A second set of observations from the TOCICO 2021 conference - quick thoughts on talks from Henry Camp, Philip Marris, Graham Scott, Boaz Ronen, and Rob Newbold.
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A second set of observations from the TOCICO 2021 conference - quick thoughts on talks from Henry Camp, Philip Marris, Graham Scott, Boaz Ronen, and Rob Newbold.
The 2021 edition of the TOCICO (Theory of Constraints International Certification Organization) annual conference was held online last week. Here are some observations from the talks I was able to attend - I might have some more on reviewing archived videos.
The TOCICO hosted an online Critical Chain 2020 conference this week. As it seems most online conferences are running, the talks themselves were pre-recorded and the speakers were available in chat during their talk, and this conference had live Q&A immediately following each speaker. This made for fewer talks overall, but good opportunity to learn a bit more from the presenters and other attendees. Examples in the conference ranged across multiple industries (aerospace, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, etc) and application areas (manufacturing, product development, information technology, etc.)
Final wrap-up from TOCICO, including the obligatory conversation about how to make TOC the way.
Henry Camp gave another interesting talk on "Gaining a Competitive Edge through Sufficiency - 10 Steps to Breakthrough Results". His focus this time was on the concepts from The Choice, which describes the necessary conditions for a successful life: Lots of chances, Toughness/willingness to recover from mistakes, and the Ability to collaborate with others.
Humberto Baptista led a thoughtful discussion on "The Elusive Nature of POOGI" (process of ongoing improvement). He had a lot of fun with the language and suggesting Eli Goldratt left more meaning between the lines.
Joe Cooper and Malcolm Neumeyer spoke about "Applying TOC to Enterprise Architecture: Gaining Focus". It was an education on EA and a nice view of the challenges they see in the discipline.
Sanjeev Gupta of Realization gave the opening keynote on the second day of TOCICO. The talk was billed as "The Rising Importance of TOC" but ended up becoming "Solving the Projects Problem: It's not about buffers or behaviors" based on his experience with years and years of CCPM software and implementations.
How do you think about embedding TOC and flow into everything you do? "Engineering Reality at WiseTech Global: Core Conflict – Friend or Foe?" from James Powell was a fun talk from someone who clearly enjoys the work he is doing.
The lunchtime keynote was "30 Years of Success: TOC & Throughput Improvement at GM" by Jeff Miller (GM) & Kevin Kohls.
Steel companies have been using TOC in a variety of formats for many years. The steel industry is even featured in the TOC Insights self-learning program that were created in the early 1990's. There were a couple talks at TOCICO from steel companies.
Yaniv Dinur presented some of the challenges experienced in work with a large engineering-to-order company, "Engineering to Order – engineering, procurement, and production in one flow."
The first official day of the TOCICO conference started with a keynote from Kaoru (John) Watanabe talking about the long history of TOC implementations at Hitachi, "Enterprise wide TOC Implementation at $83B Conglomerate."
First workshop of TOCICO18. I sat in on the Demand Driven: A Practical Workshop on The Strategy of Flow by Debra Smith - she's one of the long time experts on this topic from her experience creating the concepts of DDMRP and implementing with many clients.
The TOCICO (Theory of Constraints International Certification Organization) is holding its annual conference in Las Vegas on the 29th April - 1st May with some pre-conference workshops on Sunday the 28th.
Dee Jacob (author of Velocity) provided a workshop of a game she has been developing over many years of practice in critical chain project management. I have looked around for games or simulations to help highlight the critical pieces of critical chain, and this is the best I've seen.
Henry Camp told a parable about his own experience in trying to motivate people, in particular his sales staff. I cannot do the story justice, so I won't. Henry is a great storyteller, and he's always given off a warm, humble-but-understanding vibe. Maybe that's his Louisville roots.
Kevin Kohls had a great talk on the topic of The "Bad Luck" Obstacle - Management Churn. Essentially, he is asking the question of how people who do TOC (or any other) implementations deal with the fact of life in organization: management moves around.
Another talk on Strategy & Tactics Trees at the conference came from Michael Hannan. In this presentation he suggested updating the current "projects" S&T Tree to be more universal to any project-delivery organization.
John Ricketts from IBM talked about his view that S&T trees should be dynamic, because the assumptions under which the S&T was built could change. One must be able to pivot as the underlying conditions change.