Thinking for a Change

The Toyota Way

Last March I did a presentation about the Toyota Way at XP Day France in Paris.

Jacques Couvreur was there and now he has written an interesting article (in French) about the parallels and differences he sees between the Toyota Way and Extreme Programming. The main differences he sees are in the practice of Hansei (reflection) and the fact that the Toyota Way explicitly defines how people and teams work together, throughout the whole organisation.

Indeed, retrospectives weren’t an “official” part of XP v1, but all agile teams I know of, have incorporated some form of reflection and process improvement in their process. XP is intended specifically for the development team; all interactions with the outside world go through the mythical customer, whose job definition is left as an excercise for the student.

I particularly like the way Jacques starts the article with some nice, big, hard numbers about Toyota’s business. He ends with the rethorical question “which IT company would like to be as successful as Toyota?”. Jacques follows the advice Charlie Poole gave in his keynote at XP Day France: if you want to talk to deciders, talk their language. Money talks.

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Pictures of XP Day FranceAlexandre Betis has published some pictures he took at XP Day France. Some great pictures of Charlie Poole telling his story, all the while the same slide up on the screen with one word: “Extrême”. Charlie has been watching Presentation Zen.

You can see me presenting with a laptop on a chair, the chair on the table. Near the end of the presentation, electricity fell away. No more beamer. The audience self-organized: they put the laptop on a chair and rearranged themselves to sit closer to the small screen.

Luckily, I used a “Takahashi” style presentation with really large fonts. Since that day, I’ve made the fonts even larger, as large as I could make them. Even if the laptop had gone too, I could still have continued to tell my story. I just had to “call an audible“. We did just that shortly after this image, the last 35 minutes. A nice talk with the audience about the parallels between Lean, agile, martial arts and our experiences applying these ideas. I enjoyed myself and learned something new; I hope the other people in the room did too.