All tagged Lean
A quick note of an article from Brad Cairns of the Center for Lean Learning, Where Lean Meets Theory of Constraints. In it he gives an overview of both Lean and TOC and how they can work together - something that isn’t always obvious to people deep in one approach or the other.
I listen to the Gemba Academy Podcast, and a recent entry reflects back to a blog post from one of their contributors, Why Can’t We See the Financial Impact of Continuous Improvement? I love the list of mistakes people make that make CI efforts seem to vanish on the balance sheet.
The latest DevOps Enterprise Summit (DOES) wrapped up last week in Las Vegas. Amongst the videos and tweets and blog posts that have come out of the event was a quick interview with Gene Kim on the Agile Amped podcast with Greg Bledsoe of SolutionsIQ.
Gene Kim and John Willis recorded a set of conversations called Beyond the Phoenix Project to talk about the DevOps movement since the publication of The Phoenix Project. (It’s available as an audio and a transcription.) I very much appreciate that the thinking behind DevOps has been geared around learning and applying concepts and ideas from all of these areas. I'm sure there are cargo-cultists who simply try to mimic what they see other people doing, but the people who are developing and growing in DevOps are clearly those who are looking at the giants that have come before them, climbing up on their shoulders, doing something new that is relevant to their current view of the world, and then sharing that back with the community to test and refine and develop further. I got a strong sense of excitement and desire to learn from this.
"The Incredible Transformation of Gregory Todd" by AJ Sheppard is an interesting take on the business novel with the guru character played by a young upstart, rather than a grizzled veteran or external consultant. There are a lot of good nuggets, but I missed an overall picture of how the transformation was accomplished.
Any time you get a response different from what you expect, it is an opportunity to learn. The big question is whether you take advantage of it. Another take on this idea thanks to the Leanblog Podcast, "I consider resistance as additional information (albeit in an unpleasant form).
The Manager Tools podcast has a recent entry on The Five Whys which come out of the suite of tools from Toyota / Lean / Toyota Production System. It's a great root cause analysis tool, but the way the Manager Tools team describe it struck a chord with me.
If you look for something, you will likely find it. If people know you are monitoring or looking for something, they will make an effort to supply that thing. And on the other side, if you don't ask for that thing / report / result, you won't get it.
Depending on who you talk to and where you listen, the Lean and Theory of Constraints communities are either close partners or opposing players in the "continuous improvement" arena. But from my perspective they are much closer to being friendly than opponents.
It's a short book, meant to be a quick read and guide to start thinking about thinking. Or maybe, more accurately, to get people doing something differently about thinking. The tone is light, but insistent - change the way you think to create fantastic new solutions.
More on time management and multitasking. It's a topic near and dear to what I've been doing for many years.
In 7 Wastes That Impact Business Growth Jon Terry, one of the founders of LeanKit, presents a nice way of thinking through the Lean / Toyota Production System idea of waste and how one my think about it in the context of business growth in any type of organization.
"The CIO's Guide to Breakthrough Project Portfolio Performance: Applying the Best of Critical Chain, Agile, and Lean" by Michael Hannan, Wolfram Muller, and Hilbert Robinson is a good, short description of how to take ideas from several disciplines and apply them to an overall portfolio management approach.
Another book on my December reading binge was Look Before You Lean by “Employee X.” It was recommended by my friend and fellow curious cat, Steve Holt, in a quick Tweet. I took a look, and the topic seemed right up my alley. Indeed it is.
My review of "The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win" by Gene Kim and gang. I enjoyed it, and ended up staying up late to finish it. The structure of the book is quite familiar: business novel; looming disaster; averted with the determination of the protagonist (and colleagues) and the help of a wacky "guru." There are some new-to-me concepts that fit neatly with my current worldview.
Believing in the inherent value and quality of people comes out in how you challenge them and what you expect of them. It has much less to do with your direct personal style.
I read Bob Sproull's _Epiphanized_ in just a few days and found it told a gripping story of TOC transformation, even if the writing style was sometimes off-putting.
Thanks to Mark Graban's recent Leanblog podcast with Steve Bell, I found a long list of "information wastes" that serve as an appendix to Bell and Orzen's _Lean IT: Enabling and Sustaining Your Lean Transformation_ (2010).
I came across a pair of articles that compare Lean, Theory of Constraints and several other process improvement approaches. Both decide that Lean is the best, but the authors appear to emphasize Lean in their work as well. TOC doesn't get a very good hearing.
"The High-Velocity Edge" was given to the attendees at the Lean Software & Systems Conference this year, as Steven J. Spear was one of the keynote speakers. I enjoyed the book and have dog-eared pages and underlined throughout.