiar to many companies involved in Lean manufacturing, Lean healthcare, or Lean transaction activities today.

Challenges to the Kaizen Blitz for Project Teams

The unique challenges for the kaizen blitz for project teams are elements 3 and 4 above.

Challenge with element #3: The Project Gemba. In explaining the kaizen blitz for a project team Hal Macomber proposed, "In the project setting it is the opportunity to work on the whole of the project" but I disagree. It's important that the scope be well-defined and actionable within the 5-day (for example) duration of the kaizen event. The important thing is to define the project gemba which are the places where actual work gets done and where improvement is meaningful. The scope of a Kaizen event should not encompass an entire project or an entire value stream, but by nature the entire project may be considered the gemba. That is the challenge.

Challenge with element #4: Direct Process Observation. In my definition of a project, I said that projects take longer than a day. This can be a challenge for a Kaizen Blitz for Project Teams. In kaizen, you have to go to where the work is done (genchi or gemba) and observe the facts with the gembutsu (actual elements of the process). At the gemba, you need to observe the actual work being done to get the facts of the current situation.

You need to be able to observe the process, identify the waste, make improvements, observe the results, measure the impact, and document the new process and remaining action items. All in one week. The risk of not doing this is that your changes to one observed part of the project may have unintended consequences on another part of the work of the project. In manufacturing terms this would be like observing only one section of an assembly line and doing kaizen to it, without understanding the effect this will have on the next process immediately downstream.

So unless you have a very large team, or a very short project, this can be difficult to do and you will need to limit your scope or run multiple kaizen events to enable genchi gembutsu for a kaizen blitz for project teams. To have a kaizen event on an entire project may be possible if the project is a very short one. It may also be possible a similar project is in progress and you can observe this in a stage-by-stage fashion and use this to design a new method for a similar project.

How to do a Kaizen Blitz for Project Teams

There has been a lot written about how to manage kaizen events in a step by step fashion. The way to conduct a kaizen blitz for project teams would not be any different from how you do kaizen in any other type of work environment. There are three basic phases:

The main aspects of kaizen preparation phase involve setting targets and defining a scope, selecting the team members by following guidelines to make sure you have a good cross functional mix, coordinating resources to make sure the process can be observed and that supporting data is available, and communicating with stakeholders.

The Kaizen week phase is when you come together as a team to observe, redesign and test new methods following the PDCA cycle and applying various Lean tools to get rid of waste.

1. Go to the gemba where each member of the project team does the actual work
2. Identify waste and categorize them in the 7 types to make sure you understand them
3. Write this down on a Kaizen Newspaper, A3 Report, of Quick and Easy Kaizen from, etc.
4. Identify the root causes
5. Apply countermeasures
6. Test results
7. Standardize new method
8. Repeat

To set standards in the case of a project team whose work is not as easy to fix into a process with a set time, you may revisit the promises you made and renew them as "standards" for the work you are responsible for, as Hal Macomber points out.

Kaizen follow-up phase phase which includes continuing to monitor the new process until it is stable, completing action items required to implement all kaizen ideas, and handing over the day to day sustaining and continuous improvement of the target process to the area managers.

Seeing Waste During a Kaizen Blitz

Project team members may not be used to thinking in terms of waste and value in their individual work, their workgroup, and workstream so an emphasis on understanding the 7 types of waste in the project setting is essential. Examples of wastes within the work of a project team include:

Overproduction due to unclear requirements from the upstream process, waiting time for information from another project team member before work can be completed, inventory of projects or project tasks that are in process, motion of switching from one multi-task activity to another, defects and rework loops, and transportation and the delays and loss of information caused by hand-offs.

Then there is processing waste (which some call over-processing) is illustrated nicely in Mark Graban's post on Tuesday with the example of his team of consultants doing redundant work in developing training materials, not using each other case studies and not sharing knowledge to make each other more effective. Whenever you are using a crude tool to accomplish a task rather than the best available that may exist somewhere else in the workstream of the project, this is processing waste.

Advantages of Kaizen Blitz for Project Teams

Experience has shown that during a Kaizen Blitz, a team gets more improvement done in 5 days with 8 people than you can with the same people putting in the same 50 hours extended over 2 months, as they would in a project.

Decisions are made in real-time based on observed facts and new methods are tried during a kaizen blitz, taking the place of many useless meetings that are conducted away from the gemba in a typical project.

The cross-functional team aspect of a kaizen blitz allows you to look at things from a new perspective rather than just your own specialist perspective or role within the project, which can be powerful in a project team environment where these functions are working together already.

A Kaizen event complements project teams well because projects team typically lack speed and a bias for action, while kaizen events can fail due to a lack of follow up and structure, which the project management can provide.

Kaizen events are a good way to give a "boost" to a traditional project by rapidly accomplishing some core section of work as a team in a short period of time while improving communication and clarifying customer-supplier requirements.

In Conclusion

In the long view all organizations are temporary. Project teams are created with a termination date in mind. A kaizen team is by nature temporary, forming to solve problems, set standards and to disband typically after a week. Temporary organizations such as these need to learn to be effective quickly within their short lifespan. The Gang of Seven bloggers have written this week on this topic from various perspectives and we have tried to lay out some of these principles. Learning and applying the principles that make kaizen teams successful can help make temporary organizations such as project teams more effective also.

Read about what the other 6 bloggers wrote today about Workgroup Kaizen for Project Teams Hal Macomber, Norman Bodek, Chuck Frey, Joe Ely, Bill Waddell and Mark Graban on their respective blogs.

The Kaizen for Project Teams blog entries on Panta Rei are Making the Case for Kaizen for Project Teams, Workgroup Kaizen for Project Teams, Workstream Kaizen for Project Teams, Quick and Easy Kaizen for Project Teams, and Kaizen Blitz for Project Teams.

Posted by Jon Miller at 9:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My travels this week have made me the late blogger each day. I've had the benefit of being able to read and be inspired by the work of the other Gang of Severn bloggers. Thanks to an ice storm in Dallas I am unexpectedly in the office for a few hours. I will post early today, and keep it (relatively) short and this to the point.

Norman Bodek in his post on the Kaikaku blog talks about what is Quick and Easy Kaizen. Norman stresses the importance of respect for people as part of what makes Toyota successful with kaizen. In a collaborative project team context a good place to start is making sure each person makes promises they can keep.

Quick and Easy Kaizen asks each person to make small changes to their own work. The asking is done by the leaders who are empowering them to change their work. Bill Waddell on his Evolving Excellence blog made a great point that the team leader needs to "remove the shackles" or empower people, and set "unreasonable" or stretch goals to focus the minds of project team members on Quick and Easy Kaizen ideas to improve their work. They must motivate, inspire and support.

A common question that comes from those empowered to do with kaizen, and Quick and Easy Kaizen in particular, is "What's in it for me?" Most companies today with successful suggestions systems pay between $1 and $5 for the vast majority of improvement ideas. More valuably, most of these companies have made an explicit commitment to not laying off workers to improve profit numbers in the short term. Most of these companies happen to be Japanese.

Quick and Easy Kaizen is deceptively simple. It is not easy for most organizations, and Quick and Easy Kaizen expert Norman Bodek asks "Why in the world isn't every company in America doing this?" in his blog. I think it's because it's difficult to ask people to change their individual work.

It's not so difficult to ask when you can demonstrate respect for people. The best form of respect, reward and recognition is for leadership to make a commitment to grow the company and maintain employment and a good quality of life for people. Leaders, when doing Quick and Easy Kaizen for project teams or for larger, less temporary organizations, need to consider how to link kaizen to overall strategies and objectives of the business.

Read about what the other 6 bloggers wrote today about Workgroup Kaizen for Project Teams Hal Macomber, Norman Bodek, Chuck Frey, Joe Ely, Bill Waddell and Mark Graban on their respective blogs.

The Kaizen for Project Teams blog entries on Panta Rei are Making the Case for Kaizen for Project Teams, Workgroup Kaizen for Project Teams, Workstream Kaizen for Project Teams, Quick and Easy Kaizen for Project Teams, and Kaizen Blitz for Project Teams.

Posted by Jon Miller at 7:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The topic for today is Workstream Kaizen. The word “workstream” has been in my vocabulary for less than three weeks. The more I come to understand what a workstream is in a project team context, the less I like it. Why? The very nature of workstreams generate waste and call out for kaizen. First let's define a workstream.

Our resident expert on project management Hal Macomber gave the Gang of Seven a good description of a workstream using the example of building a house. Even just to make a wall you need someone to provide a drawing, carpenters to frame the wall, plumbers, electricians and a telecommunications trades to do their work and a drywall crew to hang and finished the walls. The general contractor may inspect the work, followed by painting, trim, flooring and so forth. While a workgroup would be a team of framers, the workstream includes all of the people from various trades and companies required to complete the project of building a the whole house, across time and distance. This requires communication, coordination and hand-offs.

To paraphrase two of Kent Bowen and Steven Spear’s four points describing the Toyota Production System from their paper Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System, every customer-supplier relationship should make a direct connection and there should be a clear yes/no signal response to requests. If you've ever built a house or had one built, you know these rules aren't followed. A goal of workstream kaizen is to be able to follow these rules.

Part of the answer to how to do workstream kaizen in terms of building of a house can be seen in the video titled the 4 hour house. Teamwork, coordination and planning can eliminate many of the losses in a typical workstream of building a house. The same lessons can be applied to any project. The video certainly motivates and inspires, but does not instructional in great depth on workstream kaizen.

Another approach to workstream kaizen, again with building a house, comes from the steel frame modular home builder Toyota Home. I call it workstream compression. At Toyota Home the dozen or so "modules" that make up a house are finished in the factory on an assembly line with about a 6 minute takt time. Carpenters and electricians are working inside of a room that is moving slowly on an assembly line. Complete with andon lights, fixed position stop mechanisms, and sub assembly lines to moderate the effect of the extreme variation in assembly times, this factory is a marvel of TPS applied to high mix low volume custom work. If you can walk through a Toyota Home factory and still say "but we're custom" you had your eyes closed.

As a result of putting all of the trades on an assembly line, building the modules that make up a house complete with doors, windows, drywall, electrical, plumbing, and so on these modules (welded steel frame boxes finished as rooms) are installed on the construction site into an attractive, earthquake-proof two-story $250,000 house, in about eight hours.

The benefits of the Toyota Home construction system are that the house is not exposed to the elements very long since the work of putting the house up is done in a day. Just pick a sunny day. In addition, due to the land shortage Japanese homeowners tend to raze their home and "rehome" or build new on the same site. You don't want to spend months building a house while your family lives in a hotel.

The Toyota Home example takes the workstream and compresses it into a factory to radically simplify the work done on the construction site. Essentially the workstream is between the customer, salesman, factory and installation crew, rather than all of the trades normally managed by the general contractor. Even some of the supplier processes within the workstream have been "compressed" by bringing the supplier company (staff, equipment, and materials) under the roof of Toyota Home. So there's no transportation cost or inventory. The supplier builds a wood window on a subassembly line minutes before it goes in the module on the main line.

If everyone who was involved in project management was a fan of assembly lines like me, we could end here with workgroup kaizen. However in my experience many designers, knowledge workers, artists and crafts people abhor any suggestion of making their work resemble "production". American manufacturing has given assembly lines a bad name, so we have a duty to dig deeper and offer some more workgroup kaizen solutions.

If workgroup kaizen Toyota Home style is abhorrent or unimaginable to you at the moment the biggest impact you can have is to stop overproduction. Project team members can be specialists who hand off their work to others. They may be considered highly skilled resources that must be kept busy. Or the output of a team member may be measured at the task level rather than overall project output. Keeping busy may seem like a good thing, but Taiichi Ohno stated decades ago that overproduction is the greatest waste and it is certainly true for project teams.

Here I'll rely on a sports analogy by Bill Waddell to how people behave in a workstream:

"In a swimming relay, swimmer number two cannot leave until swimmer number one has completed his or her leg of the race and touched the wall. There is a clear, well defined handoff - swimmer one has an absolute, measurable distance to go; and swimmer number two cannot go to work until swimmer number one is finished."

But is this the way project team members really behave within a workstream? If so then workstream kaizen wouldn't be quite so tricky. In my experience what often happens is that swimmer number two is waiting for swimmer number one who has a cramped foot, but needs to keep busy so swims off to join a pick up water polo match. The resulting delay and shuffling of resources causes the typical cost and launch date overruns.

Multi-tasking, or having more than one project task open at one time is batching. You are creating inventory. When doing kaizen, you want to find inventory, ask why you have it, and attempt to get rid of it. When you make inventory (multi-tasking) you have added value and cost to each project task, but these unfinished tasks are sitting in process and you can not yet sell them and turn them into cash. They may or may not take up space in case of a software development project, but a house half-built certainly does. If assembling an automobile was a “project”, a supply chain would be a workstream. Just as inventories plague supply chains, multi-tasking and juggling projects. A goal of workstream kaizen should be for team members to be able to move from batching to one thing at a time.

Joe Ely asks on his bog "Just how many projects do the team members within a workstream have? Does anyone know? All too often they don’t." Part of my definition for projects is that they typically take more than a day. So it becomes important to understand what needs to be done each day in order for a project not to fall behind. With so many projects in work by the team members of each workstream, the question becomes "What is today's work?"

I don’t remember exactly who I heard it from but a Japanese manager in one of the factories we visited in southern Japan a few years ago said that one of the goals he stressed for everyone in his company was “Do today’s work today.” I remember feeling like I’d been knocked on the side of my head at the simplicity and power of this statement. But how many of us who are workstream members of a project even know what “today’s work” really is? A project team member within workstream may find their work today changed based input from another team member in the workstream. How many mornings have you had something in your e-mail inbox that completely reshuffled your priorities for the day.

Do one thing at a time. It sounds easy enough. Yet in a workstream your "one thing" may depend on the "one things" of many other people, and these people's "one things" on other people's and so on. It gets complex when you are separated by time and distance and your projects spans more than a day. Workstreams don’t promote this. We can’t just finish one project before starting the next one? It's human nature to keep busy and overproduce rather than wait. This is where the "compression" option starts to look sensible.

Workstreams, like supply chains, are by nature inelegant things. They are lumpy in some parts, smooth in others. Signals between parts of a supply chain or workstream tend to be less than clear and direct. The kaizen approach is to get at the root cause of why you need a project team (why there is separation between processes) in the first place. Why can’t the construction project flow one at a time, and finish in less than one day? Why can't there be clear and direct yes/no customer-supplier relationships throughout? Examine the various hand-off steps along the way. At various points where decisions can be made or changed, where work is started without clear instruction, information or customer input, there will be opportunity for workstream kaizen.

Read about what the other 6 bloggers wrote today about Workgroup Kaizen for Project Teams Hal Macomber, Norman Bodek, Chuck Frey, Joe Ely, Bill Waddell and Mark Graban on their respective blogs.

The Kaizen for Project Teams blog entries on Panta Rei are Making the Case for Kaizen for Project Teams, Workgroup Kaizen for Project Teams, Workstream Kaizen for Project Teams, Quick and Easy Kaizen for Project Teams, and Kaizen Blitz for Project Teams.

Posted by Jon Miller at 8:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Today I'm blogging about Workgroup Kaizen for Project Teams. I'm going to take you behind the scenes for a moment and see what we can learn from a project that a workgroup called the Gang of Seven bloggers is involved in. By reading this, you're involved in it too. I'm all about holding people accountable, especially if they claim to be kaizen professionals, so I am taking us to task.

In a very real sense, the Gang of Seven bloggers are a workgroup of this project team of co-blogging on the topic of Kaizen for Project Teams. I was curious to see whether we would practice what we preach and apply project management and kaizen tools to our project. Now that we have proven that even a group of seven experts on Lean and innovation are fallible human beings, I have material for this blog.

I differentiate the core workgroup (the 7 bloggers) on this project from the "workstream" project team members, or those people who helped send out the press release, people who will help with the publishing and distribution of the handbook in 2006, the "plus one" blogger contributors, readers who post comments, etc. I only knew one member of my workgroup personally prior to this project and the others only through their writing. This may be atypical of a workgroup, but probably not of project teams in general.

Project teams are temporary. Some workgroups may persist and work on other projects within the same organization, while some workgroups, like ours, will disband at least for a time as the Gang of Seven bloggers after this week. In any case we have a short period of time within which to get to know each other and "storm, form and norm" as an effective team. In this day and age much of this happens with the help of something called the internet.

Technology is a wonderful thing to enable workgroup kaizen, as Mark Graban points out in his post today. E-mail allows us to rapidly form a team and work together. The internet let's us write collaboratively from different points on the globe and include hundreds of readers in the process, if they choose to post comments. Yet e-mail is a nefarious way to run a team meeting. More than 80% of communication is a combination of body language and tone of voice, according to psychologists. To the best of my knowledge, none of the work of this Gang of Seven workgroup so far was done face to face. This has a price.

Hindsight is 20-20 so let's see what we can learn from our mistakes. I'm going to gloss over all of the good things our workgroup has done this week, since I think mistakes can be more instructive. There are three rules I try to follow when leading major projects as well as smaller scale kaizen activities, so I will categorize my observations in context of these three rules:

1) Clarify the Goals

This was well done. The goal, as I understood it was for all of us to post one article each day on the same topic, for five days on the week of December 5 - 9, 2005. As a secondary goal, this workgroup would publish a book of the resulting work sometime in 2006. These are smart goals.

But each of us as workgroup members and owners of this project most likely also had goals. One lesson I've learned during kaizen activity is to clarify the goals of the kaizen event, but make sure that other intangible goals or individual goals are surfaced early so that they are not in conflict and can ideally be achieved as well.

Sometimes these minor, individual goals can cause trouble, if they are not made clear first. I was nearly guilty of this.

We were asked for our input on topics for each day, on the theme of Kaizen for Project Teams. The project leader asked for our improvement suggestions, as any good leader would do on the project plan. I gave my ideas. Being mine, these ideas were important to me and in my opinion important for the success of the project. To make a long story short, the project leader basically said “Thank you for your input” and proceeded with something like the original plan. My kaizen idea had effectively met the shredder.

I was surprised by this, and waited for some explanation of the process of how the decision was made to go with the final topics. I received none, but we were on a tight schedule and it was not worth slowing the whole process down to satisfy my curiosity. I think the reason was that my goal was to do justice to the topic of kaizen while the team leader's goal was to do justice to the topic of Kaizen for Project Teams.

I now know what it feels like to have the project leader or consultant ask for suggestions and ideas, and then have them go ahead in a different and possibly pre-set direction, without explanation. I can remember railroading kaizen team members as well as my staff with the solution that is “right” in my mind rather than take and develop their ideas that I may not think are the best ones to achieve the goal. This time the tables were turned, and it provided a good lesson for doing workgroup kaizen for project teams.

2) Define the Boundaries

It's another minor point, but I've noticed a discrepancy in the timing of the posts. Due to my travel schedule this week, and the fact that I tend to write until the minute I publish instead of in advance, I have been the last blogger to post each day so far. Bill on the other hand, appears to be a day ahead of the rest of us. The others are between early and on-time. It will all even out over the week, and it certainly will matter less when reading in a book form, but to a reader who wants all seven perspectives on the same topic of Kaizen for Project Teams at one time, this must to be inconvenient. My apologies.

When the guidelines for length of the blogs were given "one long, one short, others between x and y words" I responded that most of my blogs were on the long end of those guidelines. There was no big objection. This entry finds me out of bounds at over 1,700 words. What's my excuse? Like anyone who knowing violates a standard, it's because it's inconvenient for me and I don't understand the reason the boundary was set.

Thanks Hal, for adding the word pithy to my vocabulary.

Brainstorming and making changes to your work can’t be quite as open-ended during workgroup kaizen for project teams. Since a project by definition has a limited scope and duration, the scope of kaizen acitivity within a workgroup needs to be well-defined and "bounded". By contrast a widget in continuous production for several years can be improved over time in many ways, even through quite dramatic innovation and redesign of the product and process. When doing workgroup kaizen for project teams its especially important to clarify "What's in and what's out of bounds" and the reasons why.

3) Clarify the Decision Making Process

During a kaizen event or in Lean manufacturing implementation this is often a simple case of asking “Does taking this decision move us closer to flow?” or “Does this reduce waste?” or ultimately “Does this move us closer to profitability, without violating Lean principles, harming our people or our customers?” While you can adopt this almost as-is when doing workgroup kaizen for project teams, the definitions of customers may need to be expanded to include more internal customers and stakeholders, and the question of “Does this move us closer to flow?” may be too simplistic depending on what the project is trying to accomplish.

One example of a decision that didn't get made was the adoption by our workgroup of an idea by Joe Ely. One of the topics that didn't make the cut was "Getting in the Habit". Joe made a great suggestion that we should have a section at the end of each day on "Getting in the Habit". Read Joe's daily blogs this week and you'll see that he has done this. I'm ashamed that I'm one of the people that thought "Hey, great idea" and never thought to put it into action, or to ask the others for their thoughts on this. I'm guilty of PDCA without the DCA.

But to point the finger of blame at others, what the originator of the idea didn't do was say "Here is my kaizen idea. Here is how I think it will help meet team or individual goals. What do you think?" What the team leader didn't say was "Let's not do this." or "Let's do this. Team, show me that you understand how to follow this new standard." Again, as Hal Macomber reminded us in his post these mindful behaviors are particularly important for project teams.

As Joe pointed out in his post Project Kaizen: Single Piece Flow in the Workgroup, work needs to flow one at a time in a project. One piece flow is needed by the same token for communication and decision making during a project, rather than in batch and queue mode that delayed e-mail processing requires. None of our meetings were face to face, stand up meetings like Norman explained in his post Running Effective Meetings. We did none of the mapping of our project plan or visualization of potential defects before they occur, like Bill described in Project Kaizen - The Workgroup.

In Summary

In this day and age when internet based collaboration of workgroups is becoming more common, it’s increasingly important to follow kaizen principles of genchi gembutsu and be on-site and fact-based as much as possible. Visualize the process by clearly outlining decision making processes and priorities. Build in quality by asking everyone “In your words, what did we just agree to do?” Empowerment is just a silly word when it is not supported by the behaviors and rules that make kaizen possible within workgroups and project teams.

On behalf of all seven of us bloggers I'd like to than the many comments and suggestions for improvement received by our workgroup to the format and content of the blogs so far this week.

Read about what the other 6 bloggers wrote today about Workgroup Kaizen for Project Teams Hal Macomber, Norman Bodek, Chuck Frey, Joe Ely, Bill Waddell and Mark Graban on their respective blogs.

The Kaizen for Project Teams blog entries on Panta Rei are Making the Case for Kaizen for Project Teams, Workgroup Kaizen for Project Teams, Workstream Kaizen for Project Teams, Quick and Easy Kaizen for Project Teams, and Kaizen Blitz for Project Teams.

Posted by Jon Miller at 10:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A few weeks ago I got a call from Hal Macomber inviting me to join a group of bloggers for a co-blogging exercise. The topic, he said, was to be "kaizen in temporary organizations". My first thought was "kaizen in a temp agency?" As Hal explained further, I understood that by temporary organization he meant project teams.

It sounded interesting, so I accepted. But my next though was "All organizations are temporary". That's a deep thought for another day. So what makes project teams special, and why kaizen it? Before I answer that question and attempt at making the case for kaizen for project teams, I need to clarify what I mean by "Kaizen" and "Project Teams". I think I'm safe on the "for".

The way I distinguish projects from other types of work, improvement activities or pastimes is that 1) projects tend take longer than a day, 2) projects often involve more than one person and 3) there are many individual steps or activities that make up a project, and 4) these steps or activities tend to be separated by time and distance. The educated Lean thinker will recognize that in my view, projects have tremendous waste-generating potential. This is a recipe that calls for kaizen.

What is Kaizen? Follow the link to the left for a great story from the fashion world, courtesy of Kathleen Fasanella, which illustrates kaizen. Kaizen is a methodology that allows you to make small changes continuously forever, or big changes over short periods of time, depending on how you use it. It's been around for over 50 years, and a wide variety of organizations are waking up to the power of kaizen.

Among other reasons, Project Management deserves the attention the seven bloggers are giving it this week by viewing it through the lens of kaizen because project management is big business. Flipping through a magazine I saw that the book A Guide to Project Management Body of Knowledge made the BusinessWeek top 10 list. The book is in good company, along with 6 other books on becoming millionaires and three others on power, influence and getting things done. Even if most people are buying the book for the PMP exam, that's still a lot of books.

But there are many tools in the project management body of knowledge. Do we need to add kaizen? Isn't kaizen just a fancy word for continuous improvement? Kaizen is a Japanese word and it's one of the two pillars of the Toyota philosophy along with "respect for people", and it's the easier of the two to get started with if you are currently lacking both. Why copy Toyota? If you've missed the news about struggling GM and thriving Toyota, you can read some of my commentary about it here.

But we don't make automobiles (the same thing over and over), you protest. So why do kaizen in project teams, or in any temporary organization, when you are unlikely to do the exact same thing with the same people ever again? The one thing you can count on is change. You might as well add some of your ideas to the change and make it kaizen, change for the better. Having a kaizen mindset lets you do this.

This week the seven of us bloggers will do our best to help you develop your kaizen mindset. We'll look at kaizen for project teams from these angles:

Workgroup Kaizen for Project Teams: Making improvements for team members who perform the same work.

Workstream Kaizen for Project Teams: Making improvements across time, space or functional boundaries.

Quick and Easy Kaizen for Project Teams: Making improvements that are small, local and within one's own power to affect.

Kaizen Blitz for Project Teams: Making improvements rapidly for a large impact across a well-defined scope, such as a project.

Read about kaizen for project teams each day this week from the six other unique perspectives of Hal Macomber, Norman Bodek, Chuck Frey, Joe Ely, Bill Waddell and Mark Graban on their respective blogs. I look forward to the end of the week and the resulting practical and useful knowledge from the combined output of the bloggers.

The Kaizen for Project Teams blog entries on Panta Rei are Making the Case for Kaizen for Project Teams, Workgroup Kaizen for Project Teams, Workstream Kaizen for Project Teams, Quick and Easy Kaizen for Project Teams, and Kaizen Blitz for Project Teams.

Posted by Jon Miller at 4:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been chuckling quielty to myself for the past couple of days over an article I read. Now that I have internet access, I'd like share it with you.

The Kenya News Agency headline screams "Panic as Team Makes Abrupt Lands Office Visit".

Quoting the article "Tension gripped the Murang誕 District Lands and Housing offices yesterday forcing members of staff to flee after a team of experts made an impromptu visit to their offices."

Picture inspectors entering, bad civil servants fleeing out through the windows.

Apparently this team of inspectors was responding to public outcry over delays in processing title deeds. The team found disorganization, a lack of a toilet for customers, and attempted to demonstrate Gemba Kaizen by 5S (Sorting) some files. The Kenyan government has adopted Gemba Kaizen to improve performance in civil service, according to the article.

To me this is hilarious, in an absurdist sort of way. I imagined a scene of red-uniformed inspectors bursting in on a scene of fat cat bureaucrats doing nothing or worse. In British accents, "Right! We're here from the Kaizen Squad! We're here for the muda. Our chief weapon is fear. Fear and surprise. Fear, surprise, a ruthless efficiency..." And so on.

On a serious note, this type of depiction of Gemba Kaizen, or any time of drastic change that is suddenly and violently imposed on people, gives kaizen a bad name. Who is responsible for teaching these Kenyans about kaizen like this? I have my suspicions but I won't speculate in a public forum.

Two points to the government of Kenya for taking kaizen to the gemba of the Lands and Housing Office. One point pentaly for using fear. But I'm willing to accept that perhaps a shock like this is needed in the early days of Lean government. Kudos, Government of Kenya!

I'm having my first genuine 21st century moment sitting in an airport in Brazil, writing a Lean government blog entry about Gemba Kaizen in Kenya, over a Wi-Fi internet connection. Just five years ago, I couldn't have imagined any of this.

Posted by Jon Miller at 4:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I will join six other bloggers next week in tackling the topic of Kaizen for Project Teams. There are five themes, one for each day, on this topic.

This was the brainchild of Hal Macomber of the Reforming Project Management blog. The other "Gang of Seven" bloggers include:

Norman Bodek from the Kaikaku blog.

Chuck Frey from the Innovation Weblog.

Joe Ely from the Learning about Lean blog.

Bill Waddell from the Evolving Excellence blog.

Mark Graban from the Lean Manufacturing Blog.

Seven bloggers, 5 days, one theme, five topics, zero punches pulled. Check out their sites and look forward to some interesting posts, comments, and points of view. The plan is to collect all of the writing into a Kaizen for Project Teams handbook sometime in 2006. Join the discussion, and you could see your name in print.

Posted by Jon Miller at 7:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)