Management

Software development Kanban

Nov 11 2011

From scancards to “personal kanbans” and Ybry charts

Professionals know that their productivity drops when they take on too many concurrent projects. An engineer whose attention is split across 15 projects doesn’t contribute effectively to any. But it happens because supervisors keep piling on assignments without regard to this phenomenon. Over the years, cures have been proposed under different names, all aiming to cap work in process.

About 1982, a colleague showed me the system he used to manage what he was working on. It was called the Scancard System, and it used the hardware  in Figure 1. The cards were square, with 3 1/4-in sides and borders of different colors. They came with letter-size card pocket plastic boards that you could insert into 3-ring binders, keep on your desk or pin to a wall.

Figure 1. The Scancard System

He used it with one column for his backlog of things to do, one column for work in process, and one column for completed items. It was a paper-based system but, at the time, so was almost everything we did. It gave you visibility, it capped the number of items you were working on at one time, and moving cards from one column to the next was an effective metaphor for the flow of your work. The ads showed smartly dressed managers using their scancard systems in meetings. I went for it and used it for years, until I had a project with a company that used another system and switched to fit in.

Fast forward to 2011. Scancard Systems is out of business, and I hear of a system called “Personal Kanban,” that is focused on providing visibility and limiting work in process, using a white board and Post-Its as in Figure 2:

Figure 2. “Personal Kanban”

I put quotes around the name because I find it to be little more than a feat of vocabulary engineering, leveraging the buzz around a feature of Toyota’s production control system to repackage ideas that have little to do with it, are very simple and have been around for a long time. A software developer visiting a factory may see a similarity with Toyota’s Kanbans, but it escapes me.

Of course, if, as in Figure 2,  it is on a white board, you can’t carry it with you to a meeting or share it in your network. The Personal Kanban website advertizes an iPhone app called iKan, that I can’t find on Apple’s App Store. On the other hand, Leankit Kanban offers a web-based application with an iPhone version that looks very much like a team to-do list management system. It looks most useful if your work can be perceived as a collection of independent activities, which happens if each Post-It is for a whole project or for a prospect in a sales cycle. But it would not fit if each Post-It were for a task within a project, with precedence constraints or iterations between tasks.

Another limitation of such a status board is that is only shows current status, as compared, for example, with the Ybry chart of Figure 3, which shows the complete history of each project by using a line for each project rather than a card. Like the status board, it assumes that all project go through the same sequence of phases.

Figure 3. Ybry chart for projects going through the same sequence of phases

Ybry charts were invented by Charles Ybry in 1846 for railroad scheduling, and are still used for that purpose. See Edward Tufte’s Envisioning Information, pp. 107-110. The work-combination charts used in Lean operator job design are a variation on this method, as explained in Working with Machines, pp. 133-154.

By • Management • 10 • Tags: , , , ,

Lean implementation survey

Nov 9 2011

More Flak on Lean Based on the Same Survey

Managing Automation published another response to the same study that claims to show that Lean does not work: Lean Manufacturing and Operation Excellence: Not Worth Their Weight? 

As described in the press and their own press release, the AlixPartners study commingles Lean with “Six Sigma and other productivity programs,” which raises the following issues:

  1. Lean Manufacturing is based on the Toyota Production System, which includes neither Six Sigma nor Operation Excellence nor  “other productivity programs,” whatever those may be.
  2. Lean Manufacturing is not a “productivity program,” but the pursuit of concurrent improvement in quality, productivity, delivery, safety, and morale. I  know I am repeating myself, but it needs to be said until the leaders of manufacturing companies hear it.

If these press accounts are correct, the survey confuses Lean with other approaches in an open-ended list, misstates its purpose, and considers exclusively metrics of cost reduction.

The effectiveness of Lean is not an easy subject to study. Should we survey all the companies that claim to be Lean, have a Lean program in place, have been certified Lean by some external authority, or are top performers in their industry? Once we agree on this, we still need yardsticks to quantify both  the effort they put into Lean and the rewards from it.

I took a stab at it a few years ago, and did my own analysis, the results of which were published as a Viewpoint in Manufacturing Engineering in 2006. I chose 40 winners of the Shingo Prize and searched Hoovers Online, for comparative performance data with their 400 top competitors. On the average, the data did not show that the Shingo Prize predicted any advantage in profitability, market share or employment growth. The AlixPartner press release says roughly the same thing, but I see it as reflecting on the Shingo Prize itself, not Lean.

The Shingo Prize is supposed to be the “Nobel Prize for Manufacturing,” but what are the criteria used to award it? You can download the Shingo Prize Guidelines and see for yourself. A team of Shingo Prize auditors visits the plants and awards points  to measure “the degree to which the behaviors in an organization are aligned with the principles of operational excellence.” In other words, the plants are measured on process compliance. They score points for practices they have in place. It is like measuring chess players on the number of pawns they move, and is correlated to victory like the Shingo Prize to business performance.

Toyota did not grow based on a compliance checklist. When I visit a plant, based on what I see and what people tell me, I can form an opinion as to whether they are among the few that have the spirit of Lean or the many that are going through the motions. But I don’t know how to generate a checklist that could be systematically applied to arrive at such a conclusion, and, desirable though it may be, I don’t believe a real survey is feasible.

Jamie Flinchbaugh doesn’t like sports metaphors, but I can’t resist one here. Usain Bolt  is the fastest man alive. Let us assume somebody publishes a book entitled “The Running Secrets of Usain Bolt.” How Usain Bolt actually trains is probably not trivial and certainly involves sustained effort and ferocious discipline. The author of the book, however, is concerned that a stern, eat-your-vegetables message would hurt sales, and focuses instead on easier topics, like shoes. As a result, kids flock to shoe stores thinking that wearing these shoes will make them fast, but the real ones are too expensive, so they buy cheap imitations instead. Six months later, based on their responses, a survey concludes that Usain Bolt’s methods don’t work.

Most Lean programs today are to serious implementations as cheap imitation shoes are to the training of Usain Bolt. Where they may succeed is in ruining the reputation of Lean. It is bound to happen sooner or later. As a brand, Lean has had a 22-year run so far, already longer than I expected.

By • Management, Press clippings • 10 • Tags: , , ,

River Rouge Coke Ovens 1946-1976

Nov 8 2011

Factory life with and without Kaizen

In Kaizen, Masaaki Imai describes Japanese executives returning in the 1970s to American plants they had visited thirty years before and being struck by the absence of change: they saw the same production lines with the same equipment operated the same way. This started me looking for photographic evidence. Overall, pickings were slim, but I did find the above pictures of the same coke oven at the Ford River Rouge plant shot in 1946 and 1976.

If there is Kaizen activity in a factory, how does it change the work life of employees at all levels? The following chart compares the breakdowns of their use of time, with and without Kaizen:


In a plant without Kaizen, operators and supervisors are fully occupied with routine daily tasks: production for the operators, expediting parts, enforcing discipline, and record keeping for supervisors. Only middle managers and executives spend a fraction of their time on projects involving capacity changes, new production lines or new technology. Nobody works on incremental improvements to the way the work is done today.

By contrast, Kaizen involves employees at all levels  in such improvement activities to different degrees. Between improvement and daily routine, the boundary is sharp;  between improvement and innovation, fuzzy. Over time, the cumulative effect of incremental improvement is radical change by itself. In addition, the skills acquired and the lessons learned from incremental improvements are incorporated into new line or plant design projects. In some Japanese auto parts plants, I remember seeing automatic lines side-by-side, where one used old machines that had been gradually retrofitted with devices that reduced the need for human intervention, while the other one had been built from scratch with new machines to be automatic. The Kaizen work done to implement the former was essential to the success of the latter.

By • Management, Technology • 10 • Tags: , , , ,

Orgchart - end of lean program

Nov 4 2011

Should a lean transformation program ever end?

On LinkedIn, Patrick Courtney asked the following question: “In your experience, with a Lean transformation program when can the program become a waste? Is there a tipping point? Please share your experiences and wins.”

Let us assume we are talking about a successful Lean transformation with a program office, headed by a lean champion and including a small group of project facilitators. The question then is whether there is a point beyond which this organization is unnecessary.

That a Lean transformation is successful means that practices from daily operations on  the shop floor to strategic planning in the board room are more effective and efficient as a result of Lean, as evidence in business performance. At that point, people in the organization no longer refer to “Lean tools,” but simply to “the way we do things.” What was a change requiring adaptation is the new normal.

In principle, once Lean practices are assimilated into the company’s standard mode of operations, a program office is no longer necessary. In reality, there are some functions for which continued, organized support is necessary, such as the following:

  1. Continuous improvement. If continuous improvement is carried out through a system of circles or individual suggestions, then a structure will be needed to manage it and organize periodic conferences and award ceremonies.
  2. External certification. If the company is a part supplier, it may need to maintain its status as a “certified Lean” with some OEMs, and resources are needed to host audits and make sure that actions are taken as needed to ensure compliance.
  3. Supplier support. Companies that are successful at Lean commonly endeavor to pass their skills on to suppliers in exchange for price breaks, which requires a team of engineers.

Some people will remain involved with Lean, but in other roles than during the initial implementation, and often elsewhere on the organization chart. More generally, a successful change program should eventually fade away. For example, the pursuit of Total Quality Control (TQC) was a program in major Japanese manufacturing companies until the mid 1970’s, when all of them had received a Deming Prize. Then it  gradually lost visibility, as everything they had learned from this program was integrated in normal operations and its principles had become part of the culture.

By • Management • 27 • Tags: , ,

scrum-rugby

Nov 1 2011

Black belts, scrums, and other metaphors

To be useful, a metaphor must help understanding. For the promoters of Six Sigma to call their certification Black Belt was marketing genius. A more descriptive label might have been Staff Statistician, but what self-respecting manufacturing professional would want to be that? Borrowing a term from Japanese martial arts not only  appealed to their fighting spirit, but also gave the impression that an approach developed at Motorola in the US had a connection with Japan, ground-zero of manufacturing excellence. Even in Japan, Black Belt (“Kuroto”) and White Belt (“Shiroto”) have migrated from martial arts to everyday language, to designate respectively a real pro and an amateur.

As a metaphor,  Black Belt also made sense because there is a parallel between the Six Sigma and martial arts training programs. Traditional  masters in the martial arts of China trained one or two disciples at the Bruce Lee level in a lifetime, just as universities trained only a handful of experts in statistical design of experiments that could be effective in electronics manufacturing. One Karate instructor, on the other hand, can train hundreds of Black Belts, just as a Six Sigma program can teach a focused subset of statistical design of experiments to hundreds of engineers.

Scrum, in software development, is also a sports metaphor, a term borrowed from rugby, which few Americans know. The connection between a rugby scrum and what software people call by the same name, however, is not obvious. A rugby scrum involves the forward players of two teams locked in the pattern of Figure 1.

Figure 1. A rugby scrum

The ball is released in the middle of the scrum and both team try to take possession by kicking it backwards while pushing the other team forwards. It is exciting and bruising to participate in, as well as a great spectacle. For software developers, scrum is an approach to project management illustrated by the status panel in Figure 2.

Figure 2. A software development scrum

It leaves you wondering what plays the role of the opposing team, the ball, or the player positions. In other words, in what way is a rugby scrum a metaphor for this approach at all?

By • Management • 11 • Tags: ,

yardstick

Oct 28 2011

The staying power of bad metrics

A speaker I once heard on manufacturing metrics started with a quote from football coach Vince Lombardi: “If you’re not keeping score, you’re only practicing.” In a sport, your score or your rank is, by definition, the correct measure of success, and we assume too easily that this kind of thinking crosses over to every human endeavor, from national economies to plant performance or education. In this process, we begin using highly aggregated metrics as if they were physical measurements like mass or speed, and avert our eyes from how these sausages are made.

Following are a few of the egregious examples:

  • GDP. Gross Domestic Product (GDP), for example, is in the news every day. If you pollute and spend money to clean up your toxic waste, you contribute more to the GDP than if you produce cleanly. Because of this kind of absurdity, GDP as a metric has been criticized by many economists, including Joseph Stiglitz. In 2009, he even convinced French president Nicolas Sarkozy to seek alternatives. Yet, two years later, the same president is pushing to include in the country’s constitution a “Golden Rule” that caps budget deficits at a percentage of the same flawed GDP!
  • IQ. In the US, IQ  is still widely treated as a measure of intelligence. On its face, the notion that human intelligence is reducible to a number is an insult to its subject. In fact, all an IQ measures is the ability to take an IQ test. Psychologists recognize this, but many school teachers and the public at large don’t. (See Steven Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man.)
  • Food calories. Calories are the most commonly used metric in nutrition. What this number actually represents is the heat generated by drying and burning a food item. But is digestion the same as combustion? Obviously not, for example, for fibers, which cross the human body unchanged. The absurdity of assigning calories to fibers has not escaped one dieter, who questioned it on a Calorie Count forum, and received, among other replies, the following:

Fiber calories are included in nutrition information, but only in come countries. In the US, it is legal to not put in fiber calories because they are not digestible. Therefore, they do not “count” as such. however, if you, like most people, tend to underestimate cals sightly, there is nothing wrong with including them to create a “buffer zone.”

In other words, it makes no sense but you should pretend it does.

Do we behave the same way in the manufacturing world? Yes. For example, many companies measure productivity in terms of Sales/Employee. There is an easy way to boost this metric: outsource all production, close all plants and become a trading company. It is not easy to find metrics for quality, cost, delivery, safety, and morale that are meaningful and cannot be gamed, but it can be done. For overall company productivity, for example, you can use Value added/Employee, where

Value-added = Sales – (Materials + Energy + Outsourced Services)

This is what Peter Drucker called Contributed Value. Value added/Employee is not a perfect metric, but at least it does not provide a perverse incentive to outsource, and the US census bureau publishes statistics on value-added and employment by industry, that are helpful for benchmarking.

Following are a few conditions that a good metric must meet:

  1. A good metric is immediately understandable. No training or even explanation is required to figure out what it means, and the number directly maps to reality, free of any manipulation. One type of common manipulation is to assume that one particular ratio cannot possibly be over 85%, and redefine 85% for this ratio as “100% performance.” While this makes performance look better, it also makes the number misleading and difficult to interpret.
  2. People see how they can affect the outcome. With a good metric, it is also easy to understand what kind of actions can affect the value of the measurement. A shop floor metric, for example, should not a be a function of the price of oil in the world market, because there is nothing the operators can do to affect it. Their actions, on the other hand, can affect the number of labor-hours required per unit, or the rework rate.
  3. A better value for the metric always means better business performance for the company. One of the most difficult characteristics to guarantee is that a better value of a metric always translates to better business performance for the company. Equipment efficiency measures are notorious for failing in this area because maximizing them often leads to overproduction and WIP accumulation.
  4. The input data of the metric should be easy to collect. Lead time statistics, for example, require entry and exit timestamps by unit of production. The difference between these times then only gives you the lead time is calendar time, not in work time. The get lead times in work time, you then have to match the timestamps against the plant’s work calendar. Lead time information, however, can be inferred from WIP and WIP age data, which can be collected by direct observation of WIP on the shop floor. Metrics of
    WIP, therefore, contain essentially the same information but are easier to  calculate. (See Little’s Law.)
  5. All metrics should have the appropriate sensitivity. If daily fluctuations are not what is of interest, then they need to be filtered out. A common method for doing this is to plot 5-day moving averages instead of individual values — that is, the point plotted today is the average of the values observed in the last five days. Daily fluctuations are smoothed away, but weekly trends stand out.

Peter Drucker sold corporate America on the idea that you can’t manage what you can’t measure, and this has led many managers to believe that employees would do whatever it takes to maximize their scores. Given flawed metrics, it if fortunate for the companies that these managers were wrong. If they had been right, all the companies that measure productivity in terms of  Sales/Employee would actually have outsourced all production. They didn’t, because metrics are only one of many factors influencing behavior. Most employees, at all level, will not maximize their metrics through actions they feel violate common sense or are inconsistent with their personal ethics.

By • Metrics • 12 • Tags: ,

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