Management

Nov 27 2015

About Teams and Projects

In The Wisdom of Teams, Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith explained that, for a working group to coalesce as a team, it needs a common goal, complementary skills, and mutual accountability among members. It sounds simple, but it is in fact a tall order, and there is no evidence that it is sufficient.  The authors don’t claim it is, but they found these characteristics among successful teams in sports and business, and found them lacking in unsuccessful ones.

What Makes a Great Team

Let us explore the meaning of these three characteristics in more detail:

1. A common goal. It can be organizing a successful conference, or JFK’s “before this decade is out, landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth,” or building a motorcycle that wins a race. Whatever it is, the goal must be clearly stated in few words, with obvious success criteria, for team members to sign up.

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By • Management • 1 • Tags: , , , ,

Nov 19 2015

The Lean Champion: Window-Dressing or Agent of Change?

Question seen in another blog:

I work as a deployment champion in a manufacturing company, but I don’t have the support of my managers because they don´t believe in the lean methodology. Which lean tools can be used to help them believe?

Image de Zacharie Gaudrillot-Roy
Image de Zacharie Gaudrillot-Roy

I have to assume you are not self-appointed. If you are “deployment champion” for Lean in a manufacturing company, it is because someone in  gave you the job, presumably because he or she believed in Lean and in you at the right person to champion it. But don’t presume it, find out what the motivation is. If it is that the company must be “Lean-certified” in order to continue doing business with its biggest customer, chances are that the whole effort is window-dressing, and your own job in particular. If this is the case, you need to decide whether you want to play along.

On the other hand, if the person who gave you the job is the CEO, the company must improve its performance to survive, and the CEO is convinced that going Lean is the only feasible way to do it, then it is a real job and you have the backing of the one manager who matters most.

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Nov 3 2015

Cars Per Employee And Productivity At Volkswagen Versus Toyota

Seen this morning in a Lean consultant’s blog:

“Two decades later, VW has topped Toyota as the world’s number one automaker, but Toyota generally is considered to be […] far more productive. In 2015, VW employs 600,000 people to produce 10 million cars while Toyota employs 340,000 to produce just under 9 million cars…”

Is it really that simple? VW produces 10 million/600,000 = 16.67 cars/employee/year, and Toyota 9 million/340,000 = 26.47 cars/employee/year. Ergo, Toyota is 60% more productive than VW — that is, if you accept cars/employee/year as an appropriate metric of productivity.  Unfortunately, it is a bad metric that can easily be gamed by outsourcing.

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By • Metrics • 2 • Tags: , , ,

Oct 20 2015

Principles About Principles

Abstracting underlying principles from practices is essential when you are trying to learn from the way an organization works, for the purpose of helping other organizations, engaged in different activities in different contexts. Unless you can do it, you are reduced to just copying practices without understanding what problems they were intended to address.

Unfortunately, articulating a set of principles is hard because they must be (1) understood, (2) actionable, and (3) memorable. Here are a few meta-principles on how to achieve these goals:

  1. Banish words like “thoroughly,” “rigorous,” “towering,” “powerful”, or “fully.” If the meaning is in the eye of the beholder, it doesn’t belong in a statement of principle.
  2. Express principles as an action verb followed by a single object. “Develop,” “create,” “cancel,” or “hire” are all appropriate action verbs in a statement of principle. If you have multiple objects, you need a statement of principle for each.
  3. Keep the number of principles down to a maximum of five. Otherwise, they won’t be remembered. Most Jews can’t recite the 613 commandments in the Torah; most Christians, their 1o commandments; most Americans, their bill of rights. If you want principles to be remembered, make a shorter list.

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By • Management • 3 • Tags: , ,

Oct 7 2015

About Obeyas (“Big Rooms”)

“Obeya” (大部屋) is Japanese for “Big room.” The term has been getting attention lately in the Lean community as a solution for service operations or project teams and is even conflated by some with production teams’ daily meetings on the shop floor, which don’t take place in a room other than the production shop itself.

On the other hand, the idea of bringing together in one room all the stakeholders in an issue, problem, or project to communicate face to face, find solutions and make decisions is not exactly new. It’s called a meeting, and those who wish to sound “Lean” without changing anything can call their meeting rooms “obeya.” Those who wish to dig deeper, however, find a more specific — and useful — concept, if not a panacea.

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Oct 4 2015

Lean Human Resources Seminar In The Philippines

“…the first ever management seminar on how to eliminate wasteful activities in the HR function…”

Sourced through Scoop.it from: image-store.slidesharecdn.com

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

As Mike Hoseus put it at the Lean HR summit in Florida last May:

“The important question is not ‘what is Lean’s role in HR’ but ‘what is HR’s role in Lean.’ HR’s role in a Lean Transformation is critical and essential.  For a Lean Transformation to be successful and go beyond implementing tools, an organization must address Purpose, Process, People and Problem Solving.  HR’s role is critical in all 4, but especially Purpose, People and Problem Solving.”

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