lean « Thinking for a Change

Jan

Bateaux, chapeaux et chocolats

I’m not a Bottleneck in French

Bruno Orsier describes (in French) how he has run the “I’m not a Bottleneck! I’m a free man!” game. He felt a bit uncomfortable to let his colleagues experience Lean and the Theory of Constraints with such a “silly” game: folding paper boats and hats to earn chocolates. Nevertheless, the session was a great success and he sees how the Theory of Constraints tools can be used in his retrospectives.

He follows up with another blog post about the metrics underlying the game. He applies the Throughput Accounting techniques to compute the ROI in chocolates.

Bruno reflects on the game and wonders about the role of the “Production” player: they redo the test work of the tester and count the number of pairs of hats and boats (throughput). The documentation is not completely clear on the subject. A similar question arose in a previous workshop, but this time about the “Requirements” role. The player in that role didn’t really feel part of the process, as they just hand out pieces of paper and count the pieces of paper (investment).

These two players are supposed to represent the customer. They are at the start and the end of the process, where investment and throughput are measured. They don’t really participate in the process, but they track its progress. The “Production” player tests the output like a customer would acceptance test the output of their supplier. During most of the simulation they don’t have a lot to do. How could they make themselves useful?

Don’t read on if you don’t want to spoil playing the game….

Involving the customer

How could you involve the customer more? Here are a few ways to do it in the game:

Unite the two customer representatives, one who defines the requirements and the other who performs acceptance testing.
The customer representative(s) examines the process and offers improvement ideas. The other players are much too busy to see anything but their own work.
The customer representative can be involved in the work, for example by helping with quality control. I usually add a few poorly cut sheets of paper to the stack of folding paper. The customer can help their team by performing quality control on the paper, rejecting any bad raw material.
If the quality that comes out of the team is very high, the customer has more confidence and needs to do less testing, leaving them more time to do more interesting and value-adding work.

How do you involve your customer in your work?

Jan

Kaizen in Paris

$Dorothy et le Magicien d\'Oz$ A lean evening

Yesterday evening I was back in Paris to give a presentation about “Lean and the Toyota Way“. As I walked from the train station to the offices of Zenika, I came across a large billboard announcing “Dorothy et le magicien d’Oz”. It’s reassuring to see that the fairytales are alive and well.

My friends at Zenika had arranged a nice place and provided some fine drinks and snacks. More than 100 people showed up, among them many of the French Agilistas. I chatted for a while with them about agile, lean and the upcoming XP Days France.

And then it was time to start the presentation. The auditorium was almost completely full.

The Toyota Way

The presentation explained the 14 principles of The Toyota Way of Managing and the many parallels with Agile methods. As I go through the principles I illustrate them with stories from projects I’ve worked on. Each time I do this presentation it changes, as I learn more and discover more great ideas in Lean.

There were some great questions and discussions:

“What can I do to introduce more Lean and Agile in my organisation?” – Apply the principles and values, set an example. Support and collaborate with others who apply these values.
“Are there any incompatibilities between Lean and XP?” – None that I can see.
“For Agile and Lean transformations to succeed we need support from management and workers. Often, we only have support from one of them.”
“Lean coaches are very direct, not afraid of saying it as it is to management. Is that something they’re taught?” – It does seem so, judging from the documentary Kenji Hiranabe showed at Agile 2008, where a Lean coach almost made a factory manager cry by bluntly pointing out all the flaws in the production line.
“Does Lean make you lose weight?” – A Gemba Walk a day helps 🙂

Unfortunately, I couldn’t stay for drinks afterwards because I had to rush to catch the last train back to Brussels. The next day I had another team to coach, another opportunity to “Develop exceptional people and teams”, the tenth principle of the Toyota Way.

I hope to see the participants again soon. See you at the XP Days France or a Zenika training session.

A bientôt!

What others say

Jean-Claude Grosjean summarizes the principles and contrasts them with the 7 principles of Lean Software Development and Agile.

Nicolas Martignole wrote a very extensive report on each of the principles and relates Lean, Scrum and XP.

Claude Aubry thinks “Obeya” is more beautiful than “War Room”. I fully agree. He currently tries to recreate the Obeya experience for an offshore team.

Thank you for the rapid and very detailed feedback!

Dec

A Toyota Way evening in Paris

Lean presentation in Paris

On the 21st of January 2009 I’ll be in Paris to present an evening seminar on how to apply the Toyota Way management principles to Agile software development. The seminar is organised by Carl Azoury and Olivier Huber of Zenika.

To me, Agile is the application of Lean principles to software development. So, the presentation contains a lot of parallels between the two. A lot will be very familiar if you already know and practice Agile.

So, what’s left to learn? Some of the Toyota Way management principles aren’t in Agile methods. These principles are useful when we go beyond software development. There comes a moment in any successful Agile enablement when the development team is no longer the bottleneck. Suddenly, we’re faced with a completely different set of issues. Now that Agile gains more and more acceptance, we need to be able to deal with these new challenges or accept that most Agile transformations will either die or bring limited extra business value.

The more I read and learn about Toyota, the more I realise how much I don’t know and how many preconceived ideas I have to abandon. I need to keep learning. The Toyota Product Development System, for example, contains many counter-intuitive ideas like set-based design. Real Options thinking can help us understand why some of these techniques work. We’ve only started to scratch the surface of Lean ideas.

Toyota losing money? Impossible!

In the news, even Toyota is affected by the economic climate. They might even have to post the first loss since the early years. Isn’t Toyota invincible and perfect? Of course not. It will be a real show of faith in the Toyota Way if Toyota continue to keep on their workers, keep training them and keep improving to be ready when sales take off again.

Secretly, top Toyota management must be happy that this crisis happens now. One of their main concerns is complacency. No one should ever think that the work is “done”, now that Toyota is the biggest manufacturer. Hansei and Kaizen should be applied relentlessly, it’s always possible to do better. Nothing better than tough economic times to bring back the sense of urgency.

See you in Paris

The seminar is free, but you must register here. Don’t wait too long because places are limited.

See you there!

Dec

Real Options in the Real World

Real Options?

This Friday, Portia and I will present the “Real Options Space Game” at XP Days London. This strategy board game set in space allows players to experiment with Real Options concepts.

Real Options is a tool to optimize decisions: it helps us to consider and manage more possibilities and gives us more time to gather information, so that our decisions are better informed. The basic ideas are taken from financial options, but have been widened to be applicable to real-world management decisions.

There are several types of Real Options. Let’s see if the option metaphor is a useful one. How can we apply Real Options in the real world?

The option to delay a project

In this paper, Aswath Damodaran compares a Net Present Value (NPV) analysis with a Real Options analysis to decide which projects to fund when. Projects with a negative NPV now, might still become valuable later. That’s because the Real Options analysis takes into account the value of getting more information and therefore reducing risk and uncertainty.

We always have the Learning Option. We can always gather more information.

In the article, the delay is examined in a situation where the organisation has (or can buy) a way to get a hold on the market, like with a patent. We can create an option to delay a project even in a competitive market: if we have a shorter cycle time than our competitors we can afford to wait longer to start our projects. This gives us more time to gather market information. In a very volatile market, it can be more valuable to wait, to increase the odds of building the right product at the right time.

For example, if Toyota’s new product development time is 6 months shorter than a competitor, Toyota can afford to start development 6 months later. That’s 6 months in which to gather more information, six months in which they could see major swings in customer demand or in the market. That’s six months in which people can work on other projects.

So, if you decrease your cycle time you create options to

Increase your cash flow
Be first on the market
Delay the project, take the go/no go decision later, when we have more information

By using Lean and Agile methods to decrease cycle time, we create real options. Starting later may be the right thing to do.

There are more fun real options, like the option to abandon a project. What could be the value of abandoning a project?

Nov

Being professional – pt. 2

A simple question

Agile Coach: OK. A professional takes responsibility.

P: Yes. Many projects go wrong because so few people really take responsibility.

Agile Coach: Blaming is much easier, isn’t it? Is there more to being professional?

P: (Embarrassed silence. Then) Let me think about it and I’ll have the answer by next week. Is that ok for you?

Agile Coach: Yes. I want to learn more about becoming professional.

What is the acceptance test for “a professional”? How can we recognise one? What are the essential characteristics of a professional?

Acceptance criteria #2: A professional is openminded and a lifelong learner

Other people might have good ideas too

Recently I heard a bunch of “Agilistas” dismiss CMMi offhand. I know of CMMi implementations and training that were poorly done and resulted in not much more than extra overhead. Some people don’t understand the spirit and only know the letter. I’ve seen the same with Agile. Despite flawed implementations, CMMi contains a bunch of interesting ideas and techniques. The spirit of CMMi is compatible with my Agile values.

At another Agile gathering hackles were raised when a presenter dared to suggest that the Lean practice of “Standardized Work” might be usefully applied to IT work. “We’re not production workers!” they cried. Others dismissed practices because they would be used by “evil managers” to create “plug-compatible programmers”. My hackles went up when a session presenter recently dismissed first all managers then all salespeople as ignorant and evil.

A professional can’t afford a closed mind.

Other discplines, other approaches and other professions have interesting ideas. The most interesting training I ever followed was a sales training.

I like conferences where I can see and meet presenters with different backgrounds and ideas. For example, I like the diversity in subjects and delivery of the Benelux XP Days, but I worry that there are few sessions that present something I disagree with. I wonder why there are so few sessions that explain what went wrong with Agile.

I seek to perceive more than I seek to be perceived. I seek and find value wherever I can.

Mistakes are a learning opportunity

We’re trained to dislike and avoid mistakes. However, mistakes do happen. How we react to them allows us to see who the professionals are.

A professional says “Thank you!” to a bug reporter.

When we learn of a mistake we get the opportunity to do some deep learning and improvement. We learn from the answer to two questions:

“Why didn’t we detect this problem earlier?” What’s wrong with our tests? Why wasn’t this case covered? How can we detect this type of issue sooner? How can we improve our tests? If we do this consistently, we implement “Jidoka” so that we’re alerted immediately when something goes wrong and can fix the problem while it’s still cheap to correct.
“Why did we make this type of mistake?” What is the root cause of the problem? What is it that allows this type of problem to occur? How can we change our work or methods so that this type of problem can’t occur? If we do this consistently, we implement “Poka Yoke” or mistake-proofing because the cheapest issue to fix is the one that doesn’t happen.

I welcome reported mistakes as a learning opportunity.

Continuous Improvement

Standardized Work documents the best way we know of doing something. Tomorrow we’ll do better. It’s important to celebrate today’s successes. But we know we can do better next time, if we learn and improve.

A professional always looks for ways to do things better.

Thinking tools like Systems Thinking, Theory of Constraints, Lean and Agile help me to make sense of the situation, see places to intervene and find creative ways to make things better. Personal Agility tools like Congruence, Agile Fairytales and other games allow me to become a better person, colleague, friend and coach every day.

I have done my best today; I can do better tomorrow.

Invest in learning

All of this improvement and learning costs time, effort and money. Companies and people facing difficult times fear they have none of these three. Yet, when the going gets tough the smart keep learning.

A professional invests in learning.

I meet new people at work, conferences, training and talks. I learn something from each person I meet. Every situation has interesting angles that make me see new things. Books, both fiction and non-fiction, make me travel to different worlds, introduce me to new people, new ideas. I read about a subjects that are outside of my normal expertise and work. For example, this year I read about physics, evolution, consciousness, free will and philosophy and I re-read fairytales.

I set aside time and money to keep learning. I will keep learning for the rest of my life.

Thinking for a Change

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