Identifying and Managing Waste in Complex Product Development Environments

Identifying and Managing Waste in Complex Product Development Environments Ken Power

Setting Expectations

!   This is a Workshop.

!   That means: !   I will spend less time lecturing !   We will talk with each other !   We will learn from each other !   We will work through some difficult problems !   We will share our experiences and stories !   If we talk too long we may not get all material covered in

details, but that’s OK !   I will give some concrete strategies and tools that have proved

helpful !   I will write a workshop report and share the findings with you

Learning Outcomes !   Understand the history and modern context of Lean Product

Development in Software Development Organizations

!   Understand appropriate metaphors for Lean Product Development, beyond the usual influence of the manufacturing or automotive domain

!   Understand the importance of identifying and managing Waste

!   Be able to identify Waste in your own organizations

!   Be able to apply the framework for managing Waste in your own Product Development Organizations

!   Concrete strategies and practices for eliminating waste in your own organizations

General Flow

!   Opening (20 minutes)

!   Identifying Waste (30 minutes)

!   Managing and Eliminating Waste (30)

!   Closing (10 minutes)

I’m the Irish guy

OPENING

Lean Principles !   Section I: Long-Term Philosophy

!  Principle 1. Base your management decisions on a long-term philosophy, even at the expense of short-term financial goals.

!   Section II: The Right Process Will Produce the Right Results !  Principle 2. Create a continuous process

flow to bring problems to the surface. !  Principle 3. Use “pull” systems to avoid

overproduction. !  Principle 4. Level out the workload

(heijunka). (Work like the tortoise, not the hare.)

!  Principle 5. Build a culture of stopping to fix problems, to get quality right the first time.

!  Principle 6. Standardized tasks and processes are the foundation for continuous improvement and employee empowerment.

!  Principle 7. Use visual control so no problems are hidden.

!  Principle 8. Use only reliable, thoroughly tested technology that serves your people and processes.

!   Section III: Add Value to the Organization by Developing Your People !  Principle 9. Grow leaders who thoroughly

understand the work, live the philosophy, and teach it to others.

!  Principle 10. Develop exceptional people and teams who follow your company’s philosophy.

!  Principle 11. Respect your extended network of partners and suppliers by challenging them and helping them improve.

!   Section IV: Continuously Solving Root Problems Drives Organizational Learning !  Principle 12. Go and see for yourself to

thoroughly understand the situation (genchigenbutsu).

!  Principle 13. Make decisions slowly by consensus, thoroughly considering all options; implement decisions rapidly (nemawashi).

!  Principle 14. Become a learning organization through relentless reflection (hansei) and continuous improvement (kaizen).

Optimize on the people who add value

!   Almost every organization claims it’s people are important, but if they truly optimize their structures on those who add value, they would be able to say:

7 Principles of Lean Software

!   Eliminate Waste

!   Build Quality In

!   Create Knowledge

!   Defer Commitment

!   Deliver Fast

!   Respect People

!   Optimize the Whole

Complex Adaptive Systems

!   A dynamic network of interacting agents !   Stakeholders – people and groups

!   Other systems

!   Control is decentralized and dispersed throughout the network

!   Adapts to changing environment

Modern Lean Product Development

“Eliminating waste is the most fundamental lean principle, the one from which all the other principles follow. Thus, the first step to implementing lean development is learning to see waste.” (Poppendieck and Poppendieck 2003)

IDENTIFYING WASTE

Waste is considered to be anything that either (a) does not directly add value to the product, process, customer or organization, or (b) hinders or prevents the organization from being as effective and efficient as possible.

Deming

Waste is Loss

“In my experience, most troubles and most possibilities for improvement add up to proportions something like this:

94% belong to the System (the responsibility of management)

6% belong to Special Causes”

The Wastes of Product Development

!   Extra Features

!   Delays

!   Handoffs

!   Extra Processes / Relearning

!   Partially Done Work

!   Task Switching

!   Defects

!   Unused Employee Creativity

Extra Features These are features that are not required in the product, and that do not have a current economically justified need.

Delays (Waiting) Includes waiting for people to be available, or to deliver dependent work.

Handoffs Includes tacit knowledge lost when work is handed off between people or groups.

Extra Processes / Relearning Aspects of the process used by the team, or mandated by the organization, that do not add value (Poppendieck 2003). Process that cause knowledge to be lost, forcing relearning to occur (Poppendieck 2007).

Partially Done Work Partially done work is analogous to inventory in software product development.

Task Switching Waste caused by working on multiple tasks at the same time and the time lost in switching between them.

Defects Mistakes, errors, flaws in the product that cause unexpected results or behavior.

Unused Employee Creativity Refers to underutilization of people and in particular their ideas and creative input to improve the process.

Game: Identifying Waste Using the “Speedboat” Innovation Game

Game Rules !   Draw a speedboat

!   This speedboat represents your team(s)

!   Draw anchors on the speedboat !   Anchors are slowing down the speedboat !   They prevent it from going as fast as it wants to go

!   Each anchor has a theme: one of the 8 wastes

!   For each anchor: !   What are the links on this anchor that are holding this speedboat back?

!   Write examples on Sticky Notes !   Attach Sticky Notes to Anchors

!   Be specific, give examples

Post-Game Analysis

!   What examples of Waste did you discuss?

!   How do these affect you? Your team? Your organization?

MANAGE AND ELIMINATE WASTE

Techniques, Practices

!   Value Stream Maps

!   Value Network Maps

!   A3 Report

!   Waste Matrix

!   Follows the steps of the Scientific Method !   Plan: develop a hypothesis or

experiment

!   Do: conduct the experiment

!   Check: collect measurements

!   Act: interpret the results and take appropriate action

!   Also known as !   The Demming Cycle

!   The Shewart Cycle

Plan

Do Check

Act

!   Element 1: Logical Thinking Process

!   Element 2: Objectivity

!   Element 3: Results and Process

!   Element 4: Synthesis, Distillation, and Visualization

!   Element 5: Alignment

!   Element 6: Coherency Within and Consistency Across

!   Element 7: Systems Viewpoint

See also Claudio Perrone’s A3 & Kaizen presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/cperrone/a3-kaizen-heres-how

Different A3 Reports Focus Problem Solving Proposal Writing Project Status Review

Thematic content or focus Improvements related to quality, cost, delivery, safety, productivity, etc.

Policies, decisions, or projects with significant investment or implementation

Summary of changes and results as an outcome of either problem solving or proposal implementation

Tenure of person conducting the work

Novice, but continuing throughout career

Experienced personnel; managers

Both novice and more experienced managers

Analysis Strong root-cause emphasis; quantitative/analytical

Improvement based on considering current state; mix of quantitative and qualitative

Less analysis and more focus on verification of hypothesis and action items

PDCA cycle Document full PDCA cycle involved in making an improvement and verifying the result

Heavy focus on the Plan step, with Check and Act steps embedded in the implementation plan

Heavy focus on the Check and Act steps, including confirmation of results and follow-up to complete the learning loop

From Table 5.1 from “Understanding A3 Thinking”

Report Theme:

Current condition / Problem Situation

Goal / Target

Root-Cause Analysis

Countermeasures

Effect confirmation / Plan

Follow-up actions

Background

Why are we talking about this? What is the issue?

Describe Expectation, Discrepancy, Extent, Rationale Where things are today - visualize

What specifically are we going to do? By when? Quantify the improvement. How will we measure success?

Use 5-Whys, Fishbone, Force Field, Circle of Questions, or other analysis techniques What constraints prevent us from reaching our target? Get past symptoms Get to actionable root causes

For each Actionable Root Cause, describe the action and the benefit What alternatives could be considered? How will our selected countermeasures impact the root cause and change the current problem situation?

Track progress towards due date Action Plan: Who will do what? By when? How? What are the indicators of progress? What milestones should we track? Look for the most critical measures

What other issues can be anticipated? E.g., the countermeasure might make things worse, or uncover other problems What failure modes should we look out for?

Describe the goal and quantify the improvement Owner: Ken Power

Date: 08/01/2012

John Clifford, Construx http://forums.construx.com/blogs/johnclif/archive/2009/09/30/if-you-want-to-improve-stop-managing-your-problems.aspx

Waste Example Waste Category

Description Relative Importance

# Stakeholders affected

Value Trigger Date, by which the waste must be eliminated

Relative value for managing this waste vs. other wastes

Relative value for managing this waste vs. other Project work

Compile and Build times take too long

Waiting It can take 15-30 minutes to run a full build, depending on the machine

We are losing nearly 20 person-hours per day across the entire team.

42 Devs, 12 QA (directly affected – others are indirectly affected)

50+ people will have less frustration waiting for long build cycles; Shorter build cycles encourage more frequent integration and testing, and hence more reliable product

Release 4.5.1 in August 2012

This will help reduce feedback loops and encourage more use of TDD, leading to higher quality, fewer integration errors, fewer defects

This will ultimately help us go faster with other project work

Team spends time working on features that get dropped

Partially Done Work

Engineers, designers and others are putting significant effort into features that get dropped later.

We are not doing sufficient due diligence on some features. We need to get better at defining our Minimal Viable Offer.

8 Devs, 3 QA, 2 Eng Mgr, 2 Product Mgr

The entire team can spend more time focusing on delivering features we will ship with.

Duplication of status and progress reporting

Extra Processes Functional lines are managing own reporting

Duplicated effort and danger of mixed message

4 Eng. Mgr, 1 Program Mgr, 3 Team Leads

Resolving defects in complex product dependency chains

Defects

Exercise: Manage Waste

!   Pick a Technique !   Waste Matrix

!   A3 Report

!   Choose one of the Wastes identified earlier

!   Think about how to remove or manage it

!   Start to create an A3 Problem Solving Report or a Waste Matrix chart

Post-Game Analysis

!   What Wastes did you choose to solve? Why?

!   Describe how you used the Waste Matrix.

!   Describe how you used the A3 Problem Solving Report.

CLOSING

Remember…

!   Your organization is a Complex Adaptive System

!   There is waste in every system !   Find it

!   Eliminate it (or at least get it under control)

!   Use these techniques as part of your Continuous Improvement (Kaizen) efforts !   Release or Iteration Retrospectives are a great forum

!   Dedicated Problem Solving Sessions

!   Strategy Sessions

!   Portfolio Management Sessions

!   Keep it Visible

And finally …

!   Develop people to be Problem Solvers

!   You can have fun finding and eliminating waste !   – use serious games at work

References

References Deming, W. E. (1994). The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Gray, D., Brown, S., and Macanufo, J. (2010). Gamestorming : a playbook for innovators, rulebreakers, and changemakers, Beijing ; Cambridge: O'Reilly.

Hohmann, L. (2006). Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Addison-Wesley.

Liker, J. K. (2004). The Toyota way : 14 management principles from the world's greatest manufacturer, New York: McGraw-Hill.

Ohno, T. (1988). Toyota production system : beyond large-scale production, Cambridge, Mass.: Productivity Press.

Poppendieck, M., and Poppendieck, T. (2003). Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit, Boston: Addison-Wesley.

Poppendieck, M., and Poppendieck, T. (2007). Implementing lean software development : from concept to cash, London: Addison-Wesley.

Poppendieck, M., and Poppendieck, T. (2010). Leading lean software development : results are not the point, Upper Saddle River, NJ. ; London: Addison-Wesley.

Reinertsen, D. G. (2009). The principles of product development flow : second generation lean product development, Redondo Beach, Calif.: Celeritas.

Rothman, J. (2009). Manage your project portfolio : increase your capacity and finish more projects, Raleigh, N.C.: Pragmatic Bookshelf.

Shingo, S. (2007). Kaizen and the art of creative thinking : the scientific thinking mechanism, Bellingham, WA: Enna Products Corporation and PCS Inc.

Sobek, D. K., and Smalley, A. (2008). Understanding A3 thinking : a critical component of Toyota's PDCA management system, Boca Raton: CRC Press.

THANK YOU http://SystemAgility.com/ http://twitter.com/ken_power