SwimBlog  -

+ 2 - 9 | § ¶Sound Assumptions

When it comes to making assumptions for your Product Specification and/or Business Case, You could do extensive customer research, use multiple analysis techniques, obtain and test competing products, plan activities to test assumption validity etc. etc. Or, you could just follow Dilbert's lead

+ 3 - 8 | § ¶More on Project Kaizen

The first question being tackled by the Project Kaizen co-bloggers is 'Why do kaizen on projects?'. I believe a more revealing question would be 'where can we apply kaizen thinking to projects?'

For me, project perfomance improvement and optimisation opportunities can come from 4 areas:

1. First pass project planning to optimise task sequences and information handoffs.
2. Ongoing re-thinking of task sequencing and possible re-planning in the light of new information obtained.
3. Individual work planning and execution.
4. Mindful reflection (thanks for the term Hal!) on the work that has just been carried out with the intent to do it better next time.

1 and 2 will normally be the responsibility of a project manager, and so should 'automatically' happen for each project.

3 and 4 are where the actual project work happens, and is where kaizen is traditionally effective - it empowers those closest to the actual work to make the improvements. The easier of the two is probably 3, because a person embarking on a task will surely give at least some thought to how it will be done. All we need to do is to encourage a broader mindset so the individual optimises his or her own workplan until it is good enough, working as appropriate with uptream or downstream work owners to determine the best methods for passing information along. This approach should not be too difficult to instill, as most people are willing to put in a little up-front thought if they believe they will save themselves, or dependent work owners, some effort in the short-term.

However, 4 is the real challenge. The payoff is potentially higher than 3 as benefits can be repeated over time, but for kaizen to take root here, we need to motivate work owners to stray beyond the boundaries of the work at hand, and consider improvement possibilities that may not bring them any personal benefits. Things are made even more difficult due to the fact that next time the task is carried out, the inputs and outputs may be different. It takes significant time and effort to think through the possible combinations, and in fact it may not be possible to do so. This is where process kaizen and project kaizen differ. In the former, conditions are the same or similar each time the work is carried out, and the worker has an intrinsic motivation to make his own life easier for next time. In the latter we are relying more on altruism, or may need to provide for external motivations such as improvement suggestion measures or targets as suggested by Hal.

In conclusion then, for projects a kaizen approach to improvement seems to be suited to individual work planning where there is an immediate benefit to an individual and/or the project team. However, making kaizen work as a method for identifying improvements that can carry forward to the next project would take a lot more effort. In this latter case, maybe the traditional end-of-project review is more appropriate

+ 4 - 12 | § ¶Project Kaizen

How can you continuously improve your performance in new product development projects, when each project is different? The concept of kaizen, or structured continuous improvement has been around for some time now, but some of the techniques and analysis tools that go with kaizen (process mapping, control charts, pareto analysis etc.) lend themselves most readily to repeatable processes where conclusions can be drawn from observations of past perfomance. In projects, we typically get one attempt at an activity, and it either goes well or it doesn't. OK, so we may do many similar projects over a period of time, but by the time we have data or case study stories to analyse, the opportunity to improve may have disappeared. So, is a kaizen approach possible in a project driven organisation?

This is the question behind a co-blogging event being co-ordinated by Hal Macomber at Reforming Project Management. It will be interesting to follow the discussions.

+ 8 - 4 | § ¶GM's Quality Cat!

If you are ever tempted to try any gimmicks to promote an improvement initiative, you need to read this article first (warning: article contains 'colourful' language). Apparently, some bright General Motors executives thought that a man dressed up in a furry suit, prowling the GM production lines would encourage workers to improve quality. The character, named 'Howie Makem' was popular for all of five minutes, until the workers began to cotton on to the unstated message that they had the intellects of children. I wonder what actually happened to quality during that period?

In the end, Howie's visits stopped. There were rumours he was made redundant.

+ 8 - 5 | § ¶Is 'Process' Dead?

Have you ever felt that the emphasis on 'process' in today's business world is stifling and over-played? If so, Ross Mayfield agrees with you (thanks to Hal Macomber for the pointer). The case against 'process' in Ross's post is based on the fact that processes are static and inflexible. They have often been implemented 'as a reaction to prior stupidity' and once in place they remove all creativity and innovation from the people who work within them. These are all logical points and on the face of it difficult to argue against.

However, if you do agree with this point of view, please take a moment to reflect a little deeper. In particular it is worth reading through the comments (for and against) to the post. In my view, it is not a case of either 'Process is Dead' or 'Process is King'. Rather, as one commenter puts it, there should be 'just enough process'.

Where activities are carried out repetitively with the same or similar outcomes each time, and where the consistency and quality of the output is paramount, then closely defined processes are crucial. Where there is infinite variability in work content, processes should simply define key stages or tasks within the activity, together with appropriate processing and output standards, and give workers the scope and the information to use their initiaitve to solve unique problems.

So what is the role of process within product development? Most, if not all, of early product development fits in to the latter category above. Here, the role of process is to guide people to consider the appropriate factors that will lead to successful product design, and to promote the participation of other 'experts' and team members. In the later stages of product development, as the product moves closer to launch, the role of process is to usher team members down the generally well trod path of turning proven designs into production ready and commercially successful products. In both cases, process should try to ensure that initiative and creativity is not stifled, but prevent past mistakes from being repeated. In this respect then, good processes result from learning, or if you prefer, are a 'reaction to prior stupidity'. Isn't this a good thing? I think so.

So, to answer the question posed in the title, process certainly is NOT dead, at least not in product development. It plays a key role throughout the product development cycle - it's just that the nature of that role should change as appropriate.

+ 6 - 7 | § ¶PLM Marketing Speak Rant

I sometimes find myself getting annoyed at some of the press release material that is published by PLM vendors. It often seems to be so full of vague, meaningless statements that I wonder if anyone ever takes any notice of them. Here is a snippet from the press release of the latest product upgrade from a very well known vendor:

"...(release x) improves productivity through enhanced process automation and product knowledge reuse, and lowers the total cost of ownership through expanded enterprise interconnectivity and support for de facto industry standards."

For me, these types of statements always raise more questions than answers. What exactly constitutes "enhanced process automation"? Enhanced compared to what? Automation of which processes? How does it allow "product knowledge re-use"? How exactly is "enterprise interconnectivity expanded", and how will that lead to "lower total cost of ownership", what "de facto industry standards" are supported?

Now in my opinion, the product that this snippet is talking about is one of the best in the marketplace - but this press release could apply to pretty much any PLM package. Come on Marketing people, how about giving us some detail? Maybe add a few tangible examples - paint us a real picture, it doesn't matter if the example is product or industry specific - we're smart people, we can work out how it might apply to us.

Rant over.

+ 10 - 3 | § ¶Sowing the Seeds of Knowledge and Innovation

Alan Engelhardt at Cybaea.net asks the question why is knowledge management failng?. In the late 90's Knowledge Management was a hot topic, and many organisations appointed CKOs (Chief Knowledge Officers) or initiated programs to try to collect and document company knowledge. However, there is a perception that many of these initiatives actually produced little in the way of tangible benefits, and that enthusiasm has waned.

In Alan's discussion, he cites a post by Dave Pollard that discusses organisation structure as a possible reason. The suggestion is that in many hierarchical organisations, senior managers tend to assume that the most knowledge and wisdom is collected at the top of the organisation, and therefore efforts to improve the provision of knowledge to those in the lower echelons are not cost effective. The result is that projects to improve the use of corporate knowledge at these lower levels are less likely to be justified and therefore implemented.

Experience suggests that these hierarchical beliefs are not valid (see my other posts on Lean Development at Toyota and Can Your Company be Innovative?). Having interested and energised people at all levels in an organisation must surely be conducive to finding innovative solutions to problems, both large and small. And on the basis that the fuel for innovation is knowledge, as senior managers we cannot afford keep access to that knowledge to ourselves.

Alan believes that the traditionally higher rate of innovation and knowledge sharing in universities is partly down to structure:

"The management there is traditionally collegiate rather then hierarchical. A system of essentially peers where everybody's contribution is valuable within an established method or way of working, seems to produce the most new insights."

So - what could we do to foster collegiate communications structures in hierarchical organisations? Well, attempting to change the priorities and attitudes of a senior management team that makes decisions based on shorter-term and overtly tangible results would be like maneuvering an oil tanker. So, if we are to make progress, we need to use the enthusiasm and organisational savvy of our specialists and junior managers. The easiest way to do this is to start small, be creative in garnering time and resources (think about using training, Kiazen / Continuous Improvement, or support budgets), keep scope tight and manageable, use corporate politics (horse trade with other groups or managers who might stand to benefit) and maybe even encourage people to use some of own time to work on projects (ask - you may be surprised!). Maybe by starting a few such 'seed' initiatives as I have described will help to establish informal collegiate, peer-to-peer mechanisms that will succeed despite lack of senior management attention.

+ 10 - 4 | § ¶Can your Company be Innovative?

If you ever wondered if your organisation has what it takes to be innovative, the Innovation Tools Weblog, points to list of 10 Signs You've Got an Innovation Dysfunction, published by blogger and Innovation speaker Jim Carroll. It is worth a quick read as Jim has some useful observations.

I particularly like Jim's comment that in innovative companies, 'subversion is a virtue'. In other words, people should be encouraged to challenge conventional wisdom and working methods. In Lean organisations where the trend is for work content and processes to be standardised, employees who look for ways 'around the system' tend to be discouraged from doing so. Whenever these situations arise, our natural reactions are to try to impose ever tighter controls to force people to work by-the-book. What we really need to do is to give these people the opportunity to use their creative talents to improve the system, rather than work against it.

In a follow-up entry, Jim posts a series of high level actions that can help to overcome "Innovation Dysfunction". The final idea caught my attention:

"Create excitement. I don't know how many surveys I saw this year which indicated that the majority of most people in most jobs are bored, unhappy, and ready to bolt. Not at innovative companies! The opportunity for creativity, initiative and purpose results in a different attitude"

Having worked for small start-up companies, large multi-national corporations, and several points in between, I can say that most of the time the biggest buzz was generated at the smaller end of the scale. This is mostly because, individual contributions feel like they add up to a bigger percentage of the company's performance. However, in one very large corporation where I was a Junior Manager, they also had the mix right. The sense of contribution was maximised by a commitment to employee empowerment, provision of the means by which innovative thinking could be developed (time, money and training), and charismatic leaders who genuinely and passionately believed in the capabilities of their employees.

This last element is the key - creating excitement does not happen on its own - it takes leadership to create the right conditions.