Posts Tagged: lean

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13
Nov 10

Time Waste

Henry Ford:

“Time waste differs from material waste in that there can be no salvage. The easiest of all wastes and the hardest to correct is the waste of time, because wasted time does not litter the floor like wasted material.”

Time wastes are hard to see, and even harder to fix.

Take for example, communicating an idea to someone. You could spend 30 minutes crafting what you think is a perfectly clear email, or you could just talk to them for 5 minutes and let them ask a few questions. Who knows, they may understand your idea far faster than you thought.

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3
Nov 10

The Undocumented TPS

Glyn Lumley on learning:

“For years, Taiichi Ohno, the father of the Toyota Production System would not allow anything to be recorded about it. He argued that to do so would crystallize the process and stall the drive for never-ending improvement. I can see that copying others will work well in an organization that has a command and control management style where employees are told to follow a certain path as it will be good for the business and good for them. But if you want to develop a systems-thinking environment, copying will get in the way of deep-seated learning.”

Seems like simply making a procedure can prevent learning from happening. So why do we make procedures? To outsource the work? To be consistent in what we build?

But if we become consistent by using a procedure, we prevent learning.

If you had to choose between having employees learn, and have employees be consistent, which would you pick?

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4
Jul 10

Least qualified for

I love this question: “what would happen if everyone on the team did the job they were least qualified for & spent half their time helping others?” @KentBeck

Here’s what I think would happen:

  • The completion of work would slow down for a couple weeks. Maybe a month.
  • New talents would form.
  • Inter-team communication, understanding, and empathy would get amazingly good.
  • Cross training would actually happen, and single-points-of-failure would disappear.
  • The business would see fewer things down because ___ was on vacation.
  • Then the completion of work would start happening faster than it ever had before.
  • And new ideas for old problems would start cropping up all over the place.
  • And a whole bunch of “broken” things would get fixed (poor processes, kludgy systems, etc).
  • And the team would re- self organize, and perform like never has before.

It would be brilliant.

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30
Sep 09

Doing it right the first time

Jim Highsmith writes “Do it right the First Time sends the wrong message: it says we can’t be uncertain, experiment, learn from mistakes, or deviate from the plan”

A friend of mine commented that while interesting, this was taking the “Do it right the First Time” out of context. I thought I’d look into it a bit more, and from what I can tell, “Do it right the First Time” is an idea embodied in the First Time Through (FTT) manufacturing metric, which itself is based on the Zero Defects idea of which is part of “Philip Crosby’s 14 Step Quality Improvement Process” (someone please correct me if I am wrong).

While I would agree that it seems reasonable to apply this ideal in a manufacturing setting (a highly consistent and repeatable process), I don’t see it as being a good principle to apply elsewhere (say, software development).

The problem I see, is that the principle is often applied in areas that are inappropriate. Design documents for software would be a great example. If a software enhancement was designed was discovered later to be unbuildable, is it the developers fault for not being smart enough? Or is it the designers fault for not understanding the very technical system constraints? Or maybe it was further downstream, and the customer didn’t know what they wanted till they had something to look at. The process depends on experimentation, and is always uncertain at the start. 9 times out of 10, you end up building something entirely different than what you thought you were going to build at the beginning. The way I see it, highly collaborative, multi-disciplinary processes can’t possibly be done right the first time, because progress is an act of discovery, not an act of manufacturing.

So was it taken out of context? Yea, a little.

But is it a good reminder because the principle is frequently applied out of context? Absolutely.

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