+ 0 - 1 | § ¶Countering Goal Obsession
My previous post observed how people can be so focused on immediate goals that they lose the bigger picture. In a Fast Company article, they called this Goal Obsession.
How can you avoid this situation? Here’s a technique to try.
Spend 10 minutes a week thinking about what tasks you would do work-wise if you had the time and resources you needed. Maybe you would start creating a technical library, complete the documentation on your code, hold a post-project review, create a template project plan for the team…. whatever they might be, write them down.
Then spend another 10 minutes thinking of the most recent issues you have dealt with – maybe take a look at your inbox, or look at the last 5 meetings you attended. Write these down.
Now review the first list and consider how completing those tasks could have influenced or eliminated an issue on the second list. If you find one that would, start working on that task. If a task on the first list would influence more than one on the second – DO IT NOW.
+ 1 - 0 | § ¶What is Innovation?
I hear the word 'Innovation' used a lot these days. The received wisdom is that companies must be innovative or die. So what is innovation? In my experience, not everyone has the same understanding of what innovation means. To illustrate, I can recall three recent conversations I have had about innovation. To one manufacturing manager, innovation meant creating tool shadow boards to help reduce wasted time looking for lost tools in order to improve cost and delivery performance. To an engineer in a firm that makes highly complex and expensive industrial products, it meant reducing power consumption, and packing in more product features for the same price. To a sales engineer in an engineer-to-order company it meant improving access to product data for more accurate bid content and faster order turnaround.The US company Doblin has put together a nice summary of where to look to innovate. They call it The Ten Types of Innovation. In summary the ten types are:
1. Business Model
2. Networks and Alliances
3. Enabling Process
4. Core Processes
5. Product Performance
6. Product System
7. Service
8. Channel
9. Brand
10. Customer Experience
It reminds me a little of the classic 7 Ps of marketing (the 'Marketing Mix') for products and services that many companies will have been using for years to identify ways of deriving competitive advantage in their products. However, I do think that the Doblin model takes the concept further and is a useful tool to help companies to analyse their current and future business model, and look for areas where a little creative thinking can reap rewards.
So anything that improves business performance in any of the 10 areas above is innovation, right? Well - I don't think so.
I have a concern that the more the word 'Innovation' is used, the more the concepts and thinking behind it become devalued. Is innovation the same as continuous improvement? Is innovation the same as product development? Is selling cheese in re-sealable plastic packaging innovative? Maybe, maybe not. We need to be careful that we are not fooling ourselves that we are being innovative, whereas all we are doing is making the kinds of improvements that all companies, whether successful or not over the long term, have made since the start of the industrial revolution.
Whenever we think we are being innovative, we should take a step back and ask ourselves whether what we have done has a truly 'novel' element to it. Something that is novel, by definition, has never existed before. This is the core of innovation.
+ 1 - 0 | § ¶The Case for Leadership
I attended a local manufacturing industry innovation event the other evening, where a presentation was given by Dr. Gerald Mulenburg from the Aeronautics and Space Flight Hardware Division at NASA. In his presentation, Dr. Mulenburg talked about the factors that he believes are instrumental in promoting innovation at NASA. One thing stood out for me - the distinction between Leadership vs. Management. Essentially leaders work to break the mould, promote new thinking and push against the traditional inertia that is often rife in companies. In contrast, Managers generally fall back into maintaining the status quo - they may look to improve things, but they are oriented towards thinking how we can do what we currently do better as opposed to doing something new.
This distinction between leaders and managers is quite evident in our own interactions with clients. Often we find that we can help companies to find inefficiencies in their product development activities, and opportunities for both incremental and radical improvements. Client companies with strong leadership will jump on the opportunites and press ahead with planning and defining next steps, even if things are initially woolly or poorly defined. They recognise the need to make a start, and make that start now. Client companies with strong management also see the opportunities, however, their short term horizon is beset by current issues and problems that need to be fixed. Thoughts of improvement are often put on hold 'until we put out the fires we have currently'. Our experience is that these companies struggle to find the 'right time' to break out and start out down the radical improvement path.
This view chimes in with an article in Fast Company that talks about 'Goal Obsession'. I like this term a lot as it seems to me to describe the situation related above perfectly. The article is well worth a read.
+ 0 - 1 | § ¶Factory / Cell Simulation for the Masses
One of the tasks facing most manufacturers who introduce new products into volume production is to design and optimise workcells, production lines or complete factories to make the new product. The challenge is to ramp-up to serial production capacity quickly and to ensure that the manufacturing process is as efficient as possible.
Very large manufacturers often invest tens, or even hundred of millions of pounds in new manufacturing capacity. In these cases, rather than experiment with the layout and configuration of physical machines, plant etc., they often use factory planning / discrete event simulation software packages to get the layout right first time. The problem is that although these packages are very sophisticated, they are also expensive. This often puts them beyond the reach of many SMEs who might otherwise benefit from being able to simulate and optimise manufacturing before a new product introduction. However, a company called Visual Components has a suite of products that look like they might help to solve this problem.
For a software review see this article in MCAD Online.
There are some useful demos on the Visual Components website - for example there are videos showing the use of the software as part of the engineer-to-order sales cycle for vendors of factory automation solutions
+ 1 - 0 | § ¶Scrum-Down!
The previous post on pacing work in lean projects got me thinking some more. There are several synergies between lean work pacing and the "Scrum" project management philosophy. Scrum is a radical approach that has been used to manage ill-defined and somewhat chaotic software development and implementation projects. Its has been evolving over recent years, and its proponents say that Scrum can dramatically increase project delivery performance on these types of projects.
We like Scrum as a philosophy because it deals with a situation familiar to most product developers at the start of any new project : namely that project definition and requirements develop iteratively with the technical solution or concepts. During such times, what we need is a system that deals with rapid change (as we make discoveries about what customers want and how we can satisfy those wants). The best way to do this is not with formal procedures, rules and workflows, but by allowing motivated and focused teams to try stuff out, and get instant feedback from all involved. This is why Scrum is called an "empirical" method as opposed to the scientific/deterministic approach of attempting to spcecify the project and plan all the work and outcomes up front, then execute to this plan.
+ 1 - 0 | § ¶Pacing Work in Lean Projects
Hal Macomber in his Reforming Project Management blog posted about every day examples of Lean. His own example cited the traffic light system used on the on-ramps of some busy US highways to let individual cars onto the highway during peak times (I'm sure I've seen these in the UK but never experienced them working). This reduces accidents and smoothes traffic flow on the highway.
Hal then asked the question of how similar pacing might work in projects.
My response was that in a product development project, information does not always need to be 100% complete to be useful to downstream tasks or functions. If the downstream task is ready to start, then the upstream task should deliver something . For example, let us say a designer is laying out a gearbox. As soon as he has the basic dimensions of the gears, he could provide the gear blank sizes to a purchasing person. Of course, the last thing anyone wants is for purchasing to start ordering thousands of blanks, however, potential suppliers can be contacted and invited to submit initial blank cost estimates and leadtimes way before final drawings are complete.
So how do downstream tasks / functions know what they can and can't do? The answer is Maturity Designation. I first encountered this over 15 years ago when I was design manager for a UK subsidiary of a US company. We had a 5 state maturity designation with clear definitions of what they meant, and what was permissible at each state. Thus a purchasing person receiving information at state 1 (not the real designator, but as I don't have permission to publish their operating practices we'd better keep it generic) would know that the information was liable to change and was for investigation purposes only.
In my subsequent years working with many diverse companies I continue to be surprised by how few other companies formally adopt such an approach. Not only is it a good tool to promote cross-functional collaborative working, it also has the added benefit that it can be used as part of the suite of product indicators - at any point in time you can get a picture of how mature the whole design is by looking at the aggregate of the component maturities.
+ 0 - 1 | § ¶Innovation in Ice Cream Consumption
This caught my eye - as reported on Twistimage, a US ice cream company has developed "Dibs" - bite-sized ice-creams covered in chocolate that eliminate the hassle of scooping and mess associated with eating choc ices or ice lollies.
I hope they find their way over to the UK!