Akio Toyoda the CEO and President of Toyota Motor Corporation dumps a bucket of ice water on his head to support and bring more awareness to Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), or more commonly known as Loou Gehrig’s Disease.

Watch the video below. He challenges executives at Nissan and respectfully bows after he dumps water on himself.

But, I have to wonder: why didn’t he standardize the ice bucket challenge and provide a visual management board in doing so?

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My approach to applying Lean in an operation is a little unorthodox. Most practitioners follow the value stream mapping approach, where product families are created and each product family is essentially a value stream. Here are the steps of this typical approach:

1. Define and pick the product family(ies)
2. Create the current state value stream map
3. Create the future state value stream map
4. Then, using PDCA, develop an action plan to attain the future state by eliminating waste, etc.

This is the typical approach advocated by many. The term “value stream map” was coined by John Shook in his book Learning to See. It’s a great book and helps to elucidate simple yet powerful approaches that have been practiced inside Toyota for generations. But, for all the good that book has accomplished, there’s some negative outcomes too.

Focusing on value stream mapping is heralding a tool to be much greater than it really is.

You see at Toyota where I learned Lean, there is no value stream mapping. At least not as it’s understood in the “lean subculture” – what I call the Oprah-ization of Lean. At Toyota, the formal method is called information and material flow mapping. It’s actually a very specific approach to a very specific problem.

But, for some reason, value stream mapping has become the de-facto approach to implement lean. I think that’s misguided at most.

The so-called “lean consultants” love this approach because it’s package-able and very routine.

But that’s the problem: neatly packaging Lean in this way has created droves of what Ohno called “Catalog Engineers“.

What’s a Catalog Engineer?

There’s a story regarding a conversation between Taiichi Ohno and an engineer named Mr. L. In this story, Ohno tells Mr. L that a particular process needs to be fixed. Mr. L asked Ohno for some advice on how to fix the problem. Diligently, Mr. L did exactly what Ohno told him.

But. It doesn’t end there.

To his surprise, Ohno was upset with Mr. L. According to the story, Ohno says,

Why did you do only what I had told you to do?

Ohno then continues with the story and called workers like Mr. L “catalog engineers” because they only do what they are taught and have – effectively – stopped thinking for themselves. The story goes that Ohno vehemently taught against being a catalog engineer.

Value Stream Mapping – A Catalog Engineer

I understand that those reading this article will probably call me out, curse at me, unfriend me on Facebook, unfollow me on Twitter, and kick me where it counts if given the chance.

But. Here’s. The. Truth.

Those that approach every problem using the value stream mapping approach is bordering on being a catalog engineer.

Sure, the approach works sometimes.

But, are information and material flow diagrams created for every. single. problem. at Toyota?

No way. Why?

Because not every problem merits one.

My Invitation To You

Look at how you are approaching Lean and how you apply it in your world. Is there room for ingenuity? Innovation? Creativity? I challenge you to go against the norm – and actually apply practical lean – not the rote, prescribed, approach that is often talked about in Lean Pop Culture.

Try it today.

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This article is on the Practical Applications of Queueing Theory and how some of the assumptions of Queueing Theory can break down, necessitating the need for government intervention.

Queueing Theory is based on several assumptions. One of those assumptions is that when demand exceeds capacity, the result will be waiting lines. Often in situations where demand exceeds the capacity, we can either create more capacity and/or eliminate any waste at the point of constraint in the system. Let’s explore some basics on why, exactly, do we wait at all.

Why Do We Wait?

Consider the figure below:

In most operations, capacity is actually constant. A factory can only have so many machines; an airline can have so many flight attendants; a grocery store can have so many cash registers. Not only is it constant, but there’s also an upper limit to capacity – a ceiling. Now, let’s go back to the figure.

• During the period A and C, capacity exceeds the arrival rate of customers.
• So, any customer that arrives and is served between periods B and D, will increase the length of the line and the average waiting time.
• Conclusion: The average utilization of this operation is less than 100% because the average arrival rate is lower than capacity, yet customers experience a waiting time greater than zero. Why? Because of the “lumpiness” of the arrival rate – natural variation in the system.

In some cases, adding more capacity has a low cost. For example, opening up cash registers at a supermarket has a low relative cost. On the other hand, adding more doctors to relieve the waiting time at an emergency room has a relatively high cost attached to it.

What about reducing or eliminating waste at the constraint? Often times, this also has a relatively low cost – if there is adequate training in lean methods, root cause analysis, and a decent understanding of systems thinking, most anyone can eliminate or reduce waste at a bottleneck in the system.

But, what if there is available capacity, but they are not marshaled or deployed by choice?

That’s exactly what is happening at supermarkets in Venezuela ¹.

Operation Queue Killer

The Venezuelan government has launched a new initiative they call “Operation Queue Killer”, or Eficiencia Mata Cola in Spanish. In an audit of 66 private supermarkets, the investigators claim that more than half had at least one defective cash register. While others had fully functioning cash registers, but management chose not to open them. Both of these root causes lead to longer lines and longer waiting time.

The investigation doesn’t call out specifically, but there’s an undertone in the article that points to unfair pricing that are the result of fabricated demand, evidenced by the long waiting lines. Operation Queue Killer has one goal, according to Mendez, the Superintendent of Fair Prices:

Protect the sustenance of the Venezuelan Family

Continuing, Mendez claims the following:

When we conducted a thorough examination of why people are waiting in line, the phenomenon that drew our attention the most was that inspected supermarkets had more than half of their cash registers closed. Some even had 81 percent of their registers closed, and people waiting in line for three hours.

It seems to me that if there is truly widescale collusion, and shopkeepers are fabricating scarcity in order to drive up prices, it probably makes sense that the government is stepping in. To a queueing theorist, however, this is very interesting because this is one of the rare cases where factory physics aren’t the only things we are dealing with – now it’s human intervention.

Here’s the interview – beware, it’s in Spanish.

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Bob Emiliani published a very good article on principle of Respect for People ¹ - an aspect not well understood in Lean Management. In that article, he extends a challenge:

In closing, you will have a pretty good basic understanding of Lean management when you can articulate how the “Respect for People” principle relates to takt time, standardized work, 5 Whys, heijunka, jidoka, just-in-time, set-up reduction, kanban, poka-yoke, kaizen, and visual controls, for each of the following categories of people: employees, suppliers, customers, investors, and communities – for all of these 11 items in all five categories, not just for a couple of items in one or two categories.

I’d like to accept that challenge. In the next several weeks or months, based on my experience and understanding, I’d like to show how Respect for People relates to the more popular aspects of Lean that are often talked about and receive an inordinate amount of focus from the Lean community.

The index for the articles are below. As I write each post, the items below will link the actual article.

• Respect for People and Takt Time
• Respect for People and Standardized Work
• Respect for People and the 5 Whys
• Respect for People and Heijunka
• Respect for People and Jidoka
• Respect for People and Just-in-Time
• Respect for People and Set-up Reduction
• Respect for People and Kanban
• Respect for People and Poka-Yoke
• Respect for People and Kaizen
• Respect for People and Visual Management

As I publish each article, I’d love your feedback also. I’m specifically interested in your personal experience and where I might be missing something. I’d love to learn from you also.

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Elaborating on the Respect for People principle and challenge from Bob Emiliani, in this article I want to show how Respect for People relates to Takt Time. I’ll do so by showing how Respect for People looks like to Employees, Suppliers, Customers, Investors, and Communities. I’ll attempt to show examples also.

Let me briefly explain Takt Time.

I’ve written about Takt Time many times before. For example, I show how Takt Time can be used in a tax return filing operation; also, how I learned Takt Time from a Toyota Warehouse Worker, which humbled me greatly; I also provide a Takt Time Calculator Download for Free. So, I won’t go into detail here, but here’s the gist of what Takt Time means.

Consider the following equation:

Where,

T = Takt Time, or the work time between two consecutive units
Ta = Net Available Time to work
D = Demand, or units required per period

Imagine a horizontal line that represents customer demand. Now, it takes a certain amount of time to produce an item or perform a service. Working within Takt Time means we are working below that horizontal line that represents customer demand.

I’d love to hear from you. It’s likely my attempt here is not perfect, so I’d love to hear from you on where I might have missed something or even gotten something completely wrong.

Let me know in the comment section below.

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If you ever had to take the SAT or the ACT, you’ll remember those pesky analogy questions. Let me invite you to recall those – at least for today’s article. The topic for today is how Cycle Time is the top of the surface metric that tells you A LOT about an operation; similar to how high levels of finished goods inventory tells you A LOT about the nature of a manufacturing operation. Let me explain.

First off, we know there are many differences between Service and Manufacturing. But one this they definitely have in common is one metric that can – very quickly – tell you the health of the operation.

Cycle Time is to Service as Inventory is to Manufacturing

I’m sure you’ve seen this chart – it’s a common one used to explain Lean:

In Lean, we use the analogy of a river and flow. When the river is high, it masks the rocks below. Similarly, when the finished goods inventory levels of a company are high, then it masks many issues in a company. These issues are often categorized in one of the 7 Wastes as is seen in the image above.

Now, let’s switch gears a little bit.

Replace “Finished Goods Inventory” with Cycle Time.

In a service context, we get the same effect.

When cycle time is high (high is defined by the customer and the operation), then it masks many inefficiencies in the service operation. Some examples are:

• Order Entry Accuracy
• Unavailability of Equipment
• Unavailability of Personnel
• Rework
• Defects

On and on and on. And, if you think about it, this all makes sense.

Have you ever stood in line to buy something? Did your order take longer than expected? Was the reason because the clerk had to fix an order? Or the espresso machine wasn’t working the way it was supposed to? Or, was it because the cash register didn’t work as expected or it ran out of paper?

All of these reasons can cause cycle time to complete an order to increase.

And, when cycle time is high for a service operation, we know it is masking many issues beneath the surface.

Reduce Cycle Time to Make Step Change Improvement in Service Processes

If you work in a service operation, you should test out my claim. Measure a service operation end-to-end. You’ll see that if there’s variability in Cycle Time, you will see that beneath the surface there are issues that can be reduce or eliminated.

Now, my claim is true for almost every service operation – even healthcare. Though in healthcare, I would first focus on the patient safety and reducing medical errors – but even with these, Cycle Time will be one of those metrics that will be a very reliable metric that can describe the state of patient safety and medical errors.

But focusing on just Cycle Time in a service process isn’t enough. A balanced approach will be to look at other dimensions such as Cost, Errors, and Cycle Time simultaneously.

For example,

Let me summarize the chart above:

1. Any service process can be measures end-to-end along the dimensions of Cycle Time, Errors, and Cost.
2. Simultaneous improvement along all three dimensions is achievable – rather than a requirement that trade-offs must be made between the dimensions (think medical errors versus cycle time)
3. Redesign efforts that focus only on costs usually achieve only temporary savings – reduced headcount assigned to the same workload results in an increased error rate, overburden on the current employees, and likely excessive delays in time
4. Redesign efforts that focus only on error reduction will probably increase cycle time if the focus is on extra or redundant checks – or quality that is not built-in. Often times, Poka Yoke isn’t considered. If this is the case, then Cycle Time will definitely increase.
5. But, efforts that focus on Cycle Time will address issues related to errors that cause delays and also eliminate redundant steps that cause delays. This approach will enable you to address all 3 dimensions of my model above.

I challenge you to test my assumptions. If you’re in a service operation, go ahead and see if what I’m claiming rings true in your operation. If so, see what you can apply today to improve your service process.

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I had the wonderful opportunity to interview a good friend, Matthew May. You can learn more about Matt’s background after the interview but let me say this: Matt is world-renown business consultant and very respected voice in Lean and in Design Thinking. He has published 4 books and is a regular writer for the Harvard Business Review Blog. Matt refuses to be boxed anywhere, but probably the most convenient category in which he finds himself is the overlay of Elegance, Subtraction, Innovation, Leadership, and Lean.

In this interview, you’ll learn the following:

• Why did Toyota Motor Sales react the way they did when they received the first draft of the Toyota Way in 2001?
• What exactly the current Lean movement is missing?
• Why Matt believes that Eric Ries and the Leanstartup movement is the closest to come to the true spirit of Lean as practiced at Toyota.

Enjoy the interview below.

Thanks for joining us Matt. Can you please introduce yourself and your work to my readers?

My pleasure, thank you. In a nutshell, I’m an independent business advisor specializing in strategy, culture, and innovation. My philosophy revolves around the concept of elegance, which I define simply as the ability to achieve the maximum effect through minimum means. I’ve written a few books and articles on the topic, and given more than a few talks. All of my work comes from this generative theme, whether it’s facilitating a strategic conversation or teaching a creative methodology.

Matt, can you share with the audience how you got started on your Lean journey? Was there a specific event that sparked your interest and lifelong journey in Lean?

I was introduced to lean concepts through my work with the U.S. headquarters of Toyota Motor Sales, specifically the University of Toyota. My very first project, which turned out to be a nearly decade-long experience, was to somehow make the principles and practices of the Toyota Production System meaningful for the knowledge side of the business. They were not embraced at that time (late 1990s) anywhere other than in manufacturing and warehouse operations. Previous attempts had failed miserably. They had a training course called, I think, “TPS for Office.” I’m pretty sure I still have the training deck, complete with the most hideous clipart and animations you’ve even seen. The net impact was a few people organizing supply cabinets.

You’re a bit of an anomaly in the Lean world because you’re recognized for your work at the University of Toyota, but you are also known for your expertise in innovation and design thinking. If you were to place yourself in a convenient category – in which box would you place yourself?

You’re being nice. Let’s face it, I’m odd man out when it comes to the way most people view lean principles. That probably comes from me witnessing the dead-on-arrival reaction to TPS inside the Toyota organization itself. As a matter of fact, one of my most vivid memories is that of 2001, the year a green booklet called “The Toyota Way 2001″ arrived in Torrance, California, home of Toyota Motor Sales. The executive committee effectively told the Toyota mother ship in Japan: “This is all well and good for Japan, and the factories, but with all due respect, it has no place in our operation.”

I was lucky to partner with the dean of the University of Toyota, a very smart guy who saw through all the jargon associated with TPS and lean, and focused on the one thing Toyota is really good at: learning.

SO…my box is learnership. Maybe that will be the title of my next book!

I must tell you that of all the books and articles written about lean and Toyota, the one that comes closest, in fact captures, the way we eventually taught and practiced lean principles on the knowledge side of the world, is The Lean Startup, by Eric Ries. While his lens is that of tech startup, that book is all about validated learning, through the scientific method. That is what we focused on at University of Toyota.

That was a softball question. Now let me ask a real one: Can you explain what exactly is the intersection of Lean and Design Thinking?

It’s more like an overlay than an intersection. Listen, Lean and Design Thinking are simply convenient handles for what is essentially the same problem-solving process. The words are different, but the melody is the same. The instruments used to produce the melody are different. That’s important, because while a melody is memorable, you’re far more likely to keep humming it if you know and like the words, as well as arrangement and instrumentation. How many international songs without English lyrics played on a harp do you know?

One reason I like design thinking is that the words and music just resonate more with most people. You’re at a bar with a friend talking about your day, and you tell them you were doing process improvement. Yawn. You tell them you redesigned the way something works, they lean in. When I teach design thinking, I teach it the way I learned at Stanford’s d school…we redesign a existing item. It’s still the core item when all is said and done, incrementally improved. That’s called kaizen. So it’s all the same!

Look, you cannot argue with science: there are two, and only two, ways that human beings solve problems: consciously and sub- or unconsciously. Daniel Kahneman calls it fast and slow thinking. One way involves a disciplined, phase-driven approach in which we observe something that piques our interest, raise a question about it, hypothesize an answer, and test our guess, then adjusting things based on how well they worked. A child in a high chair does this naturally. The other way is through a sudden creative insight, which often occurs as the Eureka moment of legend after we’ve steeped ourselves in the problem, tried everything and nothing worked. We take a break of however long and do something mundane and routine. Suddenly the answer pops into our brains.

That’s it, end of story. Everything else is marketing.

Tell us about EDIT Innovation ¹.

EDIT is simply the name I conduct business under. There are actually a lot of Matthew May’s out there, so when I left my Toyota partnership in 2006, I wanted a business name. I started with Aevitas Learning. Aevitas is Latin for “lifelong.” But it wasn’t elegant, because no one knew exactly how to pronounce it. So EDIT was the replacement. I chose it for two reasons. First, the word “edit” captures the essence of improvement through subtraction. As Lao Tzu wrote 2500 years ago: “To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, subtract things every day.”

I’m in the wisdom business.

The logo design utilizes the first law of subtraction (what isn’t there can often trump what is) with use of a negative space minus sign to denote the act of editing.

Second, EDIT is an acronym for the central creative process that enables someone to consistently produce innovative, elegant solutions: empathize, define, ideate, test. It is this iterative loop around which lean innovation aka design thinking revolves.

I’m a one-man band, a gun for hire. From time to time when a project requires tangible deliverables I’ll bring together a project team and utilize the Hollywood model of production, in which I’m the executive producer.

What type of challenges might a company be facing for which EDIT Innovation is especially tailored to assist?

The challenges I field go something like this: “Innovating consistently is a struggle for us.” “We have ideas aplenty, we just can’t seem to execute.” “We’re not sure which way to grow.” “We’ve lost our founding entrepreneurial spirit.” “Our operations drain our resources.” “The idea is there, we just need to scale it.”

If you could go back to your time at Toyota for a moment. Are there lessons during your 8 years there that are largely ignored or even unknown to the Lean community?

My bet is that the out-of-school stories I told in question #3 aren’t widely known. But let me reiterate.

The secret to lean has nothing, and I mean nothing, to do with tools, techniques and practices that are taught and followed. At that level, lean is no different than any other programmatic approach.

The secret to lean is the art of addition through subtraction, ala Lao Tzu. I didn’t get that until midway through my tenure. And yes, there was a “moment.” Rather than regurgitate that story, I’d point people toward this little piece I penned for The Sunday New York Times ²

You have accomplished much in your career. What’s the one thing you still lack and are actively working on?

Pure elegance in work and life. I would like my work to be an effortless pull, not an effortful push.

I’ll never achieve, because it’s like perfection…to be pursued, not necessarily achieved. But I’ll probably get to simplicity. And in just the way Vince Lombardi said, and I paraphrase: “If you aim for perfection you will achieve excellence,” I figure if I aim for elegance I’ll achieve simplicity.

One final question. There are strategy consultants. There are Lean consultants. There are innovation consultants. Tell us how Matt May and EDIT Innovation is different? What’s the one thing that clients can’t get from the other guys that only you and your firm provide?

Your–and/or your–team’s best thinking. My going-in supposition is that the solution to whatever problem is being tackled lies not in my brain, but in the collective gray matter of those I’m helping. It’s my job, and a job I love, to bring that creativity to light. I have a robust, tried-and-true quiver of tools and techniques to pull out the very best from the team.

So, I’ve never thought of myself as a consultant in the traditional sense of the word. You know, the guys that come in, study a bunch of stuff, write up some near-mindless and always-obvious recommendations that are an inch thin and a mile wide, then walk away. That old school way of consulting is like the walking dead. The big firms can’t do the canned strategy anymore because the world is moving too fast.

Strategy is about choices. And important choices require an effective framework for wrestling complexity to the ground, and an objective third party to facilitate effective progress. That’s me: Coach. Facilitator. Teacher.

Is there anything else you’d like the audience to know?

I want to be Roger Federer in my next life. He’s the epitome of athletic elegance.

About Matthew May

Matthew E. May counsels executives and teams on matters of strategy, culture, and innovation through his firm, EDIT Innovation.

He spent over eight years as a close advisor to Toyota. Matt has written four books on business innovation, his latest being THE LAWS OF SUBTRACTION: 6 Simple Rules for Winning in the Age of Excess Everything (McGraw-Hill, ©2013).

He writes regularly for American Express OPEN Forum, HBR blog network, and University of Toronto’s progressive periodical, The Rotman Magazine. He holds an MBA from The Wharton School and a BA from Johns Hopkins University, but he considers winning the The New Yorker cartoon caption contest as one of his proudest and most creative achievements.

Endnotes

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We’re pleased to present to you this interview with our good friend, Mark Graban. Mark is the guy you want on your team when it comes to improving healthcare. As you read this interview, you’ll learn the following:

• What led Mark to read Deming’s Out of the Crisis while he was on Spring Break from his university studies instead of partying at the beach like other college students.
• How Mark went from being an engineer to focusing his Lean improvement efforts on Healthcare.
• Why your hospital should call Mark for help if your nurses are overloaded and patients are being harmed.
• What he would say to the Secretary of Health and Human Services if he had an opportunity to have lunch with her.

Enjoy the interview and read more about Mark in his bio section after the interview.

Thanks for joining us Mark. Can you please introduce yourself and your work to my readers?

It’s probably easiest to start by saying I wear a lot of different hats, professionally. Since 2010, I’ve worked under the banner of my own company, Constancy, Inc., as an independent consultant, an author, and a speaker. I work primarily with hospitals and healthcare organizations to better understand, implement, and sustain “Lean” methodologies and the “Kaizen” approach to continuous improvement. Since 2011, I’ve been part of the team at KaiNexus, a startup technology company with a software platform that helps organizations in multiple industries better manage their improvement work.

Educationally, my undergraduate degree is Industrial Engineering (Northwestern University), so I started my career in manufacturing, with a stint in another software company. After two years at General Motors right out of college, I had an amazing opportunity to do a dual master’s program at MIT, studying mechanical engineering and business in a program now called “Leaders for Global Operations” or LGO. I had a fortunate opportunity to shift into healthcare work in 2005 when I joined Johnson & Johnson and their consulting group that did Lean and Six Sigma work with healthcare organizations. People can read more about my background via my bio or LinkedIn.

Mark, can you share with the audience how you got started on your Lean journey? Was there a specific event that sparked your interest and lifelong journey in Lean?

I started college a chemical engineering student, and then materials science, but realized that I was more interested in business and people than I was about how the world works at a microscopic level. Before I was introduced to Lean and the Toyota Production System in college, I was fortunate that my father (who spent all 40 years of his career at GM) was able to attend one of the famous four-day seminars run by the late, great Dr. W. Edwards Deming.

In my I.E. classes, we learned about pull systems and just-in-time materials management (and how that was better than push systems and complicated computer scheduling approaches), but it was a pretty limited view of Lean. We weren’t taught about the Lean culture and management system. Over one break from school, I borrowed my dad’s copy of Deming’s Out of the Crisis and that book was very inspiring and transformational.

My passion for Lean comes from the lessons that Deming taught Toyota and other Japanese companies – that the most successful companies have leaders who create an environment where people can have “joy in work” and where everybody wins. I guess I’m an idealist in thinking that people should have great workplaces and shouldn’t hate being at work.

You’ve written several books on Lean for Healthcare. Can you share with the audience how you came to focus your efforts on healthcare?

My move into healthcare is what I’d call a “happy accident.” In 2005, I was an internal Lean consultant for Honeywell, in Phoenix, and my wife had a new career opportunity in Texas, which put me on the job market. In a classic case of “right place, right time,” I got a call from a J&J recruiter about their consulting group. I wasn’t driven to get into healthcare because I had any bad first-hand experiences in the healthcare system or anything beyond long waiting times in a primary care physicians office (the type of thing you accept as “normal,” until you realize there is a better way). While in Phoenix, in early 2005, I had the chance to do a gemba walk at a hospital in Scottsdale to see some of their early Lean improvement work in the emergency department, which piqued my interest. I was reading what I could about Lean healthcare online (which was a limited literature at that point), so the call from J&J might have been fate.

When I took that job, I thought it would be an interesting experiment, not knowing if it would be a temporary detour or a major career shift. Over nine years later, I guess I’m now “a healthare person.”

Tell us about your consulting work.

At J&J, I was part of a 25-person team that worked together and ran relatively long 12- to 16-week projects. As a consultant today, I either work independently on smaller projects or I partner up with other consultants when it makes sense for us and the client.

In the past few years, I’ve been involved with some “Lean design” efforts, working with hospital staff, leaders, and architects as they plan the construction of new space. My role is to help them understand their existing processes to see 1) how those processes can be redesigned or tweaked and 2) how the space needs to be designed to work with those processes.

I’ve also help launch formal Kaizen initiatives in many organizations, including coaching their leaders as they learn approaches to ongoing daily continuous improvements. I occasionally will help an organization with value stream mapping or other Kaizen events, but I’m more interested in helping organizations create and nurture a “culture of continuous improvement,” instead of just doing a project here and there. I’ve also done some work recently, partnering with Karen Martin, to help a health system start a formal “strategy deployment” process.

I’ve also done some pro-bono consulting and coaching for a few non-profit organizations, which is how I like to try to give back to the community.

What type of challenges might a healthcare organization be facing for which your services is especially tailored to assist?

Some of the challenges include:

• “We’ve been doing Rapid Improvement Events, but want to also incorporate ongoing continuous improvement into our workplace.”
• “We’ve been using Lean tools, but need to start managing and leading in a Lean way to really affect change and better performance.”
• “Patients are being harmed and nurses are overloaded… we need to figure that out and fix that.”

If you had the chance to have lunch with the Honorable Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the current Secretary of Health and Human Services, what would you like to talk to her about?

Oh, many things, but one topic I’m really interested in is whether different financial penalties (for things like high readmission rates) or performance incentives based on patient surveys (like HCAHPS) create more dysfunctions than they solve. Many of the incentives or penalties from Washington seem to be overly simplistic “solutions” to complex problems. If these approaches actually do work, then maybe we should consider fining a hospital $1 billion (spoken like Mike Myers’ Dr. Evil) each time a patient dies as the result of a preventable medical error. If penalties drove the right improvement, would that eliminate things like wrong-site surgeries and hospital-acquired infections?

On a less tongue-in-cheek note, I’d want to talk about the one part of the “ObamaCare” law that’s received the least attention. The formal name is “The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” but there’s been far more talk about the “affordable” aspect. Medical harm is a national catastrophe (now estimated to be the third leading cause of death in the U.S.) and we aren’t having a meaningful national discussion about that.

You spent a few years as a Senior Fellow at the Lean Enterprise Institute. What was that experience like?

I worked out of their Cambridge, Massachusetts office for a year when my wife had an opportunity to also study at MIT and worked from Texas as a half-time employee for another year. The timing was great in that LEI was starting to get really interested in Lean healthcare. I was part of the team for the launch of the Healthcare Value Network, a collaboration with the ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value. Instead of consulting, our role was promotion and sharing of Lean practices, mindsets, and success stories. I was able to visit many hospitals across the U.S. and Canada as the organizations who were members of that Network shared their experiences, successes, and struggles with each other. LEI’s founders and leaders have humility and a hunger for learning that I find to be inspiring.

Can you share with the audience some results from your healthcare engagements? If you could, it’ll be instructive tell us about the problem or opportunity (generally), the steps you took – especially steps that were informed by Lean, and the results. Generally, of course, without divulging any client privileges.

One of my favorite projects is something that’s disclosed in the 2nd edition of Lean Hospitals. Children’s Medical Center Dallas had a problem where children would have to wait 12 to 14 weeks for an outpatient sedated MRI. We pulled together a full-time team from different disciplines and functions, including nursing, scheduling, and an MRI technician. They analyzed the current state, including scheduling policies and practices, the patient flow upon arrival for the appointment, and the relatively low utilization of the MRI machines. The MRIs were actually only actively scanning a patient about 33% of the working hours. So, we had this strange conundrum of patients waiting for months, but machines sitting mostly idle.

The team proposed and tested a number of changes, including new scheduling policies (making sure scheduled MRI procedure slots were the length of the actual procedures), adding a third anesthesia team (so the next patient could be prepped while two patients were being scanned in the MRIs), and a number of other small changes.

The MRI machine utilization rate went from 33% to about 60% on a daily basis and the backlog of patients was quickly worked down to the point where patients waited only two or three weeks (which was half the waiting time of a competing hospital) for an appointment – leading to better and more timely patient care.

To me, some of the key lessons were to involve the people who actually do the work, given them time to analyze and understand what’s broken, and let them work on fixing it – not needing artificial constraints of week-long Rapid Improvement Events (since some changes were much bigger and some were smaller). Because the team owned their new process, the results were sustained from 2008 through 2013 (the last time I talked with them).

You have accomplished much in your career. What’s the one thing you still lack and are actively working on?

I lack patience! I want to see healthcare transformed to a point where patients aren’t being harmed, employees are happy and engaged, and healthcare organizations success financially at prices that are fair and reasonable. That doesn’t happen overnight. We have pockets of great success in healthcare, so it’s frustrating that meaningful Lean management systems aren’t being adopted more widely (instead of just tools and projects).

I am pretty serious about trying to continually become better at everything I do, so there’s no lack of things to actively work on!

You are an influential voice in the Lean community. If you were to list 3 things that the Lean community is focused on but shouldn’t be, what would they be?

First, the Lean healthcare community, specifically, needs to be more focused on improving patient safety and quality. If patients (and staff) are being harmed on a regular basis due to process problems and bad systems, that has to be our first priority, not trying to tweak the number of office supplies that are in the nurse’s station. Lean mindsets and methods have so much to offer to improve safety and quality… even if our organizations are not asking us to work on these things, a responsible Lean professional should be pushing to work on safety first.

Secondly, the Lean community needs to study the lessons of Dr. Deming more and put these ideas into practice. We put Toyota leaders like Ohno and Shingo on a pedestal but far too often ignore Dr. Deming. I encourage Lean professionals to read a book by Dr. Deming or about him instead of reading yet another Lean book. Or, read a book by people who worked with him, like Fourth-Generation Management by Brian Joiner or Understanding Variation.

Thirdly, I think it would be helpful to think of Lean less as a set of events, projects, and certifications, and more about engaging everything in Lean thinking and continuous improvement. As Masaaki Imai says, improvement is something for everybody, everywhere, every day.

Is there anything else you’d like the audience to know?

Thanks for interviewing me!

About Mark Graban

Mark Graban is an internationally-recognized expert in the field of “Lean Healthcare,” as a consultant, author, keynote speaker, and blogger. Mark is also the Vice President of Customer Success for the software company KaiNexus, helping further their mission of “making improvement happen” in healthcare organizations and other industries.

He is the author of the book Lean Hospitals: Improving Quality, Patient Safety, and Employee Engagement (Productivity Press), which was selected for a 2009 Shingo Research and Professional Publication Award, the first healthcare book to win this award, and is being translated into eight languages. A 2^nd revised edition was released in November, 2011.

Mark has also co-authored a second book, titled Healthcare Kaizen: Engaging Front-Line Staff in Sustainable Continuous Improvements, which was released in June 2012 and also a Shingo Research Award recipient in 2013. A newly revised and condensed edition, The Executive Guide to Healthcare Kaizen: Leadership for a Continuously Learning and Improving Organization was released in August, 2013.

He is the founder and lead blogger and podcaster at LeanBlog.org, started in January 2005.

Mark earned a BS in Industrial Engineering from Northwestern University as well as an MS in Mechanical Engineering and an MBA from the MIT Sloan Leaders for Global Operations Program (previously known as Leaders for Manufacturing). Mark has worked in automotive (General Motors), the PC industry (Dell), and industrial products (Honeywell). At Honeywell, Mark was certified as a “Lean Expert” (Lean Black Belt).

Since August 2005, Mark has worked exclusively in healthcare, where he has coached lean teams at client sites in North America and the United Kingdom, including medical laboratories, hospitals, and primary care clinics. From 2005 to 2009, Mark was a senior consultant with ValuMetrix Services, a division of Johnson & Johnson and he currently consults independently for healthcare organizations.

Mark’s motivation is to apply Lean and Toyota Production System principles to improve quality of care and patient safety, to improve the customer/patient experience, to help the development of medical professionals and employees, and to help build strong organizations for the long term.

From June 2009 to June 2011, Mark was a Senior Fellow with the Lean Enterprise Institute, a not-for-profit educational organization that is a leading voice in the Lean world. Mark served as the LEI’s “Chief Engineer” for healthcare activities, including workshops, web & social media, and other publications. Mark also served as the Director of Communication & Technology for the Healthcare Value Network, a collaboration of healthcare organizations from across North America, a partnership between LEI and the ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value.

A member of the National Speakers Association, Mark is a popular speaker at conferences and private healthcare meetings. Mark has spoken across the U.S., in multiple provinces across Canada, and other countries including Finland, Holland, and Sweden. He has guest lectured at schools including MIT, Wharton, UT Health Science Center, and Ohio State University and has served as a faculty member for the ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. He has been quoted and interviewed in many publications, including Health Affairs and the New York Times.

Mark and his wife live in San Antonio, Texas. Mark serves on the board of the Louise H. Batz Patient Safety Foundation, the board of the AME Southwest Region, and on the advisory board for the Michigan Lean Consortium. Mark is also an advisory board member for the startup technology company Homeward Healthcare.

The post Improving Healthcare with Lean: An Interview with Mark Graban appeared first on shmula.

Prostate Cancer is a serious topic. But, today, I want to share with you something that made me smile. I went to the doctor last week and, while waiting for him to finish chit chatting with the nursing staff, I noticed something on the wall that was interesting and helpful: A Prostate Cancer Decision Tree Process Map.

We’ve analyzed other process maps in the wild. We did one a few months ago on whether we should get a wet and dry vacuum.

I’m in my late 30’s, so I don’t think I need to worry about getting my prostate checked – yet. But, rest assured, when my time comes, I’m sure my wife will be very diligent in making me get my prostate checked.

Here’s the Prostate Cancer Decision Tree.

In case it’s difficult to read, let me walk through the decision tree with you.

• Are you having urinary symptoms?
  • If Yes, urinary symptoms can be caused by a number of things, including prostate cancer. Talk to your health care provider about your symptoms.
  • If No, Are you African American? Or, did your grandfather, father, uncle, brother, son have prostrate cancer?
    • If Yes, talk to your healthcare provider about getting your prostate checked.
    • If No, how old are you?
      • Under 40? The American Urological Association recommends against prostate cancer screening in men under 40 years.
      • 40-54? In general, routine prostrate cancer testing is not recommended. However, if you have concerns about your urinary health, see a doctor.
      • Age 70+? Are you in excellent health?
        • If Yes, talk to your doctor.
        • If No, if you have a life expectancy of 10 years left, then don’t get your prostate checked.

I think a simple decision tree like this is helpful to educate men regarding a common form of cancer for men in their older ages. Men, who are by and large, predisposed to analytical thinking, a tool like this can help beef up  their egos while at the same time get educated on their prostate health. Smart.

The post Prostate Cancer Decision Tree: A Process Map for the Rest of Us appeared first on shmula.

I am so excited to present to you this interview I had the opportunity to conduct with Art Smalley. In my mind, Art brings a voice of reason to the rest of the Lean world. He is one of the few Americans to work for the Toyota Motor Corporation in Japan. He worked under one of Mr. Taiichi Ohno’s early students. You can learn more about Art at the end of the interview in his Bio section. In this interview, you’ll learn the following:

• From behind closed doors, why he believes Toyota executives would shake their heads in confusion at the Lean movement in America.
• What is it exactly he likes about the Leanstartup movement?
• Why results and pragmatism are the essence of Lean – not tools or methods.
• What is it that Art is still working on learning?

Without further ado, enjoy the interview with Art Smalley.

Hi Art, and thanks for taking the time to speak to my audience. Could you please introduce yourself and your work to my readers?

Greetings and thanks for the interview request. My name is Art Smalley and I have a fairly varied background. I lived in Japan for close to ten years as a student back in the mid 1980’s and then later working for Toyota Motor Corporation in Aichi Prefecture. I was fortunate enough to be assigned to Taiichi Ohno’s Kamigo Engine Plant which was long considered the model for TPS in many regards. I eventually left Toyota and actually started a small company in Japan with a colleague which provided engineering services to Toyota overseas plants. Later I returned to the United States and worked as Director of Lean for a Tier One automotive supplier called Donnelly Corporation.

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“why Toyota executives would shake their heads in confusion at the Lean movement in America” http://ctt.ec/16_a6+

After executing a successful transformation effort there I spent almost five years as a consultant with McKinsey & Company where I learned a few things about strategy and operations from a more traditional standpoint. Eventually back in 2002 however I set up my own company Art of Lean, Inc. and more recently co-founded the Lean Leadership Academy with my colleague Sam MacPherson. I have authored three books so far (Creating Level Pull, A3 Thinking, Toyota Kaizen Methods) and have plans to eventually write some more. I help a variety of different clients implementing lean transformations.

We both worked at Toyota – you were there much longer than I was. I spent time in supply parts distribution, not manufacturing. So, my perspective might be slightly different than yours. In your opinion, if someone at Toyota were to host a luncheon with everyone in the current lean movement, what reprimands would they have? What advice would they give?

I can’t really speak for other people from Toyota. That would not be proper and I would just be putting words in their mouth. In general Toyota executives try to be polite and supportive when addressing external audiences. There is no “trash talking” and they are pretty inwardly focused. I don’t think externally they would be very critical of others as it would be considered bad etiquette.

However behind closed doors and with close confidants when I ask a lot of Japanese about Lean in the U.S. they just shake their heads in dismay and profess confusion to put it mildly. I will leave it at that. On the advice front most of us from places like Kamigo where TPS really developed hesitate to give advice without viewing something specific like your operations and conducting some form of “getting the facts” as a first step. Otherwise we are just shooting in the dark and giving empty advice. I can be a little bit of a loose cannon at times but try to keep it direct and on point.

Conversely, do you feel that Toyota has lost its way somehow?

I don’t think Toyota has lost its way too much. The “way” is still understood however I think Toyota is a victim of its own success and the old leadership has given way to new leaders and new challenges. I don’t know how well they will fare over the next two decades. For perspective when I joined Toyota for example the company consisted of 70,000 employees in Japan and very very few manufacturing outposts that basically did limited assembly of vehicles. All key engineering work and production for engines and transmissions and chassis were exported from Japan. Today Toyota has over 200,000 employees worldwide and there are still about 70,000 Japanese in the company in Japan. That is a tremendous accomplishment when you stop and think about it. In other words today non-Japanese outnumbered Japanese two to one in the company.

However the turnover rate is higher on the non-Japanese side and experience level is generally lower. Toyota struggles at times overseas due to its growth and any company would in transferring its systems overseas. I’d still give them an A- in Japan, a B for most overseas Toyota plants I visit. The average “Lean” company I visit gets about a C- grade in comparison.

In my mind, you’re a very influential voice in what I call “real lean”. You’ve been vocal in the past about some problems you see in the lean movement. Can you please explain to my audience what problems you see and how we might course-correct?

No sure I can do justice to the question or solution space. There is actual TPS as practiced and developed by Toyota in Japan with of course the various inputs and influences they openly acknowledge. Somehow in the U.S. and other countries the Lean movement is off on its own tangent which is quite different in some cases. People like to be creative and make stuff up in the U.S. and if it sells and makes them famous all the better.

However the facts are that very few companies in the U.S. are able to produce results via their lean efforts over a three to five year period. Most flatten out quickly or fail to produce much in the way of results at all. Many experience a decline or regress after a few years, etc. That does not happen in Toyota with actual TPS or if it does it is recognized as a serious problem and addressed accordingly.

The U.S. lean movement is happy with its tools and workshops approach and fuzzy improvement numbers which seem to fade away or regress over time. The lean system in the U.S. is set up mainly by consultants (internal and external) for the benefit of consultants in a lot of ways. Not sure I see that changing at all to be honest. Fixes depend upon the situation of the exact company in question so it is tough to comment without the facts of the matter.

I visited a place once where critical machines were down that day and they had a major on-time delivery problem costing tons of money. The lean program wanted to do 5S and some other stuff on the periphery. I left shaking my head and wondering what a strange world I live in.

So, I have a pretty big beef with current lean practitioners. I see a large oprah-ization of lean and I see many of what Taiichi Ohno called “catalog engineers“. Here’s one issue that bothers me. As you and I know, at Toyota Material and Information Flow Analysis was used – not as the catalyst for Kaizen, but often toward the tail end. It’s purpose was very specific and has an important albeit narrow purpose.

BUT, these days, the lean movement has made Value Stream Mapping an almost mandatory part of anything related to improvement. Some authors who have written about Value Stream Maps even call it strategic and all-encompassing. Maps everywhere. Managers of value streams all over the place. What do you think? Am I over-reacting?

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What’s the real history behind value stream mapping according to Art Smalley http://ctt.ec/7cO6E+

Well this is sort of a long and twisting story. Maybe some perspective here will help for the readers. When I came back to the U.S about the same time as John Shook we noted the strange bizarre world of Kaizen events in the early to mid 90’s that were all the rage. The contents linked to TPS concepts but the week long workshop package and implementation style was pretty different from actual TPS beliefs and practices in Japan. That is a long story for another day perhaps. Anyway a few companies became famous after working with entities like TBM and Shingijutsu. Most others did not succeed and had little to show for the efforts. More than a few instances I observed actually blew up and resulted in union drives, no results, and bad feelings. Of course those are never reported at the lean conferences by design.

Anyway John and I and others were wondering how to correct this phenomenon. At the time John had just finished a stint working in the Toyota Supplier Support Center in the U.S. TSSC practiced the act of having its internal consultants draw material and informational flow diagrams for learning purposes on the part of the consultant. It is a good tool to see flow, measure lead-time, see where inventory accumulates, and think about scheduling and pull systems, etc. John and Mike Rother and Jim Womack decided this could be a powerful tool to get people away from event based workshops which had little to no connectively to big picture stuff, the customer, and overall flow, etc. So they collectively created the workbook known as Learning to See: Value Stream Mapping. It was a big hit and changed Lean a fair amount from the overly event and tool driven model it had become. That is the positive side at least.

On the negative side it became a compliance type requirement of everyone to suddenly draw these maps everywhere as part of Lean. LEI even promoted that thinking at conferences, letters, workshops, etc. because they believed in the tool and it generated lots of money for them in all honesty. And certainly it helped some companies no doubt. However Toyota does not really draw these maps internally. I never drew one, neither did my boss who worked under Mr. Ohno and spent his entire career in the company. And Mr. Ohno certainly never drew one. There is no such thing as a Value Stream Manage in Toyota. That part is just opinion propagation by the Lean Enterprise Institute as they thought it was a good idea.

The idea of the map and usage is fine as long as you understand its purpose and limitations. It was not designed to be used for quality, productivity, cost, safety, and a whole host of other things. Originally it was a delivery and lead-time reduction mapping technique and that is all.

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“I call it all part of the Lean Wall Paper phenomenon” http://ctt.ec/AcD4U+

Unfortunately it somehow became a requirement for everyone to do regardless of the situation. I see books and stuff talking about how to do value stream maps in product development etc. and Toyota actually does no such thing. They use different tools and techniques to compress lead-time in product development. Shrug. If the tool works I tell people to go ahead and use it. The thinking process and results are what matter. Sadly I don’t see proper thinking on the usage of the tool just blind compliance and minimal results.

John, Mike, and Jim all know this as well and have tried to correct it over the years in various ways but once the genie got out of the bottle I don’t think there was a way to put it back inside. The same is true with Standardized Work, A3 Reports and other stuff. I call it all part of the Lean Wall Paper phenomenon.

What do you think of the Leanstartup movement? I personally feel it stays true to the spirit of TPS – of actual improvement. In their case, of actually building a product people will buy.

I read the book and like it. The nice thing is that it seems to keep it practical and focused on the basics of the customer, the product, the process, rapid execution, results, and feedback loops, etc. It is not overly mandating tool usage or compliance and seems to promote actual thinking and improvement.

Now let me switch to a personal question. You are a recognized expert practitioner and teacher in the Toyota Production System. Having said that, what is it you still don’t know? Can you share with us 3 things you are still working on learning or trying to get better at?

I’ll touch upon one thing as an analogy and give a personal example. When I joined Toyota I asked my boss how long it would take to become a good engineer and get promoted. He thought it would take seven years to learn the engineering side. Ten to twelve years to become an assistant manager, fifteen to twenty years to become a manager, and with luck and ability 25+ years to become a department general manager for example. Very few people achieve that level in Toyota for perspective.

What I eventually realized is that Toyota has no accelerated process for developing leadership. Toyota has the typical Japanese custom of bottom up training, apprenticeship, and learning by doing when the opportunity presents itself. There are benefits to that approach but one clear weakness is what do you do when you go overseas and need to develop leaders more quickly? How do I now make a leader in two years instead of twenty? Toyota has made some progress in this area but it is not their specialty or background. It is a real problem as I meet Toyota leaders in overseas plants and they are not always fully ready for the position they are placed it. Then factor in managerial turnover and other stuff and Toyota has a problems on its hands overseas.

Toyota plants overseas tend to cycle up and down in terms of performance and TPS and it ties back to leadership ability in the facility. The plants in the Japan don’t experience this phenomenon as much and it ties back to experience and leadership, etc. So I spend a lot of time these days working on this problem and learning about the process of leadership development. Compressing the time frame to develop a leader is an interesting topic and a difficult one. Most of what exists in this area in Lean is off base and not very helpful. I hope to produce something better in the next couple of years.

Thanks Art. Is there anything else you’d like to share with my audience?

Good luck and thanks for the interview. Remember that if you are not obtaining results from your lean efforts then something is wrong. Repeating a process over and over and just expecting better results is insanity to paraphrase Albert Einstein. Sometimes I think the Lean movement is guilty of this as well.

About Art Smalley

Art Smalley has over two decades experience with the Toyota Production System and leadership development. Art was one of the few Americans to ever work for Toyota Motor Corporation in Japan. Art learned TPS principles first hand at Kamigo Engine Plant which was founded under Taiichi Ohno and to this day remains the preeminent model for many aspects of the Toyota Production System. In addition Art worked with Russ Scaffede as Director of Improvement on a highly successful lean turnaround of Donnelly Corporation in the 1990′s. Later Art also worked for several years at the international consulting firm of McKinsey and Company along as serving as a senior instructor at the Lean Enterprise Institute. Art has published three books to date on a variety of topics including JIT scheduling methods, A3 Thinking, and Kaizen Methods. Two of these works have won Shingo Prizes for Research. In addition Art was inducted into the Shingo Academy for lifetime accomplishments.

The post Art Smalley Interview: Difference between the Toyota Production System and Lean as Practiced in America and Why He Shakes His Head in Confusion appeared first on shmula.

Continuing our interview series with some of the leading voices in Lean, today we’re speaking with Jeff Gothelf, the author of Lean UX. Applying Lean to user experience is exciting and, in my opinion, is an area of Lean that is sorely lacking attention. Most Lean practitioners focus on operations, but there’s not as much attention paid to the user experience. In today’s interview, you’ll learn the following:

1. What a Lean UX person has in common with a Lean guy on the manufacturing floor.
2. What Respect for People looks like in the context of Lean UX.
3. What are the 7 Wastes of Lean UX

Enjoy the interview with Jeff Gothelf and hope you will benefit from learning about Lean UX Process and Principles. Learn more about Jeff immediately after the interview.

Hello Jeff, and thanks for taking the time to speak with me. Could you please introduce yourself and your work to my readers?

I am an interaction designer who, over the last 16 years, has worked on a variety of products, apps and services. In the last 7 years I’ve been focusing my efforts on bridging the gap between great product design and agile engineering. This effort led to the publication of my book (along with co-author Josh Seiden) Lean UX: Applying lean principles to improve user experience in March of 2013. Today I work as a Lean evangelist for a digital product and strategy company called Neo out of their New York City office.

You’re a recognized expert in Lean UX. If you were speaking to someone on a manufacturing floor that was also a practitioner of Lean, how would you explain what you do to that person? Which areas would you both have in common?

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Lean UX is focused on increasing the efficiency of our efforts by removing components that don’t add value

We’re both focused on increasing the efficiency of our efforts specifically by removing components of our process that don’t add any value. On the manufacturing floor this likely manifests, for example, as minimizing efforts to source and utilize the raw materials for the object being manufactured. In Lean UX we’re limiting the amount of design documentation (our raw materials) being created in favor of more efficient practices like cross-functional collaboration.

In addition, we’re both working hard to mitigate the risk of building the wrong or inappropriate (defective) thing. In an assembly line, for example, a worker is empowered to stop production if a defect is detected. Similarly, lean designers work in small batches to ensure what they’re building is continuing to meet customer needs. They then have the ability to pause the process and call out potential defects that shouldn’t ship.

Can you explain how user experience design is practiced traditionally and how Lean UX is different?

Traditional user experience design has been practiced as a timeboxed (usually a few weeks or months) stand-alone process staffed largely only by designers. The input into the design process was a requirements document and the output has typically been polished visual design comps (mockups) that convey a finished product. The process to get from requirements to polished design was a mystery to non-designers. In fact, in most cases the rest of the team, specifically the engineers, would only see the proposed designs when they were finished leading to lengthy, painful and often confrontational negotiations about what the team could actually ship in the time allotted.

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“Lean UX opens up the design process by encouraging cross-functional collaboration from the moment a project starts.” http://ctt.ec/sabD8+

Lean UX opens up the design process by encouraging cross-functional collaboration from the moment a project starts. It pushes designers, engineers and product managers to state their assumptions early about the business problem being addressed, the audience being targeted and the potential feature sets that could meet that audience’s needs. The team then works together, creating the smallest experiments they can conceive to push their learning forward minimizing the amount of time they spend working on ideas that don’t deliver customer value. The process reduces the wasteful activities of upfront specifications and detailed design processes that aren’t based on market-sourced evidence and direct customer value. Finally Lean UX, lets the customer pull features and designs from the team based on direct interaction with the early experiments. This helps the team focus only on issues that can positively affect customer behavior.

One of the pillars of the Toyota Production System is Respect for People. Within the context of Lean UX, how is Respect for People put into practice? Do you have some examples that might resonate with my audience?

The digital product design process has traditionally been a closed process reserved only for experts, aka designers. It was assumed that other team members – product managers, software engineers, sales people, customers etc – could not offer any real value to these design efforts because they weren’t trained in design. By opening up the design process, Lean UX shows respect for all disciplines and points of view. Without these insights the team wastes time conceiving designs that may not be feasible, on target with corporate vision or meeting real customer needs. By respecting the opinions of this diverse group of contributors the team can make better decisions earlier in the process which leads to less time spent on efforts that don’t stand a strong chance of shipping.

Generally, can you share how some of the better known aspects of Lean looks like in the context of Lean UX? For example, Poka-Yoke, Kanban, Andon in Lean UX? Do you have specific examples of each that you could share?

Kanban: Lean UX encourages a short, continuous feedback loop with your target audience. Teams that exercise this well build a stream of knowledge that can help them prioritize their work and adjust, mid-stream based on this insight. Releases go to market when they’re ready as opposed to an arbitrary deadline.

Seven years ago we interviewed Aza Raskin on the Humane Interface and the influence of Lean on his dad’s book. Are there parallels between Lean UX and the Humane Interface?

I haven’t read the Human Interface but from the little that I do know I would guess there are significant parallels in the philosophy

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What are the 7 wastes in Lean UX http://ctt.ec/YgMG4+ with @jboogie

of the two ideas. Lean UX puts the customer at the center of the process with the goal of only building features the customer needs to solve real problems that customer actually has. By creating short, frequent customer-centric feedback loops the needs of the customer are regularly checked against the product being developed. Most importantly, as feedback bubbles up that contradicts the team’s current direction they have the ability to change course and further optimize the user experience of the product.

If we were to identify the 7 wastes traditional user experience design, what would they be? Do you have specific examples Transportation, Inventory, Motion, Waiting, Overproduction, Overprocessing, and Defects in Lean UX?

Interesting. I’ve never thought about UX in this context. Let’s take a stab at each one:

You describe traditional UX as a deliverables-heavy process, whereas Lean UX requires the designer to interact often and iteratively with his or her stakeholders for feedback. In the former, the “solitary designer” continues working in a waterfall-like manner. In the latter, the designer is required to interact with others. Will Lean UX work for creative individuals who prefer to work alone?

There will always be opportunities for creative work to take place in solitude. However, the inputs that drive that creativity must be shared and conceived collaboratively. The Lean designer doesn’t abdicate their design responsibilities to the team. Instead the design empowers the team to contribute to the design process in whatever way they can and then takes those contributions and synthesizes a more informed approach.

In many ways, Lean UX really parallels Product Development at Toyota, where there is a strong creative aspect with industrial designers, but is also a very iterative process requiring interaction with engineers and manufacturing leaders. They call it design for manufacturing. What do you think?

Designers can’t work in a vacuum and be successful. It’s the collaboration with other teammates coupled with rapid iteration that makes the product successful. On those terms, these ideas sound very compatible.

Any final words you’d like to share with my audience?

High quality software engineering is not enough to make products successful today. Coupled with it, great design brings products to life and makes them stand out from the competition. In the past, compartmentalizing the design process was acceptable to companies because the feedback loops were long and laborious. With the benefit of continuous deployment systems, easy access to customers and global distribution of code via the web and mobile ecosystems, that feedback loop can now be reduced to mere seconds. Because of this, our old wasteful practices of design need to be updated to reflect this new reality. Lean UX is that reboot.

About Jeff Gothelf

Jeff Gothelf is a user experience designer based in metro NYC. He has spent his career designing engaging experiences for clients big and small. He is currently the Director of User Experience at TheLadders.com where he helps executive jobseekers and recruiters make meaningful connections with each other. Previously Jeff helped shape the designs of AOL, Webtrends and Fidelity. Jeff publishes his thoughts on his blog and on Twitter.

The post Lean UX Process and Principles: An Interview with Jeff Gothelf appeared first on shmula.

Lean principles is being adopted across all business areas. It is, indeed, an exciting time to see so much acceptance. In today’s interview, we speak with Cecil Dijoux, a very influential voice in the world of Lean IT, or Lean for Information Technology. In this interview, you’ll learn the following:

• How Lean for Software, Leanstartup, Kanban for Software Development and Lean for IT are different in some ways and similar in other.
• As an IT leader, how you can partner with those on the shop floor to broaden your reach in your lean transformation.
• How Cecil recommends shop floor leaders partner with their IT colleagues in reaching an even broader employee base in a lean transformation.
• What Respect for People actually looks like in an IT context.

We’re very grateful to Cecil for taking the time to speak with us. Enjoy the interview and read more about Cecil after the interview.

Hello Cecil, and thanks for taking the time to speak with me. Could you please introduce yourself and your work to the readers?

My name is Cecil Dijoux and I am a french IT professional with more than 25 years experience. I have been working in different countries, industries and types of organizations. This has raised my interest in organizations culture in the 21st century. It also had developed a passion for management (yeah, I know how sad it sounds) with a special focus on Lean, Agile and Enterprise 2.0. I have been blogging about these topics for a bout 7 years now on #hypertextual. Life being full of surprises I managed to have one of my articles being discussed on the New York Times online.

You are a recognized expert in Lean IT. Can you explain exactly what Lean IT is for our audience?

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Learn about Lean IT Transformation with Cecil Dijoux

Hmm, being identified as a Lean IT expert by someone who has worked for Toyota is a bit embarassing. In all fairness, I would not rate myself as an expert: I see me more as an seasoned IT professional with a stong interest in Lean.

From a general perspective Lean IT is just applying Lean principles to the whole world of IT : both the Build (innovation and development of new features) and the Run (deployment, operations, maintenance and support).

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Agile tends to forget managers and put them aside. Lean brings the teaching kata as a daily practice for managers.

From an IT perspective I see Lean IT as an extension of Agile Methodologies along 5 axis : continous improvement, problem solving, value stream, customer and management.

Agile has brought introspection to software development with debriefs on regular monthly interval. Thanks to daily problem solving, Lean brings continuous improvement and hansei on a daily basis. Learning loop becomes much shorter and people learn much faster. In Agile there is no structured way to handle problem and once you have harvested the low hanging fruit thanks to short iteration, visual management and enhanced collaboration, you hit a plateau. With Lean IT comes PDCA a structured practice for problem solving which helps in taking off from the plateau, indefinitely.

Lean IT also puts the customer right in the middle of the process while it seems to me that most of the time, Agile is centered around the team. Besides, Lean helps us focussing on the full value stream from Marketing to deployment and support, the last two being quite often ignored by Agile teams from my experience. Last but not least, Lean puts management back into the game : Agile tends to forget managers and put them aside. Lean brings what Mike Rother calls the teaching kata as a daily practice for managers.

Related question: If you were explaining what you do to someone on the manufacturing floor very familiar with Lean, how would you do it? On which areas would you build a common bond?

Hum .. a tough challenge … I would be very humble trying to explain to this guy that IT is not only here to make his life miserable : it also can brings value to the company. The problem I see with most IT organization is they have given a bad reputation to IT. Their role has been to rationalize and set enterprise processes into the marble of complicated IT systems. Quite the opposite of Lean approach, really.

There’s been much talk about Lean for Software and Kanban Software Development. And, more recently, the Leanstartup. Can you draw some distinctions between Lean IT and them?

Lean Software Development appeared about 10 years ago with the work (and the books) of Tom and Mary Poppendieck. Kanban software development method appeared about 5 years ago with the book of David Anderson. Lean Start-up in 2011 with the work of Eric Ries.

LSD is more of a set of best practices. What I find fascinating with this work by the Poppendieck is that they naturally bridged Agile with Lean principles.

Kanban IT method (as opposed to Kanban as a production system, the initial one by Toyota) is merely an extension of the Scrum board while introducing the notion of reducing the Work In Progress and somehow pulling the flow. The main difference I see between Kanban IT method and Lean is that the former uses Kanban as an end (the tool to manage production in IT) while in Lean Kanban is used as a mean to feed the teams with PDCA and implement continuous improvement (actually, Kanban aim is to make itself obsolete). As we reduce the WiP, new problems appear and the team improve while solving them and removing waste. It is a slightly different perspective.

Lean Start-up is a Product Development approach. It helps in developing the right product very fast. Lean is an Organization Development approach : it helps in developing people so that they can develop the best product or services. We have an example with our customers. They’ve been developing great services thanks to Lean Start-Up approach. But then their growth spawned organizational problems they could not deal with. Lean has helped them in that regard with some quite spectacular results (tripled the business in 12 months).

One of the pillars of the Toyota Production System is Respect for People. Within the context of Lean IT, how is Respect for People put into practice? Is there a specific example you wouldn’t mind sharing?

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Clarify challenge make measurable, Create visual management foster collaboration, Coach on shop floor solve problems

This is a great question. Freddy and Michael Ballé have just published a great book on that very topic (Lead With Respect). What is really interesting is that book tells the story of an IT company CEO discovering Lean as she tries to deliver better quality service and software to her customer, an automotive industry supplier.

Respect for People is a principle whereby if you put the teams in the right context they will succeed. My colleagues and inspiration Regis Medina and Antoine Contal always come back to the same three things:

1. Clarify the challenge and make it measurable
2. Create visual management to foster enhanced collaboration
3. Coach the team on the shop floor and solve problems as they appear

In IT, the shop floor is the code, the continuous deployment environment, the server, the logs, the specifications, the support request etc … That’s the reason why it helps in thoroughly knowing this industry to coach teams in Lean IT.

Sometimes people understands Respect for People as let them figuring out by themselves what the best course of action is and I don’t buy into that. There needs to be a challenge and problem solving for people to improve and be proud of what they achieve, every day. This great idea comes from Gemba Walks the book by Jim Womack.

A great example I have in the software development world is, while we were implementing Lean Software Development, how the work of the testers completely changed as they were involved from the very early stages of feature design. They were no longer the sad chaps that come and find problem at the end of the development changes. They were considered as experts helping the team all the way in building quality in.

More generally, can you share how some of the better known aspects of Lean looks like in the context of IT? For example, Poka-Yoke in IT? Kanban in IT? Andon in IT?

Poka Yoke in IT can be seen from the product perspective: structured data in forms – not being able to enter text in a date field for instance. The example I love is when you mentioned an attached document in a mail in Gmail and you forget to put it, there is a message asking you if you haven’t forget to attach it. Another Poka Yoke in IT is in continuous deployment when the the application and the modules are built (compiled, and tested) and unit tests fail: then the system just stop and the module is not built : why would you build a module where you have introduced a regression and a test don’t succeed ?

Andon would be when a developer hit a problem she can not solve and then call her team leader to help her in fixing it on the spot. Scrum meeting in the morning is a great way to make such problem visible. Lean would not wait for one day to solve such issue but Scrum helps in making sure people don’t get stuck on issue for weeks (as I’ve witnessed a few times in my career).

For Kanban in IT, it can be used in development but I think for Support and / or maintenance teams it really is appropriate. The problem would be to make an organization wide Kanban to take into account the whole value stream. I am not sure how feasible that is in today’s organizations.

If we were to identify the 7 wastes in IT, what would they be? Do you have specific examples Transportation, Inventory, Motion, Waiting, Overproduction, Overprocessing, and Defects in IT?

From my experience… Transportation would be to manually copy data or system (servers installations and configuration etc … ) around. I have this telling story of two great guys (both excellent developers) who are best friends always taking coffee break together : one was working in continuous deployment team and the other was a scrum master. It took 4 months and a working session I organised for them to figure out that the scrum master spent 90 minutes everyday to install a version of the software that the second one has automated. You tell me what a waste !

Most common Inventory I’ve seen are specifications that take time not only from product development but also development, UX and test teams, and these specifications are never developed because we run short on time.

Waiting is when you have developers waiting for some software from another team : cross-functional teams are a great way to remove those.

Overproduction can be related to over-engineering (developing a generic system for one use case – what Agile mischievously prevents with YAGNI !) or overproduction of features : there was this study by the CHAOS group showing that more than two thirds of enterprise software features are hardly or never used !

Overprocessing can be related to, again, over-engineered software, that would, because of genericity and complexity, harm the performance in some significant way making life miserable for system users. Enterprise Software perfectly embodies this and anyone would has tried to trace Enterprise Java Beans code knows what I mean.

Defects are the easiest: bugs. Application should do Y it does X, it should do Z and you get an error 500 or 404 or the « blue screen of death »/ Or it should do X in 2 seconds and it takes 20.

Suppose a company was engaged in a bottoms-up lean transformation in an area outside of IT. How can the person on the shop floor, in a call center, in a nurses station partner with IT to have a broader effect on the organization?

I would bring people to the Gemba to show them the value stream and how easy it is for the user of the service or the product. Showing a streamlined process does wonder in having people to think about theirs. Like many Lean enthusiast I thought that people will be engaged when we talk about Ohno, Shingo or Kanban theory. Actually they don’t really care. When they see it in practice, it usually is some kind of revelation. And I would show it backwards, from the end, i.e from the customer perspective.

Now the opposite question: If someone was involved in transforming IT by implementing Lean principles, how might the IT leader reach out to other persons in the company that may be implementing Lean in their own world?

Again, I would show the value stream. I have this customer need expressed as a User Story (i.e from the Customer perspective). We have discussed this story with the full cross-functional team making sure we all are on par with what has to be done. We split it in small tasks, development of which we follow on our Kanban board with our pull flow. Then we make sure the support team is aware of the new feature, the code is implemented on production and the customer can test it. Showing how streamlined the process is and how value is created at every step is, in my opinion, the best way to have people think about what it would take in their own context.

Thanks Cecil. Is there anything else you’d like to share with my audience?

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Lean suffers from a low tech image and this does not gives justice to the lean ability to navigate this complex world

I strongly believe that Lean is the most appropriate way to manage enterprises in today business world. The world is changing fast with some changes being very brutal as not only companies, but whole industries, live under the threat of the advent of some radical innovation. Within that context, the ability for the organization to become resilient and to learn is key : this is what Lean brings to the company.

To be more specific, I believe that digitization is one of the main challenges of the organizations today and a Digital Kaizen approach is the best way to go.

My point of view is that Lean suffers from a low tech image and this does not gives justice to the lean ability to navigate this complex world : this is one pf the challenges of the lean community to change this perception.

Many thanks Pete for this great opportunity to discussing this with you. Keep up the good work!

About Cecil Dijoux

After 25 years in the world of IT I have decided to move to coaching. This experience allows me to help teams to create the context fostering continuous improvement and operational performance. I have practiced many of the different jobs of the industry (development, support, operations, architecture, management, methods) in all sorts of institutions (start-up, global companies, public organisations) in different european countries. This experience feeds my thoughts regarding cultures and organisations in an interconnected world, thoughts contributing to the blog thehypertextual.com. Enthusiast practitionner of Agile methodologies (since 2004) and Lean management (2011), passionnate about Enterprise 2.0, my role consist in helping IT teams and managers engage in a win-win-win formula with executives and the customers.

The post Lean IT Transformation: An Interview with Cecil Dijoux appeared first on shmula.

The Sales function within a company is one of the most important. After all, if there are no sales, there’s no revenue. To paraphrase Peter Drucker, the only purpose for a company is to create a customer. The firm creates customers through sales. While Lean has penetrated almost every function in an organization, the role of Lean in Sales and Marketing is still in its infancy.

In today’s interview, we present Brent Wahba. He is an influential voice in Lean and a recognized expert in Lean as applied to Sales processes. In this interview, you’ll learn the following:

• Why explaining Lean for Sales and Marketing will be fairly easy to explain to a Lean guy on the shop floor.
• What are the 3 types of sales process in sales and marketing and why Lean must be tailored to each one.
• Why it actually makes sense to begin your Lean journey by applying Lean principles in Sales and Marketing, versus the tradition application on the manufacturing floor.
• What Respect for People looks like in a Sales organization?

We thank Brent for taking the time to speak with us. We have much to learn from his expertise. Enjoy the interview and learn more about Brent after the interview below. And if you wish to contact him to help you in your organization, his contact information can be found after the interview.

Thanks for taking the time to speak with me. Could you please introduce yourself and your work to my readers?

Thanks, Pete. This is quite a pleasure – I love your website. I have had a really interesting career up to this point. I started in R&D at GM, worked in and managed almost every organizational function, and eventually led a global systems business at Delphi. I was fortunate enough to be able to study and apply Lean, Six Sigma, and several other problem solving methodologies along the way, and this led me to my current work as president of a consulting network, Strategy Science Inc., where we help clients learn to improve Sales & Marketing, Product Development, and Strategy on their own.

I am also on the Lean Enterprise Institute Faculty where I teach Lean Sales & Marketing, regularly contribute to the LEI Lean Post, and have published a book titled The Fluff Cycle on solving Sales & Marketing problems. When I am not in airports, I love to do volunteer start-up / small business mentoring through SCORE.

You’re a recognized expert in Lean as applied to the Sales function. If you were speaking to someone on a manufacturing floor that was also a practitioner of Lean, how would you explain what you do to that person? Which areas would you both have in common?

That is a great question and one that I get asked a lot. At its core, Lean is Lean – no matter what value stream you support. It is all about engaging everybody, every day in solving problems, adding more value, utilizing fewer resources, and ultimately achieving the organization’s purpose through helping customers achieve their own purpose. Whether it is on the factory floor or during a sales call, we all have to improve our work while changing the way we think and act.

The difference comes in the type of work we each perform, and I help Sales & Marketing organizations become more efficient and effective at understanding customer needs (stated and latent, technical and emotional), aligning corporate strategies to those needs, providing useful information to the organization so they can create valuable and competitive solutions for those needs, communicating those solutions back to customers, and then facilitating the trial, buying decision, purchase, delivery, and feedback processes to satisfy those customers now, and encouraging them to repeat their purchases and say good things to other potential customers later. Sales & Marketing processes span the entire timeline from a customer’s first exposure to a need, desire, problem, or brand to basically the end of when they could possibly influence anyone else to buy from you.

Sales is a process. Does Lean work the same way on a sales process as it does on a manufacturing process? What are some differences?

One of the biggest mistakes organizations make in trying to implement Lean within Sales & Marketing is by just thinking about it as a transactional, production-like process or a “Sales Factory.” This seems to be a recurring problem as I unfortunately recall the very unsuccessful push for “Engineering Factories” at the beginning of Lean Product Development.

Yes, there are many elements of Sales or Marketing processes that are repetitive in nature like processing sales orders, creating e-mail campaigns, or editing and broadcasting commercials, and these types of processes do benefit greatly from what we have learned in Lean Manufacturing. BUT, we also know that there are different complexities in Sales & Marketing work and some very different types of processes. First of all, Sales & Marketing does not output one type of work for one type of customer – like manufacturing a toaster.

In addition to serving end, paying customers, we also serve Operations, Engineering, R&D, Strategy, Purchasing, Service, etc. with critical information that they all need for their own processes. As we know from Lean Product Development, these “learning processes,” like market research for instance, are managed as variable learning cycles rather than standardized, step-by-step, always-get-the-same-output value streams.

Secondly, a large part of Sales & Marketing work is geared towards influencing both external and internal customers to change their behavior. Nobody woke up one day and out of the blue needed an iPhone, but rather they were educated and influenced over time to desire one because they were valuable. And no doubt Steve Jobs was influenced through many formal and informal processes to decide to put Apple’s resources behind creating the iPhone in the first place.

There is a lot of science behind influence processes that unfortunately doesn’t always align with our common lean thinking. For instance we have learned that websites need a certain amount of webpage “friction” (slowing the reader down) to maximize customer action and conversion. We also know that the human brain rewards itself during the “hunting” process of buying something and thus there can be tremendous value in the journey. If we just blindly pursued the “leanest” possible website or shortest possible buying experience, we could be losing sales.

So the fact that we have 3 types of processes in Sales & Marketing makes applying Lean more challenging, but also more interesting. There is a lot of opportunity for breakthrough improvement.

If given the chance for a lean transformation in one part of a company and the sales function, what is a good argument to begin in sales?

Starting a lean transformation in Sales & Marketing often makes a lot of sense. Most of us were taught to start in Manufacturing because it is close to the customer and easier to demonstrate a quick success. Unfortunately, Operations doesn’t often have the bandwidth to complete their day jobs, perform improvement work, and then try to push Lean upstream into other functions like Sales or Product Development. No matter how lean the Ops folks get, they still receive hard to manufacture product designs from Engineering, uneven order schedules form Sales, and don’t have a clear definition of what customers truly value from Marketing.

If we start our lean journey in Sales & Marketing, however, we not only improve our own work, but our improvements immediately lead to less waste in the other functions – thus giving them more “capacity” to perform their own improvement work. Sales & Marketing also typically has a better view of what needs to change strategically and that is very critical to aligning the transformation with the business’ needs. It is not talked about much, but there is actually a lot of waste in applying Lean across an enterprise, and we can do a much better job if we put in a little more upfront analysis and planning.

One of the pillars of the Toyota Production System is Respect for People. Within the context of Lean Sales, how is Respect for People put into practice? Do you have some examples that might resonate with my audience?

In Psychology there is a theory of intrinsic motivation called the Self-Determination Theory that not only aligns well with TPS’ Respect for People, but is also very helpful on the social side of problem solving within Sales & Marketing organizations.

The three key elements are basically:

1. people need to feel autonomous in their jobs – that they own both how to perform and improve their work
2. people need to feel like they are recognized as experts in their trades, and
3. people belong and contribute to a larger group with a worthy purpose. When we use this model along with our more conventional Lean tools, we get much better results than a simple process improvement approach.

One example was with a client that “wanted to do Lean in Sales” because management didn’t think revenue was high enough and Sales just needed to “get on board with Lean” to fix that. Sales was definitely not getting much respect. By not assuming that the problems were only Sales-specific issues, and engaging the salespeople themselves in holistic problem solving, however, the improvement team determined that the root cause problems were actually confusing strategic directions from above, a lack of the right portfolio of products to sell, and salesperson fear of having to meet with customers who had overdue deliveries.

Sure there were many little improvements that Sales could and did make, but by eliminating the blaming and then fixing the real problems, the Sales group learned that Lean really could help them solve the entire system’s problems and they felt much more respected.

Another client had a sales manager with poor results, a bad attitude, and no apparent desire to learn Lean. Rather than threaten or punish him, however, this client decided to use Strategy Deployment (Hoshin Kanri) to engage him in sales planning, PDCA, and problem solving. He was shown more respect in that he was now part of a scientific goal setting process (catch ball) rather than just being handed “impossible” targets. His attitude and results turned around very quickly.

On a related note, when the central office coaches come in to “enlighten” Sales & Marketing about Lean and use a lot of manufacturing analogies and Lego simulations, it almost always ends badly. Sales & Marketing need to be engaged by solving their own problems and not disrespected because they don’t naturally draw a direct correlation between a running production line and preparing a quote or meeting with customers.

Let’s discuss Lean culture. What does a lean culture look like and feel like in a sales organization?

Cultures change based on shared problem solving, but there are also different sub-cultures within different functions – even across Sales and Marketing. What “Lean Culture” emerges thus depends on what specific problems an organization faces and how they eventually solve those problems.

Overall, however, I would say that a lean sales organization is more scientific, more engaged in problem solving, and seeks to understand and improve the bigger organizational and market-wide systems they are part of. When I say “scientific,” I mean across many disciplines including buyer psychology, strategy, problem solving, and Complex Adaptive Systems which helps describe how markets and organizations change in unpredictable ways. Also, many people talk about the discipline aspect of Lean, but I have found that it is much easier to let discipline naturally emerge from a problem solving culture than try to force it at the beginning – especially in Sales & Marketing.

Generally, can you share how some of the better known aspects of Lean looks like in the context of Lean Sales? For example, Poka-Yoke, Kanban, Andon in Lean for Sales? Do you have specific examples of each that you could share?

The typical Lean Manufacturing tools definitely have their place in transactional sales processes, but I generally avoid teaching a lot of tools until the team has identified a specific problem that any particular method could help resolve. A critical part of becoming expert problem solvers is wrestling with problems to gain better insight, rather than just reaching for a book or finding a benchmark example to copy.

For example, we only introduced Strategy Deployment at Delphi for sales planning and managing the pipeline with PDCA after my team thoroughly defined that we needed a more efficient way to manage both our portfolio and our limited resource salesforce (illustrative example – not real data):

I also have a client in healthcare management that was having trouble aligning capacity with demand. Operations would typically learn about a new contract with only 2 weeks lead time to start, but it required 6 months to hire and train the registered nurses they needed to staff Operations. The solution (along with value stream mapping Operations and creating standard work) was a joint planning / PDCA / visual controls board that showed contract status and potential impact (illustrative example – not real data):

What is so nice about their tool is that it embeds many lean tool concepts, yet it was their own solution. Creation and ownership of tools is often a very effective means of driving more engagement.

If we were to identify the 7 wastes in Sales, what would they be? Do you have specific examples Transportation, Inventory, Motion, Waiting, Overproduction, Overprocessing, and Defects in Lean Sales?

Everybody has their favorite 8th or 9th waste, so let me start with mine. The biggest waste of all is a non-value producing strategy because it means that the entire organization, no matter how efficient, is headed in the wrong direction and taking their customers, suppliers, and stakeholders with them. It is a major root cause for many of the other wastes.

As far as the other 8 go (I include Underutilized People as #8), they are so ubiquitous that it doesn’t make a lot sense to try to change them – just give Sales & Marketing-specific examples so they make more sense:

In working with sales organizations, what is their receptiveness to lean principles? Is there resistance? If so, what are the main reasons for resistance?

In my experience, there is little resistance to the actual Lean principles, but resistance does form strongly over time because of the way Lean is introduced or informally observed. Typically, Sales is the last part of the organization to start any lean projects and that gives them a lot of time to hear about many examples that don’t really apply to them. They fear that Lean is going to turn them into “Japanese-speaking robots,” which of course couldn’t be further from the truth, and we’ve already talked about the dangers of trying to create a “Sales Factory” to solve the wrong type of problem.

But if we start our Lean discussion around the things that really matter to Sales & Marketing practitioners and achieving their goals – solving customer problems, creating products and services that customers want to buy, making their own work and selling lives easier, and improving their interface with other parts of the organization, the acceptance is very high.

In the sales world, there are many well-known and accepted selling methodologies like Sandler, SPIN, and Consultative Selling that are nothing more than standardized sales processes with integrated learning loops. This is exactly what Lean creates for Sales & Marketing, but it is a custom solution to a company’s particular problems which results in even more efficiency and effectiveness. In my travels, I meet many Sales & Marketing practitioners that are already lean by their nature and thought processes and don’t even know it yet.

Given a typical sales funnel, can you share how someone with a lean worldview would view that funnel?

I am oversimplifying here, but most organizations look at two major problems in their funnels:

1. trying to cram more prospects into the mouth – with hopes that more customers will come out the other end, and
2. trying to prevent more potential customers from leaking out along the way to conversion. Somehow it becomes Sales’ job to manage those customers through that funnel like they are cattle or something.

A Lean view would provide a more holistic, enterprise-wide solution. We would better understand how our unique capabilities could provide more value to the right customers, only pursue those right customers, and create a constant learning process along the strategy / product development / selling / delivery / service path so we fine-tune our value while simultaneously educating and influencing our customers.

When we get to the end of something that looks more like a pipe than a funnel, there would be many fewer surprises so we would have much higher confidence and less unevenness in what our production requirements are going to be, and know what elements of value have the most leverage for customer satisfaction and repeat purchase. And when we get really good at understanding the technical and emotional attributes of customer value, our customers become our salespeople and help spread the word for us. This is called “flipping the funnel” in the social media world.

Let’s suppose Lean for Sales can actually make the sales process more efficient. But can Lean help the sales function generate more sales? Can applying Lean in Sales help to increase conversions? How?

Definitely! There are two major parts to this. First of all, if we better understand what customers value, we will develop better products, services, and operational capabilities that provide that value. This will naturally lead to higher sales. Also, within the selling process we will be providing more valuable information to those customers at the right time, place, format, and quantity to help them make better buying decisions that include our offerings. Secondly, only after we understand value can we understand waste, and can thus can target our efforts towards the activities that really do lead to more sales.

The department store magnate, John Wanamaker, famously stated “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half,” but I think he was wildly optimistic. I, as much as anybody, love those entertaining Super Bowl commercials, but the trouble is that the vast majority don’t lead to higher sales or even better brand perception. There is a ton of waste in just promotion and advertising – we need to leverage that science of Consumer Psychology along with our Lean concepts so that we don’t just streamline our waste.

How do you know if Lean for Sales is adding value to the firm? Can you share some results from your prior work – perhaps a before and after would be instructive.

Everybody wants to measure sales $s (and yes, there are examples of how Lean helped grow sales by 30 – 100%), but that just proves my point that most organizations aren’t looking at how Lean helps entire enterprises perform as interrelated systems. If we have horrible products that we can’t deliver to save our lives, then getting more efficient at selling isn’t going to help our long-term growth or even the short-term bottom line – we are just going to get better and faster at alienating customers.

Sure we all want more sales, but rarely are our problems so simple that tweaking a value stream or adding some tools is going to make a significant or lasting difference. Success in any part of Lean comes from identifying and solving the most critical organization-wide problems and then continuing to find the next organizational bottleneck.

When Delphi was spun-off from General Motors, we had a very pressing need to diversify our customer and market bases. We knew our GM business was going to decrease, so we had to find a way to offset it before we could even consider growth. In my product lines we started by approaching many, many potential customers and we essentially got nowhere – despite a lot of hard work. As we applied Lean, overhauled our strategy, targeted specific markets and customers, developed customer-specific value propositions, and then developed new products / services / global lean manufacturing capabilities to implement those value propositions, we quickly gained traction – reducing our development and quotation lead times by 50 and 80%, and capturing 10 of 10 target customers in 7 of 7 target markets.

It was almost too good to be true. Oh, and we did it with 25% fewer resources and 1 less management layer. But these were our specific problems and solutions – “your results may vary.”

So the proof comes when a company identifies their particular bottlenecks and then solves them. Some other examples include: 30% reduction in new business analysis lead time, implementing an enterprise-wide Voice-of-the-Customer process to capture customer feedback at every point of contact to better understand total lifetime value, and increasing company-wide capacity utilization by 10% by just better-aligning selling with manufacturing site allocation. Greater sales will eventually come from all these improvements, but in a complex business system there rarely is a quick way to reliably measure only the sales $ effects of any particular actions – there are too many other uncontrollable variables and simultaneous changes.

How can someone learn more if they want to begin applying lean to their sales process?

I would be a horrible salesperson if I didn’t take this opportunity to promote my book, The Fluff Cycle,” or my classes and Lean Post articles at the Lean Enterprise Institute. And I would also be a horrible guest if I ddidn’t plug Shmula.com’s focus on customer experience – a huge part of what Lean can offer to the Sales & Marketing world. Case studies are always interesting, but I caution people to remember that those are particular solutions to some other organization’s particular problems and chances are fairly low that they apply directly to you. The very best way to learn is to experiment, sometimes fail, and then experiment again and again.

Any final words you’d like to share with my audience?

In my 20+ years of Lean, my best advice comes from observing the small % of companies that are truly successful and sustain their progress. The one thing that sets them apart is that they don’t “do Lean,” in the conventional textbook / somebody else’s model & tools approach, but rather they regularly solve important problems, with their own solutions, to advance their business. The goal should never be to become lean, but rather to become a better business – no matter what methods you need to use to get there. When companies do this, Lean naturally emerges from within the organization, and they end up spending far less effort on a better, company-specific solution. One great example can be found here in my article ‘Are We “Doing Lean” All Wrong? ¹

Thank you very much, Pete, this truly has been a pleasure!

About Brent Wahba

Brent Wahba learned how to apply Lean and Sigma by spending over 20 years in the automotive industry in a variety of leadership and technical positions at the Delphi Corporation. While there, he headed global product lines, led the creation and implementation of sales & marketing strategies, managed R&D and new product development organizations, and optimized operations – all while developing new applications of continuous improvement methodologies. Today he writes, gives talks, teaches classes, and consults on many topics including Adaptive Strategic Planning, Product Development Process & Culture Change, and Sales & Marketing Problem Solving. His latest work includes the book The Fluff Cycle (And How To End It By Solving REAL Sales & Marketing Problems). Brent is currently the President of the Strategy Science consulting network, and is also on the faculty of the Lean Enterprise Institute where he teaches Lean Sales & Marketing. When he is not travelling around the world, he can be found giving volunteer start-up business mentoring near his home in Dallas, Texas.

Brent holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Rochester, an MS in Materials Science and Engineering from the Rochester Institute of Technology, an MBA from the University of Rochester, and has authored 10 patents.

He can be contacted at brentwahba@strategyscienceinc.com or 585.315.7051

The post Lean Sales and Marketing with Brent Wahba appeared first on shmula.

I’m very excited to present to you this interview with David J. Anderson. He’s a Management author, consultant & trainer and Pioneer of the use of Kanban Systems in creative & knowledge worker industries. I’m grateful he took the time out of his very busy schedule to spend with us and in answering our questions.

In this interview, you’ll learn:

• The long road of discovery, self-reflection, and learning that led up to the development of Kanban for use in creative and knowledge work.
• What influenced David’s thinking in his development of the virtual Kanban system for creative and knowledge work.
• A few case studies of where Kanban has been implemented, and the broad support and acceptance by companies of all types.
• Despite broad support, there remains some resistance still – what are the common objections and why?

Enjoy the article and read more about David and his work after the interview.

Hi David. Can you tell my audience a little about yourself and your work?

I grew up in Scotland. My background is in software. I started as a games developer in the early 1980s. I went to university later and studied electronics, mostly control systems engineering and almost took a PhD in wind turbine design but the funding for the research fell through and instead I took a job as the development manager at a 5 year old startup company. I did startups for most of my 20s then moved in big corporations arriving in the United States in 1999 where I worked for Sprint PCS and later Motorola’s PCS division as department manager/director. My last real job was Senior Director of Software Engineering at Corbis, a company privately owned by Bill Gates.

These days I am Chairman of Lean Kanban Inc., a firm that licenses my intellectual property and training materials to certified trainers around the world, and organizes a series of conferences globally. Some years there can be as many as 14 of these happening around the world. This year we have 9 or 10 on 3 continents.

I’m best known these days for my work introducing virtual kanban systems into software development and for its spread into general knowledge work and creative industries. It also spawned the Personal Kanban movement as one of my business partners at the time, Jim Benson, documented how to apply the ideas to our personal lives and personal productivity. In the past I’ve been known as a contributor to the Agile Software Development movement and I’d also published work in the fields of Object-Oriented Analysis & Design and User Interface Design.

I’ve written 3 books, Agile Management for Software Engineering (2003), Kanban – Successful Evolutionary Change for your Technology Business (2010), and Lessons in Agile Management (2012). I have a few unfinished manuscripts in development and expect to have a new book published next year.

You are credited with applying the use of Kanban to creative and knowledge work. Can you take us back in history and share the context that led up to the development of the Kanban method and what influenced its development?

My first book was inspired by a synthesis of Feature-Driven Development (one of the methods that was recognized at the foundation of the Agile Software Development movement), Donald Reinertsen’s work in New Product Development and specifically his ideas on flow of information discovery, and Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints (and specifically his Drum-Buffer-Rope solution for bottlenecks in flow). The book demonstrated how to visualize flow of software development in the Feature-Development process using cumulative flow diagrams (from Reinertsen) and then recognize bottlenecks (from Goldratt) and provided guidance on how to improve based on this information.

When Reinertsen saw my work, he casually remarked that I had all the building blocks in place to implement a kanban system for software development and he argued strongly that this would produce more reliable results the Drum-Buffer-Rope approach because chance cause variability in knowledge work processes has a bigger influence on flow than the presence of bottlenecks. I’ve learned over the years that he is right in this thinking and that in perhaps 90% of cases variability dominates and bottlenecks are not a particularly relevant way to find improvement opportunities.

In 2004, a manager at Microsoft in their IT division, Dragos Dumitriu, approach me for advice on improving his software maintenance department based in Hydrabad in India. It was the first time, I got to apply the kanban system approach. The kanban were virtual and implemented in software that triggered an email when there was a “kanban” free in the database of the work tracking system. The email to manager triggered a “pull” in the system. It worked very well. We more than trebled the delivery rate from that department, and reduced lead time by over 90%. The on-time delivery performance rose from 0% to 98%. All of this over a 15 month period and spending very little money. The results were impress enough for both of us to believe that the technique should be used again.

I didn’t really understand what The Kanban Method was until I came to write the book published in 2010, and I didn’t understand where it came from until I wrote Lessons in Agile Management 2 years later.

When I was writing my first book in 2002, I realized that I was largely writing the wrong book. The intent was to show that Agile Software Development methods produced an economically superior outcome and to model this with product development flow and Theory of Constraints. The book assumed that organizations were installing an Agile method. As I wrote the book, and from painful experience I was gaining at Motorola, I came to realize that people resist the imposition of prescribed methods of working. So what I really wanted was an evolutionary approach where improvements start from the current process – there is no prescribed defined new process to be adopted and followed.

Initially, I’d viewed the use of kanban systems as simply one incremental step, deployed when appropriate to improve workflow. It wasn’t until we put up boards in January 2007 and introduced formal feedback mechanisms such as operations reviews that we started to see evolutionary change. Until 2007, I’d viewed the managerial things I did to drive evolutionary change such as a focus on facts, data, empirical observation, pragmatism, collaboration, empowerment and operations review as separate from the use of kanban systems.

When I came to document Kanban in 2009, I simply wrote it all down as one thing. It wasn’t until I was curating and editing my blog archive from 12 years of blogging, for the Lessons in Agile Management book, that I spotted that two separate threads in my work had come together and merged into the one thing we now know as The Kanban Method during 2007.

I’ve drawn an analogy to Bruce Lee’s Jeet Kun Do approach to Chinese martial arts with the Kanban Method. It takes its name from one core practice but is in fact an evolutionary approach. With Jeet Jun Do, the “way of the intercepting fist” the name comes from a single move but the method is evolutionary and involves each practitioner evolving their own unique style. With the Kanban Method, the name comes the use of kanban systems but the method is evolutionary and each service delivery workflow evolves uniquely to serve its customers better.

If you don’t consider your work to be inspired by or related to the Toyota Production System, why do you use the terms Lean and Kanban, as in LeanKanban University? Do you feel that adds to a branding confusion?

I consider a lot of my work to be inspired by the Lean Product Development movement and particularly that of Donald Reinertsen, and in turn his work inspired by Marvin Patterson. I’ve also adopted aspects of Michael Kennedy’s work particularly naming conventions to avoid confusion. Clearly kanban systems are part of TPS and we’ve also demonstrated that Heijunka is a valid and useful technique though we don’t refer to it as Heijunka to avoid too much arcane language from manufacturing and industrial engineering. So clearly, my work has a significant Toyota influence.

I also consider what we do to be very close to the core of the Toyota way, in that it is driven as a management and cultural approach rather than as an industrial engineering or process improvement approach. We expect all managers to be trained in our methods and for it to become a day-to-day part of their jobs. We don’t expect what we teach to be led by process improvement groups, though we know that it often is, particularly in Western companies. I don’t consider my work to be inspired or referential to much if anything every published by members of LEI or practiced by McKinsey.

The brand LeanKanban actually comes from an accident. We discovered another firm was planning to start a web site called Lean-Agile University to promote classes in Lean Software Development and Kanban. At the time, we had just formalized a trade association agreement with 16 partners globally to license our training curriculum and teach it in their local languages. We needed a web site to list those classes. So we formed a joint venture with that other firm and the name evolved to Lean-Kanban University.

Later I bought that other partner out of the firm, merged it with our conference business and renamed simply to Lean Kanban Incorporated. For now we retain the “university” term in the brand of the training materials but that may change at some stage in the future. The word Kanban isn’t something you can protect as a trademark. So we needed “something”-Kanban or Kanban-“something” and so why not Lean Kanban? It’s just a handle for referring to our particular flavor of management training. I’m proud that we’ve been able to develop something as powerful as Toyota’s system for manufacturing and supply chain management that can be used widely across creative and knowledge worker industries.

There seems to broad support and interest from the software development community in trying Kanban. What are some quantifiable and qualitative benefits you’ve seen when organizations adopt Kanban. Can you share a specific example from your experience?

There are many documented case studies. Not all of them show quantitative results. Often the baseline was so immature there is no quantitative baseline from which to measure the improvement. Where there was a quantitative baseline, the results are often stunning, and eye-popping to those from a manufacturing background.

• At Microsoft, we more than trebled productivity.
• The BBC produced a 700% improvement. This result is documented in IEEE Management, a peer-reviewed academic journal.
• Another improvement initiative at Hewlett-Packard’s printer firmware group showed an 800% improvement with fully 50% of that (or 400% improvement) directly attributed to the use of Kanban. The purely qualitative results are impressive too.
• The CIO of Blizzard Skis in Austria won the Austrian CIO of the Year award in 2013 for his Kanban implementation. The factory had earlier implemented a classic Lean production system with the help of Porsche Consulting. They became the world’s first Lean ski manufacturer.
• One of Europe’s fastest growing and most successful startups, Jimdo, in Hamburg use Kanban for the whole company, even the building janitor has his own Personal Kanban board!

We see Kanban adopted at the largest firms on most major continents. Petrobras in Rio de Janeiro has an entire business unit running on Kanban.

• China: Some of China’s largest firms such as Huawei (a telecom equipment manufacturer) and Ping An (a financial services company) are also large adopters. Inward investment business in China and India are also adopters such as Thomson Reuters, Microsoft (the former Nokia), Volvo, and Sabre Holdings.
• Russia: One of the largest banks in Russia is a big adopter across its entire IT department. Russia’s largest software outsource firm is also a big adopter.
• Australia: Australia’s Telstra had 6000 people trained in Kanban. I
• Israel: Israel’s largest indigenous software firm, Amdocs, has over 2000 people doing Kanban.

We’ve seen published case studies from LAN airlines in Chile, and BBVA one of Spain’s largest banks. That implementation won a prestigious Spanish quality award for the consultants from Atos in Barcelona who led the initiative. There is adoption in the British, Canadian, German and US public sectors. We’re seeing Kanban show up in immigration services, driver license processing, and in the supply chain for the navy and the air force. We have 5 years of global conference presentations collected on video with many case studies from all over the world. Most of these only show qualitative benefits but the theme is consistent – happier workers, better economic outcomes, more satisfied customers.

Wow, that is amazing and congratulations on your massive positive influence. Despite broad support, there’s probably some that are skeptical and are resistant to change. What do you think is holding some people back from trying Kanban?

Ha! I teach 3 days of my class for consultants and coaches on this topic. The Kanban Method exists because people resist change so we expect and anticipate resistance. The main points of resistance are: deferred commitment – the just-in-time nature of Kanban; fear of reduced worker utilization due to flow problems; fear of transparency; and a failure to comprehend the probabilistic approach to planning, forecasting, and expectation setting. While a number of significantly capable software products have also appeared to support Kanban, most adopters tend to stick with legacy work tracking software that supports Kanban in only minimal ways. This is definitely an impediment to full adoption.

The dedicated tools such as LeanKit, Swift Kanban, Kanban Tool, and Target Process, still lack many features to support aspects of our training. The inclusion of Monte Carlo simulation is a step forward but much of the risk management, sequencing and scheduling, aspects we teach in our classes is still not supported by even the best tools. So, we are still reliant on people taking training and actually implementing what they have learned manually.

image courtesy of leankanban.com

For all the good things applying the use of Kanban to creative and knowledge work, what problems remain that Kanban has not been able to address?

I think it is important not to get sucked into solving all the World’s problems with a single method to rule them all! We’ve seen several case studies that successful synthesize Lean Startup with Kanban. We’ve documented a couple of these and they are available as downloads from our web site. We like to talk about making a business “fit for purpose” has both a product or service component and a service delivery component. Lean Startup is about making the product or service “fitter for purpose” (sorry to use British English but American is incapable of expressing this concept in an adequate fashion) while Kanban is about making the service delivery “fitter for purpose.” Together they insure the resilience of a business.

The future direction of my work is to explore this concept of resilient businesses – business that can survive and thrive in fast changing conditions and against the fickle, uncertain demands of a fluid customer base. Stephen Parry used the term “Sense and Respond” as the title of his book on Lean for service delivery. I like that term. Kanban has primarily been about responding – about adapting quickly to a changing external environment. I’d like it also to develop to better cover the concept of “sensing” changes in the market and what represent the fitness criteria for survival.

In all the real world examples that I’m aware of, where a business has sensed that it was no longer “fit for purpose” and has changed its service delivery in order to fix this, the sensing only happened when sales or market share suffered a significant decline. You can’t write guidance based on such examples. Guidance has to be “safe to fail.” So we need a sensing mechanism that is “safe to fail” and doesn’t put businesses or their people at risk when trying to validate existing fitness criteria or establish new replacement criteria.

If we can nail this down then I believe we’ve moved well beyond Toyota and we have a resilience solution for the complex creative and knowledge worker businesses of the 21st Century. It would not surprise me if the first enterprise scale adopter of such a method is Chinese and that the “Toyota” of this century will be a Chinese company mostly making software.

If an audience member wishes to learn more about applying the use of Kanban to creative and knowledge work, where do you suggest she begin?

I would avoid the wikipedia entry on the topic. I don’t know who wrote that stuff but it should be avoided. It seems a couple of minor training/consulting firms in North America are fighting a small war over the content of the wikipedia page. It’s mostly self-serving content that doesn’t accurately reflect the real history, the definition of Kanban or what we actually do.

The edu.leankanban.com site is always a good place to look for training and case studies and is likely to expand into a repository of definitive material. The entire archive of videos is accessible via our community site limitedwipsociety.org. For those who wish to read then Mike Burrows’ new book, Kanban from the Inside, includes most of our latest material. My own book, Kanban – Successful Evolutionary Change for your Technology Business, is still widely regarded as very accessible and we know many people who managed successful implementations simply by reading it. The text if 5 years old and a few of the details need updating in a 2nd edition.

Is there anything else you’d like to share with my audience?

For an audience that is perhaps more familiar with manufacturing, supply chains and industrial engineering, the best takeaway is to realize that Kanban for knowledge work required a lot of adaptation. The modeling of workflow focuses on activities that generate information or knowledge and is extracted from the Lean Product Development body of knowledge. So the Gemba Walk approach isn’t used in knowledge work. Also the spreads of variation in task durations, lead times, and delivery rates, often exhibit a 2x above and below the mean spread. Assignable cause variations are generally lost in the noise of the chance cause variation (we prefer Shewhart’s nomenclature to Deming’s).

As a result, other adjustments have had to be made. Risk assessment is a vital part of Kanban, and kanban systems must offer multiple classes of service that vary the queuing discipline of the work, and capacity allocations for items of different risks. While this isn’t unheard of in industrial implementations, it is essential in knowledge work implementations. It is vitally important that anyone with an industrial engineering background doesn’t simply attempt to analogously map what they know from the physical world into the virtual world.

Thanks for giving me this opportunity Pete! I really appreciate the opportunity to share what I’ve been doing with your audience.

About David J. Anderson

David Anderson is a thought leader in managing effective teams. He leads a consulting, training and publishing and event planning business dedicated to developing, promoting and implementing sustainable evolutionary approaches for management of knowledge workers. He has 30+ years experience in the high technology industry starting with computer games in the early 1980’s. He has led software teams delivering superior productivity and quality using innovative agile methods at large companies such as Sprint and Motorola. David is the pioneer of the Kanban Method an approach to evolutionary to improvement, and the Modern Management Framework, a system of management for modern businesses operating in complex environments. David is also Chairman of the Board of Lean Kanban, Inc, a company that operates LeanKanban University and Lean Kanban Conferences — a business dedicated to assuring quality of training in The Kanban Method and the Modern Management Framework.

David is the author of three books, Kanban – Successful Evolutionary Change for your Technology Business; Lessons in Agile Management: On the Road to Kanban, and Agile Management for Software Engineering – Applying the Theory of Constraints for Business Results.

Follow David on Twitter at @djaa_dja

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Yesterday, we interviewed David Anderson, who pioneered the use of Kanban systems for creative and knowledge work. The popularity of Kanban has opened up a sizeable cottage industry of companies that provide virtual kanban boards. One of the more popular of those companies is LeanKit.

Today we speak with Chris Hefley, the CEO of LeanKit. In this interview you’ll learn:

• What first led him to apply Kanban to his work
• Why that led him to start a company
• What positive difference he’s seen in companies that have applied Kanban principles

Enjoy the interview and please read more about Chris after the article.

Software development processes have undergone quite an overhaul in the last several years. On this blog, we interviewed Mary Poppendieck back in 2007 on Lean Software Development. Can you help explain the relationship between Kanban and Lean Software Development?

Lean software development is a pretty big umbrella term, describing how people are working to apply principles from Lean manufacturing, Lean Management, and Lean Product Development to the creation of software. Mary’s work over the years has benefited the software development community greatly by helping to translate the principles of Lean into the context of software development,  and knowledge work in general.

Kanban systems have long been a part of Lean manufacturing, as a tool for managing the “just-in-time” flow of work through the production line. In the software development community, a core group of thought leaders (List of Top Kanban Blogs) have coalesced around the idea of using Kanban boards to manage the flow of knowledge work. Kanban boards are used as the metaphor for managing the work, and as a way to reveal problems with flow that can lead to continuous process improvement.

This community, practicing Lean and Kanban, has given rise to all kinds of other advances in Lean thinking as it relates to software development and knowledge work, and it’s become part of what people in the Agile Software development community use to manage their work as well.  It’s an exciting, dynamic community to be involved with, and I’m continually impressed with the quality of new ideas being generated, much of which goes well beyond the starting point of Kanban itself.

You are the co-founder and CEO of LeanKit. Can you tell us what LeanKit is and what specific problems LeanKit was designed to address?

LeanKit is widely regarded as the top Kanban software in the market, especially when it comes to enterprise implementations. It allows teams and organizations to visualize their work and workflow, customize their processes to improve the flow of work, and collaborate together to complete the work. It also integrated with your existing PPM and scheduling software at the enterprise level, providing a consistent view of the work from end-to-end, from planning to execution.

By making the work visible, LeanKit allows you to spend less time tracking down the status of work items, and more time having valuable conversations about how to move the work forward. Visualization helps you to see bottlenecks and other problems with flow, and LeanKit then gives you the tools to improve the flow, such as work-in-process limits, explicit policies, and flexible board design.

LeanKit also provides rich collaboration tools, allowing people to share information and valuable conversations about the work from multiple locations, including via our mobile apps.

LeanKit is often used outside the context of pure “Kanban” as well. We have lots of SCRUM teams using it, as well as applications in IT Operations, Manufacturing and Engineering, HR, Marketing, Healthcare, Education, and Construction job-site management. In some of these cases, the organizations using LeanKit are less concerned with Kanban principles, other than simple visualization of the status of work and collaboration to complete the work.

Many companies talk about culture and sometimes cite the Respect for People pillar at Toyota. Can you share with us how Kanban might support that pillar in the Toyota Production System? Specifically, can you share an example of a company you’ve worked with that exemplified the principle of Respect for People withing a software development context?

One of the great things about Kanban is that it focuses everyone’s attention on the work, and the system by which the work gets done. Problems with flow are attributed to the System, and the people collaborate to improve the system. Focusing attention on the System helps to empower and motivate the people, and displays an inherent quality of respect for the people. To paraphrase Deming, “A bad system will beat a good person every time.”

But perhaps the clearest example of how kanban promotes respect for people is via the use of WIP limits. A system has only so much capacity, and traditional work systems tend to overload that capacity, placing an impossible burden on the people in the system. Visualizing the work makes this this situation visible and difficult to ignore. Just visualizing, however, isn’t enough. You also need the WIP limit to align demand and priorities with the actual capacity of the system and the people in it.

One example of this can be seen at one of our customers, AmDocs. They make software for the telecom industry, and have over 2,000 people practicing Kanban. In this presentation earlier this year at the Lean/Kanban North America conference, they told a story about how kanban revealed aspects of their work related to “work/life balance.”  A few months into their kanban rollout they did some surveys to determine what aspects of their work had improved because of kanban. In all but 2 categories, people agreed that kanban had made things better or a lot better. But when asked about “Quality” and “Work/Life Balance”, the survey results said that things had actually gotten worse!

When they measured quality objectively, however, they found that it had improved – in terms of defects and time to fix them. With a little investigation they were able to uncover an interesting effect of making the work visible. Quality hadn’t really gotten worse, but quality issues were being identified earlier in the process, and those issues were very visible to the team on the kanban board. So, it was the perception of quality that had changed, simply because it was more visible. Similarly, when they investigated the work/life balance question, they found that it was the improved visibility of the actual amount of work being loaded onto the teams that made it seem like things had gotten worse, and that those people who reported negative effects were not using WIP limits at all.  In order to address the problem, they started encouraging those teams to put WIP limits in place, and they worked together to write up a “Sustainable Pace Manifesto”.

We know that visual management is a critical aspect of Lean. In software development, why is visual management especially important? Can you share a specific example of how LeanKit helps organizations better visualize their work?

In manufacturing, the work-in-process inventory is easy to see. You can go to the plant or warehouse and actually look at it. In software development, the work-in-process inventory is all the work you have started but not finished yet. That’s not easy to see until you put it up on the Kanban board. Visualizing the process steps and queues where the work sits and waits between steps turns out to be really valuable in and of itself, even before you start putting work-in-process limits in place. Simply “putting the work on the wall” allows you to see hidden work-in-process, and it often becomes immediately apparent where bottlenecks in the process have formed that hamper the flow of value through the process. For example, when a software team puts all their work on the board, and realizes that they have large numbers of cards waiting for QA or waiting for Deployment, it’s easy to see those bottlenecks by just looking at the board.

We’ve seen software development go through phases: waterfall to agile to lean for software. And now, Kanban software development. Where do you see software development processes going next?

I see three things. One is the coalescing of these things we’ve learned into the larger body of knowledge, and the blurring of the lines between them. Most people now talk about “Lean/Agile” and imply that Lean, Agile, and Kanban are all part of a single body of knowledge and set of tools that can be used to develop software better. This is kind of the same thing that’s happened with the term “Lean” itself. Lean is more than just a re-naming of the Toyota Production System; it includes ideas from Scientific Management, TQM, Six Sigma, and more. I’ve heard it described as the “sum of good things we’ve learned about manufacturing for the past century”. A similar coalescing of ideas is happening in the field of software development.

Second, there are new and better ideas coming to the fore about how to measure, plan, and forecast our software projects. For a long time, we’ve relied on fuzzy estimates and padding those estimates to hopefully get things done reasonably on time and within budget. Some of the lean metrics that have been introduced into the community, along with probabilistic forecasting techniques, like Monte Carlo simulations, allow us to get much more confident about how long our software projects will take and how much they’ll cost.

Third, a lot of work is going into improving the state of the art when it comes to scaling the ideas from Agile and Lean to large software development organizations. There are a lot of good tools in Lean to help with this, and examples of very large, successful Lean and Kanban implementations at scale. And from the Agile world, we’re seeing things like the Scaled Agile Framework(TM), which attempts to address the “big company” problems of doing agile at scale, is built on a foundation of Lean principles, and includes the use of Kanban at the portfolio and team levels.

For my readers interested interested in LeanKit, how can they learn more?

You can watch some short demo videos and see more about the value of LeanKit. And while you’re there, you can sign up for a free 30 day trial. You can also check out our blog at leankit blog, and follow us on twitter and Facebook. Finally, for teams looking to get started with Kanban, we’ve published an easy to follow roadmap with some exercises you can do with  your team. Download a copy.

About Chris Hefley

Chris Hefley, CEO and Co-founder of LeanKit, is a practitioner and thought leader in the global Lean/Kanban community. In 2011, he was nominated for the Lean Systems Society’s Brickell Key Award. After years of coping with “broken” project management systems in the world of software development, Chris helped build LeanKit as a way for teams to become more effective. Prior to LeanKit, Chris worked with globally distributed teams in leadership positions at HCA Healthcare and IMI Health. He believes in building software and systems that make people’s lives better and transform their relationship with work.

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Today we hear from a leading voice in Lean for the Office and knowledge work, Dan Markovitz. I’m so excited that he took the time to speak with us today.

In this interview, you’ll learn:

• Why Dan believes that “Go and See” is the best way to explain to a Lean practitioner on the shop floor what lean looks like for the office and knowledge work.
• Why white collar workers bear the cost of inefficient processes and systems alone.
• Why he believes the shop floor is connected to the customer through the office – and why this matters.

Please read Dan’s bio after the interview. Enjoy.

Hi Dan, and thanks for taking the time to speak to my audience. Could you please introduce yourself and your work to my readers?

Although my company name is “Markovitz Consulting,” I consider myself a teacher. I show companies—and the people in those companies—who are struggling with all the typical wastes, frustrations, and pointless work how to use lean ideas to improve. To that end, I consult, I speak at a variety of public and private events, and I write. My first book, “A Factory of One,” was awarded a Shigeo Shingo Research Award in 2012.

Teaching has actually been a lifelong theme for me. I was a TA in college, I taught for a year in public junior high schools in Japan, taught another year in the US, and coached high school cross country for three years.

Tell us about your personal Lean journey – how did it begin? Was there a specific spark that led you on your journey?

I was forced to slog through a nearly unending stream of turgid, boring, useless, and utterly forgettable books while getting my MBA at Stanford Business School. The only book that I remember—and the only book that I still have from that time—is “The Machine That Changed The World,” by Womack/Jones/Roos. This is back in 1992. I knew nothing about manufacturing, or the auto industry, or lean, or Toyota—but I was absolutely fascinated by the book. I had no idea what I would do with the ideas that Womack et al presented, but I knew that they were important. And they resonated with me deeply. Fast forward 13 years: it’s 2005, and I’m launching my own corporate time management training firm. I realized that the lean concept of producing more value with fewer resources could be applied equally well to the individual as to a company. That began a 10-year journey of continuous learning about lean.

Digressing for a minute here. An MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business is impressive. Their acceptance rate is remarkably low. Surely you’ve got some advice for anyone reading this interview that may be aspiring to earn their MBA?

No advice for getting in Stanford.  Honestly, it’s been so long since my time there that I don’t even know what they look for now. But if you assume that everyone applying is incredibly smart, it comes down to the essays — what story can you tell that will convince them that you’ll be a great addition to the student body today, and the kind of alum that they’ll be proud of tomorrow?

For a Lean guy, has the MBA helped you much?

The MBA has been absolutely useless in terms of my business — although it did introduce me to The Machine that Changed the World, so that’s good.

If you were to explain what you do to a person on the manufacturing floor who is well versed in Lean, how would you do it? On which points would you build a common bond?

I wouldn’t have to explain anything—we’d “go and see.” We’d go to the marketing department, or the sales department, or any other area and just watch how work flows (or doesn’t). Someone from the shop floor who understands lean would be mortified at how much waste they’d see in all the administrative processes and the individual work habits. And they’re all the same wastes that the person on the shop floor deals with: waiting, rework, motion, over-production, etc. That would be the starting point for building a common bond.

You are a recognized leader in helping individuals and teams increase their personal productivity. Your approach is deeply informed by Lean principles. If given the option to transform, say the manufacturing floor, what are some reasons that Lean should be deployed in the office instead?

Let’s re-frame the question: it’s not a matter of transforming the manufacturing floor vs. the office. Instead, the question is whether we should focus on the overall processes, or on the way we work within those processes. It’s a false choice, of course—we need to work on both. But I’d argue that non-lean individual behaviors squander an enormous amount of time. If we could recapture that time, how much more capacity would we have to work on kaizen, or visit customers, or spend time with our families, or get some exercise?

As an aside, what’s really sad is that waste in the office never shows up on the company’s income statement. At the supervisory level at least, white-collar workers don’t get overtime, and they fix defects or achieve their “production targets” by working at night and on the weekends. They bear the cost of office inefficiencies alone.

Generally, can you share how some of the better known aspects of Lean looks like in the context of transactions or the office? For example, Poka-Yoke in the office? Kanban in the office? Andon in the office? More specifically, can you share some examples from prior work that might inform my readers?

Jim Benson of Modus Cooperandi has written the book (literally) on using kanban to manage personal work. But kanban can be used by teams as well, which you see quite commonly in agile software shops. A friend of mine runs a patent law firm in San Francisco, and they manage all their work on a version of a kanban board—all the work in the queue is visible on cards, and when it gets “pulled” by one of the attorneys, that acts as a signal to move other work forward. The cards enable them to manage the flow of work for each attorney and for the firm as a whole.

You see poka-yoke all the time in office IT. It’s hugely beneficial in managing data, whether on a custom software interface, or just on a spreadsheet that people are using. The types of data can be restricted to ensure that the right kind of information goes into the form, and criteria can be set that ensure that all data fields are entered correctly—just think of webforms that we fill in everyday. One of my clients created some very simple data masks like this to make customer service’s job much easier.

One of the pillars of Lean is Respect for People. Within the context of non-manufacturing processes, how is Respect for People put into practice? Is there a specific example you wouldn’t mind sharing?

Sadly, I don’t see much respect for people in the non-manufacturing world. How many people are working 50, 60, 70-hour weeks? How many people are expected—or at least encouraged—to answer email on nights and weekends? Leaders in most companies think nothing of overburdening office workers, because (as I said before), it doesn’t show up on the income statement. If you overburden a plant, you have to run another shift, and that’s expensive. If you overburden your marketing department, nothing happens except maybe that you pick up the cost of a few pizzas.

I do a lot of my work in the outdoor and sporting goods industries, and I will say that they’re more sensitive than most firms to the importance of avoiding overburdening workers. Of course, they have to—if you’re The North Face and your staff can’t ever get out to Yosemite, you probably won’t be able to attract good people for very long. Patagonia does a great job of ensuring that people have time to surf and otherwise get outdoors.

There’s a lot more to “respect for people,” of course, as Michael Balle explains in his new book, “Lead with Respect.” But certainly overburdening is one crucial area in the office that I think needs more attention.

Suppose a company was engaged in a bottom-up lean transformation in an area outside of the office. How can the person on the shop floor partner with the Lean efforts in the office to have a broader effect on the organization?

The shop floor is connected to the customer through the office—at the most obvious level, the sales or customer service teams take customer orders, and those order are what drive factory activities. The shop floor doesn’t exist independently, and therefore many of the problems affecting the shop floor are initiated by, or exacerbated by, what the office does. So lean efforts in one area are inextricably linked to lean efforts in the other. I won’t suggest that the people involved in lean efforts start with a value stream map before doing anything (I know how you feel about reflexive VSM activities!), but it’s certainly useful for the folks in sales to know how their work affects the shop floor. If people in both realms saw how their work connected to the other, I think it would spur improvement efforts.

Now the opposite question: If someone was involved in transforming office processes by implementing Lean principles, how might that leader reach out to other persons in the company that may be implementing Lean in their own world?

Okay, I’ll get in trouble for saying this, but in my experience people from the shop floor are—generally speaking—better at seeing inefficiencies and waste than people in the office. I think that’s because they’re always dealing with physical objects and physical movements. Office people sit in one chair and look at a computer screen most of the day (at least, when they’re not sitting in a conference room), so they’re not as attuned to seeing waste. Again, I’m not saying that all manufacturing workers are sharp-eyed and all office workers are blind. Rather, I’m saying that if you’re leading lean in an office, you can get some great observations—or at the very least, some great questions—by bringing in someone from the shop floor to watch the way work is done in the office.

If someone reading this is interested in improving their personal productivity by implementing the principles of Lean, what are the specific steps you suggest they do?

Did my publisher put you up to this? Buy my book, of course! You’ll get step-by-step instructions on how to do that. But even if you don’t buy the book, the first step is figuring out what value you’re creating. That value is seldom captured in your job title, which is more of an HR artifact than a true description of your purpose. Once you identify the value, you can start to figure out how to deliver it more effectively.

About Dan Markovitz

Dan Markovitz is president of Markovitz Consulting, a consulting firm that applies lean concepts to knowledge work. He is a faculty member at the Lean Enterprise Institute and teaches at the Stanford University Continuing Studies Program. He also lectures at the Ohio State University’s Fisher School of Business.

His book, A Factory of One, was honored with a Shingo Research Award in 2013. Dan has published articles in the Harvard Business Review blog, Quality Progress, Industry Week magazine, Reliable Plant magazine, and Management Services Journal, among other magazines.

Earlier in his career, he held management positions in product marketing at Sierra Designs, Adidas, CNET and Asics Tiger, where he worked in sales, product marketing, and product development. He also has experience as an entrepreneur, having founded his own skateboarding footwear company.
Dan lived in Japan for four years and is fluent in Japanese. He holds a BA from Wesleyan University and an MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.

The post Dan Markovitz Interview: How the Shop Floor is Connected to the Customer via the Office and Why Lean Matters to White Collar Workers appeared first on shmula.

We are quite pleased to have Dr. Jeffrey Liker speak with us today. If you all turn your eyes to your bookshelves, I’m sure you will likely find a few books for which Dr. Liker has authored. He has helped to bring to a general audience Lean Manufacturing and has gone on to help countless of companies adopt the Toyota Production System in their own operations. We’re very excited that Dr. Liker chose to spend some of his time answering our questions.

In this interview, you’ll learn:

• Why Toyota Kata was first difficult for Jeff Liker to accept?
• Why Dr. Liker believes Lean Leadership is critical to achieving sustainable improvement versus one-off improvements.
• After over 30 years of studying Toyota and the Toyota Production System, why he is still passionate about it.

Enjoy the interview and read more about Dr. Liker immediately after.

Hi Dr. Liker, and thanks for taking the time to speak to my audience. Could you please introduce yourself and your work to my readers?

I have been a Professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan for over 30 years. From the beginning of arriving at Michigan I began studying US-Japan differences in the auto industry. That led to focusing on Toyota as I came to admire their exceptional culture of continuous improvement which led to my 2004 book The Toyota Way. Since then I have published eight other books about Toyota and lean management. I also have a consulting firm and we have consulted to or trained hundreds of organizations over the years.

What got you started in your Lean journey? Can you point to a specific time or event that led you to a lifelong study of the Toyota Production System?

It was the opportunity to join a very large US-Japan auto study when I arrived as an assistant professor at UM. Before then I had no particular interest in Japanese manufacturing and new little about Toyota. I found Japan fascinating and the more I learned about Toyota from visits and interviews the more I realized how special they were. That led to a passion to learn more and more from them and learn from applying the concepts to other organizations that has carried me through the last thirty years.

Can you tell us about your current research and what you’ve been working on?

I am not sure that research is the right term. For many years I was expected to do research and publish in academic journals to get tenure and promotion at the University of Michigan. I published over 60 peer-reviewed journal articles and dozens of book chapters, many with my doctoral students. By the time I wrote The Toyota Way I was more interested in reaching a general audience then an academic audience.

Research shifted from large scale surveys and case studies based on structured interviews to a less structured approach of going and seeing and asking people a lot of questions. In books for a general audience I write what I believe, with case examples and direct quotes, but I do not feel the same need to justify each statement I make with citations to publications or with statistics. It is quite liberating to be able to write what I have come to believe and focus on writing in an engaging way, rather then writing more dry scientific articles.

For the last five years I have been quite focused on how to develop lean leadership because my experience is that makes the difference between sustainable improvement and one off lean projects that eventually go back to the prior non-lean state. My most recent book is called: Developing Lean Leaders at All Levels: A practical guide.” It is a practical guidebook companion for The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership.

You’re the author of several books that are staples in many people’s bookshelves. While your books have added a ton of value to the collective knowledge of the Toyota Production System, are there any unintended consequences that you’ve observed? Do any of them bother you, why or why not?

If you do anything in this world there will be unintended consequences. Give a gun to one person and they defend themselves and another commits murder. Give a book about the Toyota Way to one person and they take in the core concepts and it begins to positively influence their thinking, while another person gets mad because they think it is Toyota worship, and a third person takes away a few ideas for tools and misses the core philosophy. It always can be frustrating to try to communicate something you are passionate about because it will always be misunderstood by some.

On the other hand it is incredibly gratifying when someone gets it. I get notes from people who have applied what they learned in the Toyota Way on their own to their company’s and done really innovative things with great results. I meet people when I speak who bring a copy of The Toyota Way Field book filled with post-it notes and highlighted text who say something like: “This is my bible for lean application. I have read it cover to cover four times and constantly refer to it to guide my work.” As far as I know my books have not been used to murder anyone.

Let’s talk about your watershed book, The Toyota Way, 2004. This, of course, is not to be confused with the internal booklet that made its rounds at Toyota in 2001 also called The Toyota Way (April 2001), also called the Green Book. I have to be honest – I actually hadn’t heard of the elusive 2001 Green Book until years after I had left Toyota. Have you read the Green Book? What are your thoughts on it?

I had a copy of the Toyota’s green book from 2001 when I wrote my book, The Toyota Way. There version is more of a long pamphlet then a book in the usual sense. It begins with the model of the house with the pillars of respect for people (broken down into foundational elements of respect and teamwork) and continuous improvement (broken down to challenge, kaizen, and genchi gembutsu). Then for each of the five foundational values they describe it briefly with sub principles and provide historical quotes from past executives.

I found it very inspirational and it helped me develop my model and principles. In my book in show my 4P model with their 5 principles as they line up in relation to my model. Toyota also came out with a version for sales and one for supply chain. It works for them internally to communicate the image and values and they had a course with practice activities to teach the principles. That immediately led to a methodology to put the Toyota Way into practice which they call Toyota Business Practices—an eight step improvement methodology. Everyone has to go through the training which includes a lengthy project with a coach. The training is very rigorous.

You’ve accomplished much in your career and have added much value to the collective knowledge of the Toyota Production System. Having said that, what is it you are still trying to learn and improve on?

I have been working closely with my former student Mike Rother, mostly learning, about his methodology and philosophy in Toyota Kata. I believe the kata approach is very practical and powerful for developing the routines necessary to systematically approach improvement. I have had a lot of heated debates with Mike as he has contradicted some accepted truth in lean like his method does not include finding the root cause and he believes A3 reports can mislead people into thinking they are using a systematic improvement process when they are not.

As we worked through those discussions I have come to appreciate his viewpoints. I have adopted the improvement kata and coaching kata for my graduate level course on lean at UM. I have incorporated a lot of his ideas, and slides, in my training and consulting work. I think he is the first to break down lean into practice routines to develop high levels of skill in systematic improvement.

When I learned the A3, I actually was coached on it by means of what Rother now calls Kata. From what I remember, Root Cause Analysis may be included if the countermeasure wasn’t obvious. If it was obvious, then there was no need. Am I missing something?

The way real experts in Toyota coach you through A3 is similar to the improvement and coaching kata. That is correct. What Mike Rother noticed is that outside Toyota it was rare someone was coached with that rigor when doing an A3 report. Without the strong culture and expertise inside Toyota he asked how can we get people to follow a similarly rigorous process for practicing and being socialized into the routines for improvement. He concluded a more detailed methodology was needed that laid out the process explicitly. That is the reason for the kata he has painstakingly developed.

Is there anything else you’d like to share with my audience?

As you break down lean into its constituent pieces it comes down to Toyota’s internal model which has only two pillars—continuous improvement and respect for people. All of the tools of lean are only valuable if they help support these two pillars. In some ways you can argue that the concepts of engaging people in improvement and treating them with respect do not require a special name like “lean.”

But I do believe there is a philosophy and system that Toyota has evolved through decades of learning that is different from usual management concepts of leadership, engagement, and performance improvement. They have demonstrated the power of a system designed for learning and adaptation. I would advice really working hard to understand what we mean by systems thinking. Going back to Dr. Deming as well as Peter Senge can help.

About Jeffrey Liker

Dr. Jeffrey K. Liker is Professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan, owner of Liker Lean Advisors, LLC, Partner in The Toyota Way Academy, and Partner in Lean Leadership Institute.

Dr. Liker has authored or co-authored over 75 articles and book chapters and eleven books.

He is author of the international best-seller, The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World’s Greatest Manufacturer, McGraw-Hill, 2004 which speaks to the underlying philosophy and principles that drive Toyota’s quality and efficiency-obsessed culture.

The companion (with David Meier) The Toyota Way Fieldbook, McGraw Hill, 2005 details how companies can learn from the Toyota Way principles.

His book with Jim Morgan, The Toyota Product Development System, Productivity Press, 2006, is the first that details the product development side of Toyota.

Additional books in The Toyota Way Series are (with David Meier), Toyota Talent: Developing exceptional people the Toyota Way (May, 2007), (with Michael Hoseus) Toyota Culture: The Heart and Soul of the Toyota Way (January, 2008), (with Gary Convis) The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership (2012), (with James Franz) The Toyota Way to Continuous Improvement (2012), (with Tim Ogden) Toyota Under Fire (2012), and (with George Trachilis) Developing Lean Leaders The Toyota Way (2014).

His articles and books have won eleven Shingo Prizes for Research Excellence and The Toyota Way also won the 2005 Institute of Industrial Engineers Book of the Year Award and 2007 Sloan Industry Studies Book of the Year. In 2012 he was inducted into the Association of Manufacturing Excellence Hall of Fame. He is a frequent keynote speaker and consultant. Recent clients include Caterpillar, Applied Materials, Siemens, Dover Industries, Kraft-Oscar Meyer, Alcatel-Lucent, Hertz, Solar Turbine, Art Van Furniture and Henry Ford Health Systems.

Other Interviews you might enjoy:

Lean Leadership Interviews
Jeffrey Liker, NYT Best Selling Author, Professor, and Author of the Toyota Way	Jeffrey Liker, author of The Toyota Way, shares his thoughts on Toyota Kata, why sometimes root cause analysis isn't necessary, and what else he is excited to learn - even after 30 years of being a student of the Toyota Production System.
Eric Ries, Author of the Leanstartup	In this Podcast interview with Eric Ries, the author of The Leanstartup, we learn about the how he's applied Lean principles to starting companies. He also tells us about his consulting work with GE and how GE, worldwide, has applied Leanstartup throughout all its divisions and is considering Leanstartup as its new Operating System for the company.
Michael Balle, Author and Respected Lean Thinker	Michael Balle is a leading voice in Lean. In this interview, he shares with us his thoughts on Lean, tells us about his book, and spends a good amount of time discussing Respect for People.
Bob Emiliani, Author and Professor of Management	This interview with Dr. Bob Emiliani covers several aspects of Fake Lean versus Real Lean. There are real insights here from the "Lean Professor".
Laura Busche, Author of Lean Branding	Lean Branding is an application of Lean principles to branding. Read her provocative and practical approach to brand branding using the principles of Lean.
	Robert Martichenko is the Founder and CEO of LeanCor - a lean logistics and supply chain company. He is also the author of the book "A Lean Fulfillment Stream", published by the Lean Enterprise Institute. In this interview, he shares with us how Lean can be applied effectively beyond the 4 walls of manufacturing and outside the office, but infused into the entire supply chain.
Peter Armstrong, CEO of Leanpub (Lean Publishing)	Leanpub is an innovative approach to book publishing, where Peter believes that lean principles apply. He claims that writing a book is essentially a startup. And, the worst waste of all is writing a book that nobody wants. Read more to learn how to apply lean to the world of book publishing.
Keith Sparkjoy, Chief Culture Officer at Pluralsight	Keith Sparkjoy is the Culture Officer at Pluralsight, a Utah company that raised $135 Million in 2014 - an unprecedented amount of venture capital. And, here's the really cool part, as the culture officer, he's trying to transform his company using Dr. W. Edward Deming's teachings.
David J. Anderson, Author of many books on Agile, and inventor of Kanban for Creative and Knowledge work	David J. Anderson is the pioneer of the application of Kanban for creative knowledge work. His methodology and approach has had widespread acceptance and adoption and in this interview he shares results from companies that have tried his approach and other lessons learned.
Dimitar Karaivanov, CEO of Kanbanize	Dimitar Karaivanov is the CEO of Kanbanize, a visual kanban system designed for creative and knowledge workers. In this interview, we discuss the product and its many uses and how it embodies the principles of Lean.
Chris Hefley, CEO LeanKit	Chris Hefley is the CEO of LeanKit, a company that provides Virtual Kanban software for software development teams and knowledge workers. Reah his interview and learn what led to the development of LeanKit and the role Lean and the Toyota Production System plays.
Dan Markovitz, Noted consultant and expert on Lean for Office	In this interview with Dan Markovitz, we learn why he believes that everything is connected to the customer through the office. Based on this belief, he feels that Lean for Office makes the most sense. Read and learn how he's implemented Lean for the Office.
Jason Yip, Consultant to software development organzations	Jason Yip is a noted thoughtleader in software engineering. As a consultant, he helps software engineering organizations get better. In this interview, we learn the state of software engineering and the role of Agile, Lean for Software and Kanban.
Matthew May, NYT Best Selling author, consultant, and expert on Toyota Production System	Matthew May is an author and influential voice in Lean and also Design Thinking. He worked close to a decade at University of Toyota to help codify the Toyota Production System. In this interview, he shares with us his thoughts on his experience and what we can learn from it.
Mark Graban, Best Selling Author and expert on Lean for Healthcare	Lean Healthcare expert Mark Graban stops by and share his thoughts with Shmula readers on how Lean can be applied to arguably the most important industry in the world, healthcare.
Art Smalley, 15 Year Toyota Veteran and authority on Toyota Production System	Art Smalley is one of the most honest and influential voices in Lean. He was the first American to work in Japan's Kamigo plant, the plant where Taiichi Ohno began the Toyota Production System. He shares with us his thoughts on the Lean Movement and where it is going wrong.
Jeff Gothelf, Author of Lean UX, applying Lean for User Experience	Lean is being applied to every facet of business. Jeff Gothelf shares with us his thoughts on applying Lean for user experience, or Lean UX.
Cecil Dijoux, Expert Consultant on applying Lean for IT	Cecil Dijoux shares with us his thoughts on applying Lean to IT, definitely a must-read if you are in the information technology space.
Brent Wahba, Author and Expert on applying Lean for Sales and Marketing	Brent Wahba is a fellow at the Lean Enterprise Institute and shares with us his thoughts on Lean for Sales and Marketing.

Interview with Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos

In December 2008, I was fortunate enough to interview Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos. In a 5 part series of interviews, we discuss the Zappos strategy and Tony answers questions on why he chooses to focus on the customer and how he sees that as strategic. Interview Questions from shmula.com blog readers Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 1 Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 2 Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 3 Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 4 Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 5

Interviews with Customer Experience Experts
Mark Roenigk, COO of Rackspace and Board Member at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation	Rackspace Interview on Customer Experience: We interviewed Mark Roenigk on June 10, 2013. We discussed the Net Promoter Score and also topics around process improvement and how Rackspace places the customer first.
Shep Hyken, Author and expert on Customer Experience Strategy	Shep Hyken Customer Service Interview: We interviewed Shep Hyken on June 3, 2013 and discussed topics close to his heart - the customer. We focused our discussion on customer service and how focusing on the customer is strategic, not just tactical.
Annette Franz, Customer Experience Strategist and Survey Design Expert	Annette Franz Gleneicki on Customer Experience Strategy: Annette Gleneicki is a customer experience thought leader and Director at Confirmit, a voice of the customer platform. We discuss her thoughts on customer experience and the direction of the overall field.
Michel Falcon, Customer Experience Strategist and Author	Michel Falcon on Improving the Customer Experience: Michel Falcon is a former executive at 1800GOTJUNK and was the person who propelled 1800GOTJUNK to become a customer service powerhouse. In this interview, we discuss what he did and the lessons he learned.
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Leadership Interviews
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The post Jeff Liker, The Toyota Way, and Unintended Consequences appeared first on shmula.

Today we speak with Jason Yip, a principal consultant with Thoughtworks. Jason helps companies interested in improve how they develop software. In this interview, you’ll learn the following:

• After over a decade of helping organizations develop better software, why some things have changed and why some things remain the same.
• In software engineering, why “meeting where people are” is an instantiation of Respect for People.
• Why Visual Management in knowledge work an attempt to make visible the invisible.

Enjoy the interview and learn more about Jason immediately after. Enjoy.

Hi Jason. Can you tell me audience a little about yourself and your work?

I’m an Electrical Engineer by training but I’ve focused on software since realising that I preferred that to other activities. Over the last 13 years, I’ve had various roles related to software builds and development but these days what I mostly do is consult with companies who are interested in adopting Agile and Lean approaches to software delivery, IT operations, and product development.

As a principal consultant for Thoughtworks, you’ve spent a lot of time consulting with client companies. Over the years, have you seen a trend in what methods software development teams are adopting?

Some things haven’t changed, in the sense that some of the methods are becoming mainstream so it’s more of a continuation of a trend. “Some of the discussions I’m having about Agile today are very similar to the ones I’ve had back in the beginning. I notice this “more of the same” phenomenon mostly in the context of internal-facing software development.

There have been some changes in what technologies or technology approaches are being advocated and some have implications on how teams are structured, for example micro-services and DevOps.

The biggest trends that go beyond what we would have already advocated in the early days, and this is usually in the context of consumer-facing digital teams, are the twin forces of Continuous Delivery and what we might call Continuous Design, that is the application of design and customer-centric approaches in a rapid, iterative way.

Software development processes have undergone quite an overhaul in the last several years. On this blog, we interviewed Mary Poppendieck back in 2007 on Lean for Software. Can you help explain the difference between Agile, Kanban for Creative and Knowledge Work and Lean for Software?

I would say that Agile is an umbrella term that refers to a set of methods that share a few key assumptions about what makes software development more effective:

• Closing the gap between problems and problem solvers
• Taking smaller steps
• Validating every step
• Improving as you go

Lean for software development is partially a reinterpretation of Agile approaches through the lens of Lean principles and partially an extension of Agile approaches by borrowing from Lean insights and tools. Practically, I find people who identify with Lean tend to have a more holistic view of systems and processes, and are more likely to seek insight from other industries.

Kanban Software Development I’d say can be described in two ways: 1. an evolution of Agile towards a more continuous flow approach; 2. an incremental change approach to improving software delivery

Many companies talk about culture and sometimes cite the Respect for People pillar at Toyota. Can you share with us how Kanban might support that pillar in the Toyota Production System? Specifically, can you share an example of a company you’ve worked with that exemplified the principle of Respect for People within a software development context?

Kanban, specifically the incremental change approach, and further the idea of starting where you are, I think most clearly reflects Respect for People, both in terms of meeting people where they are as well as trusting that they are capable of their own improvement given the appropriate support and structures. But the most frequent example I see within the software development context is simply when the relationship between business owners and development teams shifts from one of giving and taking orders to one of collaboration. This means that it is not just a business person asking the development team to build something but also development team members proposing and/or improving ideas.

We know that visual management is a critical aspect of Lean. In software development, why is visual management especially important? Can you share a specific example of how software development teams have adopted visual management to help them in their work?

In software development, like any form of knowledge work, the work is essentially invisible, especially to non-technical stakeholders. It is very difficult for observers to realise that people are overburdened, that work is bottlenecked, or any other problem that is relatively easier to see if the work was physical. The most common example of visual management that you’ll see in Agile, Lean, Kanban teams is the card wall or kanban board, that is a physical representation of the workflow and the work using index cards. This is not the only type of visual management useful in software development teams though. There are also things like build lights that show whether recent integration and test runs worked, various charts showing progress and software quality, and broader issues like upcoming demand in the portfolio.

If you get down to the essence of visual management being used to make problems easier to see, I would also say that coding standards and syntax highlighting are a low-level example of visual management in the software development context akin to 5S in a physical factory.

We’ve seen software development go through phases: waterfall to agile to lean for software. And now, Kanban software development. Where do you see software development processes going next?

With Continuous Delivery, I think we’ve kind of reached the end of delivering more frequently. There are still going to be improvements in programming and technology approaches of course, but that’s not really a process thing. The next frontier in process I see will be less about delivering faster and more about delivering better products and services. That is all the activity happening with Lean Startup, Lean UX, Jobs-to-be-Done, etc. And then approaching that at scale.

What are some good methods or practices you’ve seen that can especially help distributed software teams?

In my opinion, the most critical practice for distributed software teams is to humanise the “other side”. It is too easy to forget that you are dealing with humans when you don’t see them, don’t hear them, don’t learn about the many “irrelevant” social details that remind you that you are working with real people. This means flying people around, always-on video conferencing, always-on chat rooms, etc. anything to ensure that communications are not just transactional.

Another important practice is structuring the work such that you reduce the amount of communication required across distributed boundaries. So oddly enough, I’m encouraging people to both increase interaction across distribution boundaries to humanise relationship AND encouraging people to structure the work such that the ongoing work does not require frequent interaction.

Thanks Jason. Appreciate you spending some time with us and in answering our questions.

About Jason Yip

Jason has worked at ThoughtWorks for the past 13 years as a buildmaster, developer and currently as an organisational Agile / Lean / Kanban coach.  He was one of the early committers on CruiseControl, the first Open Source Continuous Integration server, and is a prolific blogger and tweeter on Agile, Lean, and Kanban topics. Jason used to own the entire first results page on Google until some Hong Kong actor showed up.

Other Interviews you might enjoy:

Lean Leadership Interviews
Jeffrey Liker, NYT Best Selling Author, Professor, and Author of the Toyota Way	Jeffrey Liker, author of The Toyota Way, shares his thoughts on Toyota Kata, why sometimes root cause analysis isn't necessary, and what else he is excited to learn - even after 30 years of being a student of the Toyota Production System.
Eric Ries, Author of the Leanstartup	In this Podcast interview with Eric Ries, the author of The Leanstartup, we learn about the how he's applied Lean principles to starting companies. He also tells us about his consulting work with GE and how GE, worldwide, has applied Leanstartup throughout all its divisions and is considering Leanstartup as its new Operating System for the company.
Michael Balle, Author and Respected Lean Thinker	Michael Balle is a leading voice in Lean. In this interview, he shares with us his thoughts on Lean, tells us about his book, and spends a good amount of time discussing Respect for People.
Bob Emiliani, Author and Professor of Management	This interview with Dr. Bob Emiliani covers several aspects of Fake Lean versus Real Lean. There are real insights here from the "Lean Professor".
Laura Busche, Author of Lean Branding	Lean Branding is an application of Lean principles to branding. Read her provocative and practical approach to brand branding using the principles of Lean.
	Robert Martichenko is the Founder and CEO of LeanCor - a lean logistics and supply chain company. He is also the author of the book "A Lean Fulfillment Stream", published by the Lean Enterprise Institute. In this interview, he shares with us how Lean can be applied effectively beyond the 4 walls of manufacturing and outside the office, but infused into the entire supply chain.
Peter Armstrong, CEO of Leanpub (Lean Publishing)	Leanpub is an innovative approach to book publishing, where Peter believes that lean principles apply. He claims that writing a book is essentially a startup. And, the worst waste of all is writing a book that nobody wants. Read more to learn how to apply lean to the world of book publishing.
Keith Sparkjoy, Chief Culture Officer at Pluralsight	Keith Sparkjoy is the Culture Officer at Pluralsight, a Utah company that raised $135 Million in 2014 - an unprecedented amount of venture capital. And, here's the really cool part, as the culture officer, he's trying to transform his company using Dr. W. Edward Deming's teachings.
David J. Anderson, Author of many books on Agile, and inventor of Kanban for Creative and Knowledge work	David J. Anderson is the pioneer of the application of Kanban for creative knowledge work. His methodology and approach has had widespread acceptance and adoption and in this interview he shares results from companies that have tried his approach and other lessons learned.
Dimitar Karaivanov, CEO of Kanbanize	Dimitar Karaivanov is the CEO of Kanbanize, a visual kanban system designed for creative and knowledge workers. In this interview, we discuss the product and its many uses and how it embodies the principles of Lean.
Chris Hefley, CEO LeanKit	Chris Hefley is the CEO of LeanKit, a company that provides Virtual Kanban software for software development teams and knowledge workers. Reah his interview and learn what led to the development of LeanKit and the role Lean and the Toyota Production System plays.
Dan Markovitz, Noted consultant and expert on Lean for Office	In this interview with Dan Markovitz, we learn why he believes that everything is connected to the customer through the office. Based on this belief, he feels that Lean for Office makes the most sense. Read and learn how he's implemented Lean for the Office.
Jason Yip, Consultant to software development organzations	Jason Yip is a noted thoughtleader in software engineering. As a consultant, he helps software engineering organizations get better. In this interview, we learn the state of software engineering and the role of Agile, Lean for Software and Kanban.
Matthew May, NYT Best Selling author, consultant, and expert on Toyota Production System	Matthew May is an author and influential voice in Lean and also Design Thinking. He worked close to a decade at University of Toyota to help codify the Toyota Production System. In this interview, he shares with us his thoughts on his experience and what we can learn from it.
Mark Graban, Best Selling Author and expert on Lean for Healthcare	Lean Healthcare expert Mark Graban stops by and share his thoughts with Shmula readers on how Lean can be applied to arguably the most important industry in the world, healthcare.
Art Smalley, 15 Year Toyota Veteran and authority on Toyota Production System	Art Smalley is one of the most honest and influential voices in Lean. He was the first American to work in Japan's Kamigo plant, the plant where Taiichi Ohno began the Toyota Production System. He shares with us his thoughts on the Lean Movement and where it is going wrong.
Jeff Gothelf, Author of Lean UX, applying Lean for User Experience	Lean is being applied to every facet of business. Jeff Gothelf shares with us his thoughts on applying Lean for user experience, or Lean UX.
Cecil Dijoux, Expert Consultant on applying Lean for IT	Cecil Dijoux shares with us his thoughts on applying Lean to IT, definitely a must-read if you are in the information technology space.
Brent Wahba, Author and Expert on applying Lean for Sales and Marketing	Brent Wahba is a fellow at the Lean Enterprise Institute and shares with us his thoughts on Lean for Sales and Marketing.

Interview with Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos

In December 2008, I was fortunate enough to interview Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos. In a 5 part series of interviews, we discuss the Zappos strategy and Tony answers questions on why he chooses to focus on the customer and how he sees that as strategic. Interview Questions from shmula.com blog readers Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 1 Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 2 Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 3 Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 4 Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 5

Interviews with Customer Experience Experts
Mark Roenigk, COO of Rackspace and Board Member at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation	Rackspace Interview on Customer Experience: We interviewed Mark Roenigk on June 10, 2013. We discussed the Net Promoter Score and also topics around process improvement and how Rackspace places the customer first.
Shep Hyken, Author and expert on Customer Experience Strategy	Shep Hyken Customer Service Interview: We interviewed Shep Hyken on June 3, 2013 and discussed topics close to his heart - the customer. We focused our discussion on customer service and how focusing on the customer is strategic, not just tactical.
Annette Franz, Customer Experience Strategist and Survey Design Expert	Annette Franz Gleneicki on Customer Experience Strategy: Annette Gleneicki is a customer experience thought leader and Director at Confirmit, a voice of the customer platform. We discuss her thoughts on customer experience and the direction of the overall field.
Michel Falcon, Customer Experience Strategist and Author	Michel Falcon on Improving the Customer Experience: Michel Falcon is a former executive at 1800GOTJUNK and was the person who propelled 1800GOTJUNK to become a customer service powerhouse. In this interview, we discuss what he did and the lessons he learned.
Adam Ramshaw, Consultant to fortune 500 companies on Customer Experience	Adam Ramshaw, a customer experience consultant with Genroe, explains the relationship between continuous improvement and customer experience.

Leadership Interviews
Aza Raskin, Author, Startup Founder, and Son of Mac Inventor Jef Raskin	This is a multi-part Interview with Aza Raskin, on the Humane Interface. He discusses Agile Software Engineering. Then, in a later interview Aza Raskin discusses the "infinite scroll" approach to Google search results. In part 3, Aza Raskin shares his thoughts on Feature Bloat (aka, "Featuritis") and how to overcome it. In part 4, Aza Raskin describes the concept of Quasimodal Design and how to implement it in our software projects. Finally, Aza Raskin explains the role of Poka Yoke in the User Experience and why Lean should be applied to software engineering and knowledge work in general.
Mary Poppendieck, Author and codifier of Lean for Software Engineering	In this multi-part interview with Mary Poppendieck, the pre-eminent evangelist and teacher for Lean for Software, explains Lean Software Engineering. Then, Shmula.com readers were able to ask her questions of their own - read them here as Mary Poppendieck’s Answers to ALL Readers’ Questions, which includes questions such as Should Lean be Top-down or Bottom-up?. Then, another Interview with Mary Poppendieck. Then, Another interview with Mary Poppendieck where she explains Lean Software Engineering to a Lean Six Sigma audience. Plus, here's the Original Article to Ask Mary Poppendieck Anything. Finally, Mary considers the idea of "handoff" and how that's such a big problem in software projects - Mary Poppendieck on the Handoff and Waste
Gauri Nanda, Entrepreneur and inventor of Clocky	The inventor of Clocky, Gauri Nanda, shares with us her thoughts on innovation and the birth of Clocky
Gretchen Rubin, Author and evangelist of Happiness	In March 2010, I held a 2 part series of interview with Gretchen Rubin, the author of the Happiness Project. Her answers to reader's questions on a variety of topics centering on happiness will enlighten you. Gretchen Rubin, the author of The Happiness Project, shares with us here thoughts on how to be happy and what our part is in choosing to be happy. Gretchen Rubin, the author of The Happiness Project, answers questions on happiness. This is Part 1 of 2. And, In part 2 of 2, Gretchen Rubin, the author of the Happiness project answers more questions on how to be happy.
Spencer Rascoff, CEO of Zillow	Spencer Rascoff, the CEO of Zillow, shares with us his thoughts on this interview with Zillow back in June 2006.
Josh Coates, Entrepreneur and Startup Guy	Josh Coates, the founder of Mozy, shares with us jokes and the innovation behind Mozy.
Lloyd Hildebrand, Physician, Entrepreneur, and Enemy of Preventable Diseases that cause Blindness	Lloyd Hildebrand describes Diabetic Retinopathy and how his company, Inoveon, a Telemedicine Company, aims to eradicate diabetic retinopathy.
Ryan Kiskis, Gamer, Product Director, World of Warcraft	Ryan Kiskis of xFire, the developer of World of Warcraft, explains his thoughts on innovation.
Brian Hansen, Product Director, Kaboodle, the first pinterest	Kaboodle, was clearly the predecessor to Pinterest. We learn about Kaboodle and the innovation behind it.
Mark Jen, Product Manager, Guy who was fired from Google	Mark Jen, VP of Product Management at Plaxo, a Contact management company, the predecessor to Linkedin speaks to us about innovation and the business of business networking.
Samuel Adams, Community Director and expert on all things word of mouth	Bzzagent, the word of mouth marketing company, explains the power of the buzz.

The post Interview with Jason Yip: In Software Engineering Respect for People is Trusting that People are Capable of Their Own Improvement appeared first on shmula.

I love the fact that Lean principles is being applied everywhere. That fact alone tells me that the principles endure, regardless of value stream and is a good sign that there’s a lot of freedom with the lean framework. In this interview, we learn how Lean is applied to Branding. Laura Busche, the author of Leanbranding, shares with us how she’s applied Lean principles to create dynamic, lasting brands that convert. Specifically, you’ll learn the following:

• What is a brand?
• How exactly to apply Lean principles to branding?
• What are the 7 wastes of branding?
• What a brand strategist using Lean has in common with a hard-nosed shop floor lean practitioner

Enjoy the interview and learn more about Laura immediately after. Enjoy the interview and please feel free to check out other lean leadership interviews.

Hi Laura. Can you tell my audience a little about yourself and your work?

I’m a brand strategist and have mentored over 300 entrepreneurs and their 90+ internet-based startups in building and measuring high-conversion brands as part of the Colombian government’s Apps.co program. In the process, I’ve learned about what makes and breaks startup brands, what teams fear as they create them, and how it can be fixed. I’ve grasped first-hand what it takes to optimize every component of their brand strategy from logo design to demo day pitches, and compiled these lessons in the Lean Branding book, which is now part of O’Reilly’s Lean Series.

My academic background is a combination of business (undergraduate), design (graduate) and consumer psychology (doctoral), which has allowed me to build and communicate a unique methodology for brand building that is well-informed by these disciplines.

My audience is varied, but consists generally of Lean practitioners in various settings – from manufacturing to healthcare. If you were to explain Lean Branding to someone on the shop floor who is very well aware of Lean principles from Toyota, how would you do it? On which points would you build a common bond?

Like Toyota’s approach to lean, this book relies on the idea that brands exist in order to generate value for consumers, and investments that do not contribute to such value are seen as wasteful. In Lean Branding, we continuously test hypotheses about a brand’s symbols, story and strategy to determine which version of them works best to generate conversion. Just like you work to minimize waste, improve continuously, and prevent quality issues, Lean Branding practitioners learn to allocate resources strategically, engage in constant hypothesis testing and build more informed brand components from the onset (to avoid future expenses).

For decades, many marketers have been introducing brand development as a “soft” science, to the point where many believe that branding is ornamental or a second-class concern. This is because many haven’t realized that brand development should be evidence-based, and that our branding efforts can actually be matched to the returns that they generate. Lean Branding sees brands much like you see the products in your shop floor: as the result of a process that must be optimized to avoid inconsistency, waste, and overwork.

Let’s assume my audience is familiar with PDCA from Toyota, but not Eric Ries’ version for startups – Build, Measure, Learn. Within that context, can you explain what Lean Branding is? And, why the use of Lean?

Ries’ introduction of the Build-Measure-Learn cycle is logically inspired by lean manufacturing practices, and reinterprets PDCA to fit the rapid iterations that startups face. Unlike PDCA, where “Plan” and “Do” are separate stages, the cycle introduced in the Lean Startup focuses on agility, and merges these two into a single “Build” phase. Instead of focusing their efforts on planning, startups must often experiment and launch simultaneously, figuring out what customers want by exposing them to minimum viable products.

Along the same lines, Lean Branding is an evidence-based process to develop high-conversion brands while minimizing waste. As in Toyota’s PDCA, this method is iterative and involves constant adjusting. The “Plan” and “Do” phases come together in a single “Build” stage, where minimally viable brand components are created. An initial set of visual symbols, a value creation story and growth strategy is built to form the base of our iteration process. The “Check” phase, which becomes “Measure” in the B-M-L cycle, introduces a series of methods to test out the validity and effectiveness of the previously built components in light of how much value they add for customers. The brand’s visual identity, resonance and traction are all evaluated based on actionable metrics. Finally, the “Act” or “Adjust” phase in PDCA becomes “Learn” in Eric Ries’ version. In Lean Branding, learning involves rebranding, repositioning or rechanneling based on the feedback that one has obtained from the measurement stage. Just like in PDCA, the BML cycle repeats in order to guarantee continuous improvement.

We recently interviewed Jeff Gothelf on Lean UX. What is the relationship between Lean UX and Lean Branding as you describe it?

Lean Branding defines a brand as the “unique story that consumers recall when they think of you.” This story associates your product with their personal stories, a particular personality, what you promise to solve, and with your position in relation to competitors. Your brand is represented by your visual symbols, and feeds from multiple conversations where you must participate strategically.

Now, as you can imagine, this story is written & rewritten every time consumers interact with everything related to your offer: your name, pitch, employees, point of purchase, product quality, and yes, your user experience. This is where Lean UX and Lean Branding join forces: by building a customer-centric, feedback-based user experience, brands are actually solidifying the story that has taken shape in their customers’ minds, without wasting resources. Since Lean UX focuses on building product features that positively affect customer behavior and add genuine value, it contributes to the brand-building process demystified in Lean Branding.

It is essential to remember that your brand encapsulates your product, and everything else conforming the unique story that consumers form when they think of you. Therefore, Lean Branding helps you think about your product experience in terms of all the brand elements that must come together when someone consumes your offer. User experience is one such element.

The book introduces a tool called the Brand Journey Map to help you visualize your brand’s value creation story holistically.

If you were to list the 7 wastes of Branding, what would they be?

Now, Lean Branding isn’t just for startups, right? How would Lean Branding apply to established companies? Or, what about Lean Branding for internal change transformation initiatives within a big company?

That’s right. Lean Branding can also help intrapreneurs build and rebuild dynamic brands to transform their companies. The building, measurement and learning notions introduced in the book can help everyone trying to build a high-conversion brand: from the individual wanting to reflect his/her personal value offer, to early-stage startups with a minimum viable product, to established companies with wide product portfolios.

Thanks Laura. If an audience member would like to learn more about Lean Branding, where do you suggest she begins her journey?

We regularly publish articles on Lean Branding practices, tools and tips at leanbranding.com/blog. You can subscribe to our free email newsletter there.

About Laura Busche

Laura is Summa Cum Laude from the Kogod School of Business (American University), and completed a Master’s degree in Design Management (Savannah College of Art & Design, SCAD). She is currently completing her PhD dissertation in Consumer Psychology, sponsored by the Colombian Government’s Administrative Department for Science, Technology & Innovation (Colciencias).

Junior Chamber International (UN program) recognized her as one of the Top Outstanding Young Persons in Colombia in 2012, and she became part of the World Economic Forum’s Global Shapers community of young leaders changing the world in 2013. Laura regularly blogs about branding, design and business at Leanbranding. She has worked in Groupon, interned at National Geographic and co-founded a digital agency called Ozone Group in 2008. More at www.laurabusche.com.

Other Interviews you might enjoy:

Lean Leadership Interviews
Jeffrey Liker, NYT Best Selling Author, Professor, and Author of the Toyota Way	Jeffrey Liker, author of The Toyota Way, shares his thoughts on Toyota Kata, why sometimes root cause analysis isn't necessary, and what else he is excited to learn - even after 30 years of being a student of the Toyota Production System.
Eric Ries, Author of the Leanstartup	In this Podcast interview with Eric Ries, the author of The Leanstartup, we learn about the how he's applied Lean principles to starting companies. He also tells us about his consulting work with GE and how GE, worldwide, has applied Leanstartup throughout all its divisions and is considering Leanstartup as its new Operating System for the company.
Michael Balle, Author and Respected Lean Thinker	Michael Balle is a leading voice in Lean. In this interview, he shares with us his thoughts on Lean, tells us about his book, and spends a good amount of time discussing Respect for People.
Bob Emiliani, Author and Professor of Management	This interview with Dr. Bob Emiliani covers several aspects of Fake Lean versus Real Lean. There are real insights here from the "Lean Professor".
Laura Busche, Author of Lean Branding	Lean Branding is an application of Lean principles to branding. Read her provocative and practical approach to brand branding using the principles of Lean.
	Robert Martichenko is the Founder and CEO of LeanCor - a lean logistics and supply chain company. He is also the author of the book "A Lean Fulfillment Stream", published by the Lean Enterprise Institute. In this interview, he shares with us how Lean can be applied effectively beyond the 4 walls of manufacturing and outside the office, but infused into the entire supply chain.
Peter Armstrong, CEO of Leanpub (Lean Publishing)	Leanpub is an innovative approach to book publishing, where Peter believes that lean principles apply. He claims that writing a book is essentially a startup. And, the worst waste of all is writing a book that nobody wants. Read more to learn how to apply lean to the world of book publishing.
Keith Sparkjoy, Chief Culture Officer at Pluralsight	Keith Sparkjoy is the Culture Officer at Pluralsight, a Utah company that raised $135 Million in 2014 - an unprecedented amount of venture capital. And, here's the really cool part, as the culture officer, he's trying to transform his company using Dr. W. Edward Deming's teachings.
David J. Anderson, Author of many books on Agile, and inventor of Kanban for Creative and Knowledge work	David J. Anderson is the pioneer of the application of Kanban for creative knowledge work. His methodology and approach has had widespread acceptance and adoption and in this interview he shares results from companies that have tried his approach and other lessons learned.
Dimitar Karaivanov, CEO of Kanbanize	Dimitar Karaivanov is the CEO of Kanbanize, a visual kanban system designed for creative and knowledge workers. In this interview, we discuss the product and its many uses and how it embodies the principles of Lean.
Chris Hefley, CEO LeanKit	Chris Hefley is the CEO of LeanKit, a company that provides Virtual Kanban software for software development teams and knowledge workers. Reah his interview and learn what led to the development of LeanKit and the role Lean and the Toyota Production System plays.
Dan Markovitz, Noted consultant and expert on Lean for Office	In this interview with Dan Markovitz, we learn why he believes that everything is connected to the customer through the office. Based on this belief, he feels that Lean for Office makes the most sense. Read and learn how he's implemented Lean for the Office.
Jason Yip, Consultant to software development organzations	Jason Yip is a noted thoughtleader in software engineering. As a consultant, he helps software engineering organizations get better. In this interview, we learn the state of software engineering and the role of Agile, Lean for Software and Kanban.
Matthew May, NYT Best Selling author, consultant, and expert on Toyota Production System	Matthew May is an author and influential voice in Lean and also Design Thinking. He worked close to a decade at University of Toyota to help codify the Toyota Production System. In this interview, he shares with us his thoughts on his experience and what we can learn from it.
Mark Graban, Best Selling Author and expert on Lean for Healthcare	Lean Healthcare expert Mark Graban stops by and share his thoughts with Shmula readers on how Lean can be applied to arguably the most important industry in the world, healthcare.
Art Smalley, 15 Year Toyota Veteran and authority on Toyota Production System	Art Smalley is one of the most honest and influential voices in Lean. He was the first American to work in Japan's Kamigo plant, the plant where Taiichi Ohno began the Toyota Production System. He shares with us his thoughts on the Lean Movement and where it is going wrong.
Jeff Gothelf, Author of Lean UX, applying Lean for User Experience	Lean is being applied to every facet of business. Jeff Gothelf shares with us his thoughts on applying Lean for user experience, or Lean UX.
Cecil Dijoux, Expert Consultant on applying Lean for IT	Cecil Dijoux shares with us his thoughts on applying Lean to IT, definitely a must-read if you are in the information technology space.
Brent Wahba, Author and Expert on applying Lean for Sales and Marketing	Brent Wahba is a fellow at the Lean Enterprise Institute and shares with us his thoughts on Lean for Sales and Marketing.

Interview with Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos

In December 2008, I was fortunate enough to interview Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos. In a 5 part series of interviews, we discuss the Zappos strategy and Tony answers questions on why he chooses to focus on the customer and how he sees that as strategic. Interview Questions from shmula.com blog readers Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 1 Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 2 Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 3 Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 4 Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 5

Interviews with Customer Experience Experts
Mark Roenigk, COO of Rackspace and Board Member at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation	Rackspace Interview on Customer Experience: We interviewed Mark Roenigk on June 10, 2013. We discussed the Net Promoter Score and also topics around process improvement and how Rackspace places the customer first.
Shep Hyken, Author and expert on Customer Experience Strategy	Shep Hyken Customer Service Interview: We interviewed Shep Hyken on June 3, 2013 and discussed topics close to his heart - the customer. We focused our discussion on customer service and how focusing on the customer is strategic, not just tactical.
Annette Franz, Customer Experience Strategist and Survey Design Expert	Annette Franz Gleneicki on Customer Experience Strategy: Annette Gleneicki is a customer experience thought leader and Director at Confirmit, a voice of the customer platform. We discuss her thoughts on customer experience and the direction of the overall field.
Michel Falcon, Customer Experience Strategist and Author	Michel Falcon on Improving the Customer Experience: Michel Falcon is a former executive at 1800GOTJUNK and was the person who propelled 1800GOTJUNK to become a customer service powerhouse. In this interview, we discuss what he did and the lessons he learned.
Adam Ramshaw, Consultant to fortune 500 companies on Customer Experience	Adam Ramshaw, a customer experience consultant with Genroe, explains the relationship between continuous improvement and customer experience.

Leadership Interviews
Aza Raskin, Author, Startup Founder, and Son of Mac Inventor Jef Raskin	This is a multi-part Interview with Aza Raskin, on the Humane Interface. He discusses Agile Software Engineering. Then, in a later interview Aza Raskin discusses the "infinite scroll" approach to Google search results. In part 3, Aza Raskin shares his thoughts on Feature Bloat (aka, "Featuritis") and how to overcome it. In part 4, Aza Raskin describes the concept of Quasimodal Design and how to implement it in our software projects. Finally, Aza Raskin explains the role of Poka Yoke in the User Experience and why Lean should be applied to software engineering and knowledge work in general.
Mary Poppendieck, Author and codifier of Lean for Software Engineering	In this multi-part interview with Mary Poppendieck, the pre-eminent evangelist and teacher for Lean for Software, explains Lean Software Engineering. Then, Shmula.com readers were able to ask her questions of their own - read them here as Mary Poppendieck’s Answers to ALL Readers’ Questions, which includes questions such as Should Lean be Top-down or Bottom-up?. Then, another Interview with Mary Poppendieck. Then, Another interview with Mary Poppendieck where she explains Lean Software Engineering to a Lean Six Sigma audience. Plus, here's the Original Article to Ask Mary Poppendieck Anything. Finally, Mary considers the idea of "handoff" and how that's such a big problem in software projects - Mary Poppendieck on the Handoff and Waste
Gauri Nanda, Entrepreneur and inventor of Clocky	The inventor of Clocky, Gauri Nanda, shares with us her thoughts on innovation and the birth of Clocky
Gretchen Rubin, Author and evangelist of Happiness	In March 2010, I held a 2 part series of interview with Gretchen Rubin, the author of the Happiness Project. Her answers to reader's questions on a variety of topics centering on happiness will enlighten you. Gretchen Rubin, the author of The Happiness Project, shares with us here thoughts on how to be happy and what our part is in choosing to be happy. Gretchen Rubin, the author of The Happiness Project, answers questions on happiness. This is Part 1 of 2. And, In part 2 of 2, Gretchen Rubin, the author of the Happiness project answers more questions on how to be happy.
Spencer Rascoff, CEO of Zillow	Spencer Rascoff, the CEO of Zillow, shares with us his thoughts on this interview with Zillow back in June 2006.
Josh Coates, Entrepreneur and Startup Guy	Josh Coates, the founder of Mozy, shares with us jokes and the innovation behind Mozy.
Lloyd Hildebrand, Physician, Entrepreneur, and Enemy of Preventable Diseases that cause Blindness	Lloyd Hildebrand describes Diabetic Retinopathy and how his company, Inoveon, a Telemedicine Company, aims to eradicate diabetic retinopathy.
Ryan Kiskis, Gamer, Product Director, World of Warcraft	Ryan Kiskis of xFire, the developer of World of Warcraft, explains his thoughts on innovation.
Brian Hansen, Product Director, Kaboodle, the first pinterest	Kaboodle, was clearly the predecessor to Pinterest. We learn about Kaboodle and the innovation behind it.
Mark Jen, Product Manager, Guy who was fired from Google	Mark Jen, VP of Product Management at Plaxo, a Contact management company, the predecessor to Linkedin speaks to us about innovation and the business of business networking.
Samuel Adams, Community Director and expert on all things word of mouth	Bzzagent, the word of mouth marketing company, explains the power of the buzz.

The post Laura Busche Interview on Lean Branding: Using Lean Principles to Create Dynamic Brands that Convert appeared first on shmula.

I first heard of Pluralsight when I saw a tweet from Techcrunch on the massive $135 Million Funding it received in August 2014. I thought to myself, “what is pluralsight?”. So I looked them up. It turns out they are a local Utah company – go figure; small world since I live in Utah now. I checked out their site to see what they were about and one thing immediately stuck out to me: there was a blog post written by Keith Sparkjoy entitled “Why Deming?”. I thought, hmmm, there’s something you don’t see everyday. So, I asked him to be part of my Leadership Insights Series.

So today, I’m pleased to present Keith Sparkjoy, a co-founder of Pluralsight and has held roles of CTO and is currently the Culture Coach. In this interview you’ll learn:

• Why Deming? And, what can we still learn from him?
• What’s wrong with modern management and what Deming has to teach us.
• What the Red Bead game can teach us about working in a system we’re entrusted to improve, but have very little control in actually improving.

Enjoy the article and check out Pluralsight also. You can learn more about Keith after the interview. Enjoy.

Hi Keith, and thanks for taking the time to speak to my audience. Could you please introduce yourself and your work to my readers?

I’m a cofounder of pluralsight.com, where our vision is to democratize professional training. We offer high quality video training at a very affordable price (subscriptions start at $29/mo). We currently offer training for software developers, IT professionals, and creatives.

What’s your role at Pluralsight and how does Deming’s influence play into it?

For many years I was the CTO, leading the development of our content delivery system, which included the public-facing as well as internal websites and other tools. I gave my teams a great deal of autonomy and eventually they became self-supportive and I was able to focus more on company culture, which is something I learned a great deal about while working as CTO. I discovered Deming while reading Dan Pink’s book Drive, as well as Erik Reis’s book The Lean Startup. Both seemed to be influenced by a guy named W. Edwards Deming, so I picked up a copy of Deming’s epic book Out of the Crisis. I also purchased a set of DVDs from the Deming Institute and watched the entire “Deming Library” over a weekend. It was a very emotional moment for me as I realized that we could maintain a healthy culture at Pluralsight even as we experienced tremendous growth (we grew from 20 to 200 employees in the span of 18 months). Prior to this I was starting to see sickness creep in and I was honestly worried that we were going to become just another typical “grown up” company that Scott Adams regularly mocks in his comic strip Dilbert.

Suppose you had a chance to have dinner with Dr. Deming. What advice would he have for you and for Pluralsight? What do you think he’d say about modern management?

I think he would ask our senior leadership team to spend more time where the work happens. See for yourself what is going on and try to break out of the bubble that naturally forms around you. Our leadership team has made great strides towards adopting Dr. Deming’s lens as a guide for cultivating a healthy company culture, but this is one place we still need to do a better job, I think.

Deming had a lot of complaints about modern management techniques. He pointed out how a lot of seemingly “obvious” management techniques have unintended consequences that lead to a distorted view of the company. It’s hard enough to run a profitable company in a depressed economy when you know the real numbers. But when you have a distorted view you’re relying purely on luck. Deming helps us unhook from practices that introduce distortion (annual merit reviews, stack ranking, commissions, employee of the month programs, incentive pay, and so on).

Have you conducted the Red Bead Experiment at your company? If so, what were some of the ah-ha moments?

Yes, we’ve actually done this twice. Once with top leadership and once with the entire company. It’s especially effective to put top leadership to work as willing workers so they can feel what it’s like to work in a broken system that they are not trusted to improve

PDCA is the accepted improvement loop at Toyota. But, Deming encourages PDSA. What’s your feeling? Does it matter? Why or why not?

I’ve not studied the differences between the two loops, but my understanding is that Deming wanted us to “study” the results, not merely “check” them.

In addition to being strongly influenced by Deming, as the Culture Coach do you also encourage improvement by teaching PDCA? If so, how is that being received?

We call it PDSA, following Deming’s lead. Yes we do encourage teams to use the PDSA loop to improve our systems. It’s generally been received well when the intent of PDSA is understood by all on the team. It tends to remove a lot of fear because the entire team (including the leader) works together to come up with a theory and a way to test that theory. So if the test fails, nobody is worried about losing their job. The failure becomes a learning: we come up with a new theory and test again. By spinning that flywheel we are able to innovate and produce better results for our customers.

Not everyone understands PDSA. I recently heard about an employee who was afraid to share her idea for a PDSA with her leader. This is the type of thing that culture coaches can help with – rooting out sources of fear within the company and working with teams to drive it out.

Let’s discuss the concept of fear. Deming had a lot to say about fear. Is fear in the workplace still an issue for modern management? How do you address fear in the workplace?

Definitely it’s an issue. And one of the hardest things about it is that it’s often not discussed. Nobody wants to talk about what they are afraid of. This is one of the hardest jobs of management. They must develop a strong rapport with their teams so that team members are able to open up and talk about what they fear. It’s tough to work at your best in a creative endeavor like ours when you’re afraid all the time. But before any of this can happen, the traditional manager has to have a serious change of heart and learn that managing by fear isn’t an effective long term strategy. Managers must transform into leaders. Leadership is very different than management, as Deming points out.

Viewing the organization as a system was one of Dr. Deming’s main contributions. What are the negative consequences when we don’t? How have you addressed the natural tendency to silo? Is more meetings the answer?

When we fail to lead a company as a system, we tend to suboptimize (for example, by giving incentives to VPs for optimizing their individual departments, which causes all sorts of problems). When we start to see the company as a system we start to think about suppliers and customers at all levels. If we all want the system to function optimally, we start to break down walls between departments and encourage direct communication. More meetings isn’t necessarily the answer, but having meetings where the right people are there becomes critical. Instead of working to please your boss, why not work to please your customer? That could be someone in a different department.

Deming’s 14 points can be viewed as a framework for cultural transformation. Do you disagree with any of them? If so, which ones and why?

I think all of Deming’s 14 points are important, and I agree with all of them. They reinforce one another.

Back to the 14 points. Why is it so difficult for companies to adopt all of them?

Many of the points, if adopted in isolation, could fail spectacularly. For example, if you have a typical unhealthy western culture and you dropped incentive pay, you’ll likely lose some of your workforce if you don’t also adopt the other points and create a healthy culture where people are intrinsically motivated and love coming to work each day. Adopting Deming’s model of management is not a piecemeal thing – you have to drastically change the hearts and minds of management so they start to lead and start to develop trust within their teams. As Simon Sinek points out in his book Leaders Eat Last, the leader is the one who sacrifices first, and it’s often hard to convince managers that this is a solid long term strategy for success.

Pluralsight is a young company, with about 100 or so employees and is early in its cultural transformation. What advice would you have for others that are just beginning their journey in becoming less command and control and more in line with Deming’s teachings?

We’re over 200 employees and growing

You’ve got to experiment with it to really get it. I remember the visceral sense of enthusiasm and ownership that my development team showed when I experimented with dropping command and control in favor of consensus-based decision making. When it’s their idea, they are going to own it, feel tremendous responsibility for it, and feel tremendous pride when they succeed. So much more than if they were simply implementing your idea – then they are more likely to want your job

A couple weeks after the experiment with my development team, I shared my experience during a one-on-one with my leader, the CEO. That one-on-one was in the morning, and later that afternoon during a leadership team meeting, he tried the same thing on us. Suddenly instead of being the “decider” he wanted to hear what we thought, and he wanted us to vote on stuff. I remember feeling a huge weight lift off my chest during that meeting.

So I got a chance to experience leadership without command and control both as a leader myself and as a team member, all within one month. This forever changed my attitude.

Is there anything else you’d like to share with my audience?

I’ve learned over the last year that in so many things, focusing directly on what it is you want is not often the most effective long-term strategy.

You want to be happy? Focusing directly on your own happiness will often lead you into short-term strategies that will (ironically) make you less happy in the long term. There’s usually something else that’s more important to focus on in order to get what you want. Want to really be happy in the long term? Spend less time thinking about yourself and more time thinking about others. Give more. Love more. You’ll find a much more meaningful happiness that lasts by focusing on the right things.

You want a profitable company? Focusing directly on the numbers and incenting people to make them better may work in the short term, but you won’t get the big gains that you could get if you instead focused on creating a work environment where employees love to be.

Want happy employees? A pool table might give some immediate gratification, but changing the hearts and minds of managers and helping them become leaders, unhooking from command and control, removing demotivators like “employee of the month” would have a much better long term impact.

About Keith Sparkjoy

Keith is a cofounder and Culture Coach of Pluralsight, the leader in hardcore developer training. With Keith’s help, Pluralsight launched in 2004 with a small team of world-renowned software development authorities to provide professional training for developers throughout the world. The company launched a proprietary process whereby it publishes high-quality training videos through an unmatched online learning experience.

As Culture Coach, Keith is constantly challenging the leadership at Pluralsight to improve its culture. Leaning heavily on Deming’s teachings, we want to build a company where people find joy in their work and are intrinsically motivated to help us democratize professional tech training, making a great tech education available to anyone in the world who wants it, at an affordable price.

With a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Irvine, Keith quickly migrated into the world of programming once graduating. After a few years in the industry, and after mastering a particularly daunting software technology called “COM”, Keith wanted to share his learnings and started teaching a course at the UCI extension. This quickly grew into a passion for research and teaching that led to Keith joining DevelopMentor for a 7 year stint of teaching and researching, where his focus was on security. During that time, Keith became the security columnist for MSJ and MSDN magazines, a column he wrote for 8 years. Keith was also a Microsoft MVP for many years.

In 2004, along with cofounders Aaron Skonnard and Fritz Onion, Keith helped form Pluralsight, where he’s refocused his efforts on software craftsmanship and quality. Keith helped build a team of incredibly capable craftsmen to build the next generation of online learning platform: pluralsight.com

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