lean « Thinking for a Change

Oct

Exploit the workers

Criticize shortcomings at a workplace without fear or hesitation!

Bottlenecks in Paris

This week I was in Paris to host an “I’m not a Bottleneck! I’m a Free Man!” or “A l’aide! Mon Processus m’étrangle!” workshop to help a company to apply the Theory of Constraints.

The workshop is fun and playful. We simulated a team making paper hats and boats. The team got paid in Belgian chocolates. Participants enjoyed learning about The Theory of Constraints. In the retrospective, most participants noted that they liked the relaxed atmosphere, the fun way of learning and the friendly cooperation.

And yet, there were a few moments where the participants felt uncomfortable and voiced their disagreement with the material.

Say NO to the exploitation of bottlenecks!

Step 2 of the “Five Focusing Steps” tells us to exploit the bottleneck. As the throughput of the system is determined by the throughput of the bottleneck, we need to do everything we can to increase the throughput of the bottleneck. We need to get as much value out of the bottleneck as possible.

When I asked the participants how we could exploit the bottleneck in the game, many people bristled at the suggestion. They felt I was trying to ‘squeeze’ the unfortunate worker who was (by design) the bottleneck of the game. To them, this smacked of “Taylorism” or “Fordism“.

It took some convincing and explaining to get the participants to look for ways to exploit their overworked, stressed and sweating colleague. Adding more people seemed like a simpler and more powerful improvement technique.

Go on, exploit the bottleneck! It’s just a game.

Now, what did the team come up with to get more output from the bottleneck? How did we make the bottlenecks in the game and in the real processes more productive?

Ensure that there’s a small buffer of work in front of the bottleneck, so that the bottleneck is never idle due to lack of input. Install a ‘pull’ system so that whatever the bottleneck needs arrives just-in-time when the bottleneck needs it.
Reduce interruptions, so that the bottleneck can stay concentrated on their task and get into the “Flow state“.
Reduce task switching. Finish each task before starting on another. Focus on the task at hand and don’t worry about upcoming tasks.
Prioritise the work to be done by the bottleneck, so that they always work on the task that brings the most value.
Reduce waste in the bottleneck’s work, so that the bottleneck doesn’t spend time on non-value adding work.
Ensure that the inputs and tools of the bottleneck are of the highest quality so that they don’t waste their time finding and correcting errors or dealing with machine breakdowns.
Even out the workload (Heijunka) to combat the waste of unevenness (Mura) and overburdening (Muri)

At the end of the day, each team had several exploitation ideas that they could work out the next day. Exploiting the bottleneck is usually quite easy as it doesn’t require investment and doesn’t involve many people.

And yet, these simple changes can add a lot of value. For example, we recently almost doubled the productivity of a development team by installing some simple measures to reduce interruptions and by prioritising work better so that there was less task switching.

If that’s what “being exploited” means, you can exploit me too!

The result of all that exploiting? A bottleneck that’s less stressed and less overworked and yet has higher productivity. A bottleneck that can concentrate on their job without all those energy-sapping distractions and wastes. In their final retrospective, the team that doubled their productivity noted that this project was a lot less stressful than their usual projects.

Participants in the workshop learned that there are better, easier and cheaper ways to improve processes than to add more people. They learned that “exploiting” in the Theory of Constraints is very beneficial to the bottleneck, despite the negative connotations of the word.

Would a “softer” word have helped? Would another word evoke less resistance? I used to think so. Now, I think that we need to go through that resistance that the word exploit evokes. If we let the participants of the workshop optimise the game’s process on their own, they will probably get no further than throwing more bodies at the problem. The Theory of Constraints is simple, but its consequences are counter-intuitive. By dealing with the resistance to the idea early, participants learn to break through their existing patterns. Having seen Eli Goldratt in action, I appreciate he’s no proponent of the “softly, softly” approach.

And it gets better

After participants have accepted the exploit step, we move on to “Subordinate every other decision to the bottleneck”, which leads to another set of counter-intuitive ideas. For example, the participants learned that they could get more output from their processes by slowing down certain people.

Resistance in Amsterdam

Lean has another set of counter-intuitive yet effective ideas. On Friday, the suggestion that “Standardized Work” could be useful in IT was met with strong resistance by participants of the Agile Holland conference. More about that later.

I’m starting to enjoy resistance. In my experience, resistance from myself and others means that we’re on the right way, that we’re trying to do something different. Because if we want to get a different result, we will have to do something different.

What have you resisted this week? Now imagine that the thing you resist is not your enemy but your friend. What would the world look like if that were true?

You can download the Bottleneck Game from the Agile Coach site.

The “I’m not a Bottleneck! I’m a Free Man!” game by Pascal Van Cauwenberghe and Portia Tung is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Belgium License.

Image courtesy of ‘Freedom Toast‘, licensed Creative Commons, Attribution Non-Commercial.

Sep

Consulting is easy

Consulting is easy

Yesterday someone told me “Consulting is easy. You just say to management what we’ve been saying for years!”

People tell me that all the time.

My standard answer is: “You’re right. I just listen to people. They usually tell me what the problem is within 5 minutes. They tell me what the solution is in the next 10 minutes. Easy.” (The 5-minute Rule)

The rest of the day is filled with fooling around with word processors and presentation software. And playing with index cards, whiteboards, stickers and other silly stuff of course! 😉

Consulting ain’t as easy as it looks (The Number One Secret)

But if it was so easy, why did this person need to repeat their message for years? Why wasn’t the message heard or acted upon?

Giving advice isn’t easy. Getting advice is even harder. The Secret of Consulting is that you have to be heard to have an effect.

Everybody who wants to be heard, not only consultants, should read this book at least once per year.

But, why does this customer need a consultant if their employees could give them the same advice, essentially for free? Why don’t they hear?

Everybody who wants to hear, not only consultants, should read this book at least once per year.

Real Lean

I hear a lot of talk about “Lean”, including at this customer. When asked about it, most people will say something about “eliminating waste”. Some may even mention “Japanese”, “flow” or “quality”.

Real Lean is making use of the collective wisdom of everybody in the organisation. Real Lean companies don’t need consultants. Everybody’s a consultant in a Real Lean company.

If you can’t accept failure, you’ll never succeed as a consultant (The Hard Law)

Most of the time, for most of the world, no matter how hard people work at it, nothing of any significance happens. (Weinberg’s Law of Twins)

No matter how many books you’ve read, your advice will be neglected, misunderstood or mis-applied some of the time. Or, more likely, you will give the wrong advice at the wrong time to the wrong person.

There are no perfect consultants. There are consultants who work on easy problems most of the time.

Some of the time, in some places, significant change happens – especially when people aren’t working hard at it. (Weinberg’s Law of Twins Inverted).

Helping myself is even harder than helping others (The Hardest Law)

Everybody who wants to hear or be heard should read The Secrets of Consulting at least once per year.

I’ve just started re-reading it. I rediscover at least one gem on each of its 200 pages each time I read it.

Do you want to be heard?

Do you want to hear?

Jul

Why bother with bottlenecks?

Why?

Bottleneck Game at XP Days London 2005

Portia writes about a participant of our Bottleneck session asking her about the relevance of a session on (industrial or manufacturing) process improvement techniques at an IT conference. Portia already told me she had the same reaction when she attended this session at XP Days London in 2005. If you look carefully, you can see Portia at the right, a bit bored as she’s waiting for the bottleneck.

Moreover, with terms like ‘exploit’ and ‘subordinate’, the 5 focusing steps don’t sound very friendly. Is this just another management fad ‘to squeeze the workers’? Can we apply manufacturing ideas to IT? Isn’t the manufacturing metaphor (or the house building metaphor) responsible for some of the worst ideas in IT?

That participant took the first step in understanding: they asked “Why?”

What is it about?

The session (and the Theory of Constraints) is about creating meaning and value by really understanding systems.

To do this, you need to:

Design systems that fulfill a meaningful goal.
Take a step-by-step approach to diagnose problems.
Find real cures by going beyond your area of responsibility, beyond your comfort zone and considering the system as a whole.
Involve everybody, to continuously challenge assumptions and long-standing traditions to create lasting improvements.

These are things I use every day in my life and my work. Are these things you could use in your work, in your life, every day?

Thank you to Portia for excellent writing advice and helping to edit this entry.

Jul

Les goulots d’étranglement pt. 3

Université du SI day 2: Heroes

We start the day with a refreshing run up the Champs Elysées, down to the Eiffel tower and along the Seine. I’ve been looking forward to this day: I will meet two of my heroes!

Eli Goldratt challenges us throughout the whole keynote. Do we want an easy life or a meaningful life? We have in our hands the most powerful tool that has ever been invented and what have we done with it? Have we brought enormous value to companies and people? We haven’t: we’ve automated the same old processes; we’ve looked no further than local optima; we’ve enabled people to perform useless work faster than ever before. Is that all we want to achieve?

What is the greatest challenge businesses face? The ability to take the right decisions at the right time. IT is the ideal tool to support that decision-making, at all levels of the company: we can store, transfer and manipulate prodigious amounts of data almost instantly. We can provide the Information people need to make decisions. We can create an enormous amount of value, but by all accounts (sic) we haven’t.

Why haven’t we fulfilled the promise of IT? The tools are out there: Theory of Constraints, Lean, the Thinking Processes, Agile… Most of them readily available and only a few clicks away. Why haven’t we used those tools? One of the reasons is that we would have to step out of our comfort zone. We need to stop dabbling with technology and look further, to accounting, sales, marketing and production. We need to see the whole system and realize its goal. Do we want an easy life or a meaningful life? Do we want to ‘fulfill requirements’ or do we want to add value? Who dares to enter into a contract with a customer where payment depends on value added?

Where are the real constraints?

The real constraints are in (implicit) rules. Who has the intelligence to recognize those rules and the guts to challenge them? Common Action (“that’s how we’ve always done it”) is not the same as common sense. Accounting rules and the way we measure are some of the most pernicious constraints. We have the tools and the obligation to change the system, to enable our companies and people to realize their full potential.

People do not resist change, according to Goldratt. People resist changes that are unclear, that threaten them, that might harm them or that bring no clear value to them. Resistance is your cue to realize that your proposal is not fully worked out and that your explanation is not clear.

Goldratt’s call to arms can be summarized as: “Get of your asses and start using your brains!” I thought this was an excellent, inspiring and thought-provoking keynote. I left the auditorium with a renewed resolve to create meaning and value.

Lean

We participated in an excellent exercise led by Olivier Pizzato and Christian Daniel about using Lean techniques to solve IT project challenges. We worked in small groups on different scenarios. For each scenario we defined three approaches to solve the problem; listed the three biggest obstacles/objections to the most promising approach; searched for a way to overcome the biggest obstacle. After a group presented their analysis, Christian linked the solution back to Lean principles and techniques.

What I like about the session are the exercises and the short (15 min) timeboxes. To make this session perfect I would provide participants with more structure and guidance about Lean, so that they can apply the techniques to the exercises.

We attend part of the session about how Google will revolutionize the development of IT systems. Bernard Notarianni and Didier Girard pair-presented the session in a very relaxed style. Portia thought it looked like a French game show. The session gave examples of web design principles that can be applied to internal IT systems. The resulting systems, often using a RESTful style, are simple and easy to integrate. We had to leave before the end to prepare for our next run of the Bottleneck Game.

Goulots d’étranglement, take three

After Goldratt’s keynote interest for our session is very high, the room is packed full. Seven volunteers come forward to play the role of the “workers”; the other participants are the “consultants” who observe and give improvement tips to the workers. They all get paid in Belgian chocolates and British sweets.

After one round of play we go through the “5 focusing steps”:

0. Define the goal of the system
1. Find the bottleneck
2. Exploit the bottleneck, get the most value out of the constrained resource
3. Subordinate all decisions to the bottleneck
4. Elevate the bottleneck when it has been exploited fully and all decisions have been subordinated
5. GOTO 0. Don’t let inertia become the constraint

The team makes some improvements to their process and plays a second round. The decision to subordinate to the bottleneck wasn’t fully implemented. The team had planned to put a buffer of work in progress before the bottleneck. They failed to keep it filled, which led to an idle bottleneck and reduced output of the system. The players used their idle time to ‘learn’ so that they could help the bottleneck in the next round.

Changing the system, breaking through constraints

Warning: don’t read this section if you want to play the game with an open mind!

The game is filled with arbitrary constraints:

players are very specialized and can’t help each other
the two customer representatives sit far apart
the layout of the table makes it difficult to get an overview and to communicate with the other team members
testing is done at the end. Nobody but the tester knows the acceptance tests

In the third round we make the players think about the assumptions and rules built into the game. They get to change their system. The most powerful thing they can do is to re-arrange the tables. As you can see in the picture, the team has a better oversight and can communicate more easily when they sit around the tables.

In the end, this team didn’t produce as much as the previous team on the first day of the Université du SI. I think this is because this team tried to be too sophisticated. Instead of simply implementing an optimisation as agreed, they kept discussing and tweaking their way of working. The DO part of Plan-Do-Check-Act shouldn’t be skipped.

Running this session in 90 minutes is exhausting. Time for a break before the closing keynote.

Man from the moon

OCTO brought Neil Armstrong to Paris for the closing keynote. As a little kid I read a lot of science fiction, fascinated by the tales of wonder and limitless possibilities. I devoured everything about the “Space Race”. These people were making science fiction a reality. By the time I was old enough to understand what was happening, the space race was already over; interest for space exploration was gone. We had stopped looking outward.

Armstrong’s keynote was humorous, enthralling and humble. These teams achieved wonders with the technology of that day (e.g. on-board computers with a few K of memory) and took enormous risks. The American and Russian space programs are a testament to what we can achieve if we really set our mind to it.

I was thoroughly inspired by these two keynotes by my heroes. Armstrong showed us what we can achieve; Goldratt exhorted us to achieve our potential, starting NOW.

The end. Or the beginning?

The conference is over. Our visit to Paris is over. Thank you to Octo for organizing this conference and for inviting Portia and me. We left Paris buzzing with ideas and energy.

Jul

Les goulots d’étranglement pt. 2

Université du SI day 1: Philosophy

We travel from quiet Montparnasse to busy Champs Elysées in time for the Université du SI conference opening at 8 AM. We register, grab some coffee and pastries and have a chat with our hosts from OCTO. François Hisquin kicks off the conference and introduces Michel Serres, philosopher and member of the Académie Française.

Serres talks about changes in the relation between ‘hard’ vs ‘soft’ (medium vs message) and actual vs virtual. He reviews several fundamental changes, like the invention of language, writing and printing, and believes that we are witnessing a new fundamental change thanks to IT. For example, distance is becoming less and less important as everything becomes virtual. According to Serres humanity loses something with each revolution of the evolution cycle. He states (with apparent relish) that our ability to remember things is being exchanged for access to much larger amounts of information than we could ever hope to remember in a lifetime.

It might seem strange to kick off an IT conference with a philosopher’s speech, but the audience really liked the presentation. I found it a bit high level and abstract. What was the message we could take away from this talk? Physical distance is still real, otherwise why would we have traveled to Paris to attend the conference? I remain puzzled by Serres’ talk.

Outsourcing and being Googley

Next up, we attend a talk by Guillaume Bodet on the dangers and methods of outsourcing. It is a good overview of the subject with different methods to align the goals of customer and service provider.

The food and drinks are excellent but the lunch is a little crowded and inefficient. What is the goal? Where is the bottleneck? How can we exploit it? This isn’t the first lunch that is served at this conference center. I would have thought that they would have improved the process by now. What is the constraint that holds the conference center back on improving? That’s the problem with the Theory of Constraints: once you’ve encountered it, you see the world differently; you can’t stop applying the “5 focusing steps”.

In the afternoon we attend a session on innovation and how Google’s company culture encourages innovation. The presentation starts with a “Zen” style overview of innovation, followed by the principles of Google’s innovation culture. Due to lack of time, the second part is cut short. To make this presentation perfect I would spend less time on the “what is innovation?” part and focus on explaining what Google does, why they do it and how we can apply the lessons to our own companies.

A l’aide! Mon processus m’étrangle!

Then Portia and I run the “Bottleneck Game” session as part of the Agile training track. This was the last session on an intensive day for the participants, but they participated fully in the fun simulation. The chocolates and sweets helped to motivate them and to keep their energy up.

We run the session as we had discussed at the previous day’s retrospective, guided by Portia’s beautiful map of the session. We have a little less time than expected because the previous session ran over, but we still manage to run the three rounds of the game. The team does really well: with results of 2, 4 and 8 pairs of boats and hats they do better than any team that week. They end up quadrupling their output using simple Agile and Lean techniques. None of the techniques used cost much money, time or effort. How much more value could you produce by making a few simple changes?

Concentrate on value, not waste!

From discussions between the sessions and from the session topics we gather that there is a growing interest in applying Lean and Theory of Constraints to IT. The Université provided us with an opportunity to share experiences between the IT and manufacturing worlds. There is a genuine interest to really improve the way we work. But there is one thing that bothers Portia and me: there is a lot of talk about (eliminating) waste; very little about (increasing) value.

Throughput and Constraint Accounting tell us to improve Throughput (value added) first, reduce Investment/Inventory second and only try to reduce Operating Expense (fixed costs) as a last resort. Is there a conflict between Theory of Constraints (increase value first) and Lean (decrease waste/cost first)?

We don’t think so; we think that the message of Lean has been misunderstood. What does Taiichi Ohno, founder of Lean, say in “Toyota Production System. Beyond Large-scale Production“?

“All we are doing is looking at the time line from the moment the customer gives us and order to the point when we collect the cash. And we are reducing that time line by removing the non-value-added wastes.” (Foreword, p. ix).

We read this as: increasing value for the customer, increasing throughput for the company is the goal. One of the ways to do that is to remove non-value-added wastes. Why? There is a limit to how much you can decrease costs; the amount of value you can add is essentially infinite, only limited by your imagination.

More about that later, I’m sure, when Eli Goldratt (!) opens the second day of the conference

Closing day 1

Bjarne Stroustrup, author of C++, closes the day with an overview of the history of the language. Having programmed in C++ for 10 years, there was little new information, but the look behind the screens of development and standardisation of a language is interesting. Bjarne comes over as a humble, but passionate ‘father’ of the language. Could he have done things differently; could the result have been better? Yes, he says so himself. It’s easy to do better with the 20/20 vision of hindsight. C++ is a success and still has its place after all those years.

The first day closes with some drinks and more talk about Lean, Agile and Theory of Constraints. Portia and I go to dinner with a nice bunch of agilists, where we have more good food and drink, jokes and discussion. Portia discovers that one of her blog readers imagined her as a little old lady, sort of an agile Miss Marple 🙂

Day 2 of the Université features another run of the Bottleneck Game and keynotes by two of my heroes: Eli Goldratt (!) and Neil Armstrong (!!!).

Thinking for a Change

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