Business Week is stepping out! This week's issue is focused on the role of innovation to the viability of the firm. I'm a 33 year subscriber. There's never been a cover like this one. And it's not all sizzle. There's plenty of steak in the articles. If you're not a subscriber, this issue will change your mind.

The cover story describes five steps (stages) of the innovative firm.

1. Technology and information become commoditized and globalized.
2. With commoditization, core advantages can be shipped abroad.
3. Design strategy begins to replace Six Sigma as a key organizing principle.
4. Creative innovation becomes the key driver of growth.
5. The successful Creative Corporation emerges, with new innovation DNA.

While their interpretation is interesting, the stories and examples are illuminating.

I get my prescriptions from CVS, but the Target Prescription Bottle has me rethinking my choice. The usual prescription bottle is difficult to read. Frankly, I don't read it as carefully as I should. 'Take with a meal', 'Avoid taking with alcohol', and 'Stop taking if a rash develops'. Who can read this stuff? (Ok, if I wasn't middle-aged and nearly blind I might be able to read it.) The Target prescription bottle is exactly the kind of innovation and day-to-day creativity that separates great companies from merely good ones.

BW is one of the finest publications available. The writing is wonderful. Don't miss this issue.

A very interesting project has begun to develop trustworthiness in open systems software. It goes by the name of TROSTing. The project investigations are quite ambitious:

• How can we be reliable at delivering open-systems components with demonstrable trustworthiness?
• After that, how do we continuously strive for achieving and sustaining new levels of trustworthiness?

While I wonder what will come of such an ambitious project, I can't help but marvel at the thoughtfulness that has gone into the creation of the symbol of trust.

The symbol is a keeper. The important work remains.

Dennis Hamilton, the designer, calls the symbol "a fusion" of the Shewhart/Deming Cycle of Learning, Fernando Flores' Action Workflow, partnership, and an ever-progression (spiral) of one interaction to another.

I met Dennis when my auto-responder for the Let's Play Catch! mini-course failed to deliver one of the lessons. He wrote asking for the missing lesson. One thing led to another, soon we were deep into exploring what each other was doing. Dennis is in the midst of finishing his thesis for a masters degree in IT. He is also writing a weblog on open systems along with starting to build a community to explore trustworthiness in software.

I can't help but think of the application of a mark of trustworthiness for the project environment. Can you imagine the equivalent of the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval on a company offering to do project work? What could that mean? The AEC industry can be so contentious and generally distrusting. What if there were a collection of firms that were known broadly for just the opposite behaviors? There's no telling what might be produced by a consortium of those firms.

It's easier to talk about trust than it is to be trustworthy. I commend Dennis for putting this issue in front of us. Let's join him in his pursuit.

Visual management of a workplace is foundational to lean. The intention is to be able to see at a glance that everything is going well or see what needs attention. When visual management is done well anyone visiting the location can make sense of what is going on. When I work in fabrication operations I routinely start with 5S. It results in more space, easy-to-see workflow, and an all around safer work setting.

Here's a quick summary of the 5S approach to visual management.

Sort

Separate what you need on an everyday basis from everything else. Toss those things that you aren't using at all.

Set in order

Place tools and materials close to where they will be used and in a way that is ready-to-hand.

Shine

Clean, clean, clean.

Standardize

Do things that help keep tools and materials in the intended place.

Sustain

Keep adjusting to the changing situation of your operations. Revisit the first four steps on a regular basis.

So how do we make this work? It starts with an intention to make it work. (Don't proceed if you can't bring that intention.) The secret is in the standardization. You want to make it easy to return items to the intended place.

Do you need a drill at a particular point in an operation? Have a holder for the drill at that place. Color code the drill and the holder. Have a chuck key attached to the cord. And keep just those bits needed in that operation in a bin next to the drill.

Do you use a Greenlee storage box on your jobsites? They are great for moving tools to where they will be used. The problem with most boxes is they function as a catch-all chest. Workers toss their tools in without regard to giving ready access to the next person. The chest is also rarely prepared with just the tools needed for the operations that will be performed. The solution is to prepare boxes for the operations that are coming. Have just those tools, consumables, and material that is needed. And present those tools in a way that is ready-to-hand.

Visual management produces the biggest returns for the investment in time and money. If you don't know what else to do, then start with 5S.

When we go about organizing anything we often follow unexamined rules. We might collect items by size, color, materials, style, and type. Notice that all these are characteristics of the items. When we organize tools this way we see pliers of different sizes, socket sets by metric, SAE, and standard, and screwdrivers all ordered small to large. This approach makes things easy to find. The lean approach is different: organize for use.

Joe Ely offers his everyday lean example Right-Sizing Tools where he has organized a variety of tools for a single purpose. There is no finding tools in this approach. Set-up is quick. A variation on this approach is to have tools ready for use. Here are two examples: chuck keys are attached to the power cord of the drill and Allen wrenches are attached to the casing of the jig saw.

What would be examples of organizing for use for managing projects?

The Project Reformer's e-Tip of the Week

043: Adopt a Pace for Project Work

Toyota uses the term mura — inconsistency or unevenness — to identify one of the contributors to defective work. Unevenness gets in the way of completing what we set out to do. In a physical sense, variability in drill speed would result in poor quality of a drilled hole. Variability in the ingredients of a batch of batter would result in bad cookies. Six Sigma is the a western response to attacking unevenness. Low variability in the variables of a process is referred to as high process capability. In other words, high process capability results in high quality results. Low variability in the project setting is harder to get our heads around. The desired outcome — always getting the intended result — is less a function of the materiel process than human processes. There are two keys to high project capability. First, what we ask people to do is already in a condition for completing it. Second, people manage the promises they make. Pacing project tasks is one way to eliminate one source of variability. This has similar effect as pacing a production line. Performers always know what is coming at them next and when they have to deliver. Establish a drum beat for doing work by designing tasks so they all take roughly the same duration to complete. For instance, establish a schedule for completing design details on an everyday basis rather than batches of different sizes. This will improve the reliability of completions which aids follow-on performers depending on that work as input to their work. The overall effect is to counteract the compound effects of dependence and variability. The Project Leaders' Studio™

©2005 Hal Macomber | RPM | e-Tip Archive | PDFs | Submit Tip

I intend to publish 9 more Project e-Tips before ending this series. What have I left out? What help can you offer? Please send along your proposals.

I moved to Switzerland in 1989 to Work for ABB for two years. I went ahead of my family. That gave me the opportunity to get the house ready for their arrival. I had plenty of time on nights and weekends in the two months before they arrived to tinker with the organization of our stuff. Two years earlier I had the fortune of visiting Japan for 3 weeks where I was introduced to 5S. What a perfect opportunity (I thought) to organize the kitchen along the lines of what we would do in the kitchen and quick access to what was needed for doing it.

We had (what I thought was) a good-sized galley kitchen. All the cabinets and appliances were along one wall. There was also a large pantry cabinet on one end. I started by storing the pots and pans in the lower cabinet between the dishwasher and the range. It made sense to me. It was the largest of lower cabinets. It made for short movements when retrieving a pan and when putting it away when emptying the dishwasher. I then moved to the coffee and tea. I placed the coffee, tea, filters, French Press, espresso cups, sugar bowl, coffee mugs, and tin of cinnamon above the coffee maker. Everything we needed was in short reach of where we would use it. I felt so proud. I went on to organize the baking items all together. Sugar, flour, canned fruit, preserves, baking powder, baking soda, shortening, mixing bowls, and measuring spoons together on the shelf above where I thought my wife would do the baking. I was on a roll. I then organized glassware alongside the canned juice, cereal, breakfast bars, and cereal bowls in a lower cabinet in easy reach for the children. I continued with this 5S approach until everything was in its place. I couldn't wait for my wife and children to arrive.

I was sure Rita would be so impressed. She wasn't! I had organized for high efficiency of access based on the task we (normally she) would perform. The problem was everything was of different sizes and shapes. It was terribly inefficient in the use of the quite limited space in that galley kitchen. While there was plenty of airspace in the cabinets there was little we could do with that space. It had to be done over. It turned out to be a blessing. Rita and our next door neighbor got a good laugh and became close friends as they completely rearranged my handiwork to get all our stuff organized in the way she was used to working. That was my big lesson with 5S. You can't organize without including the people who will be doing the work.

Joe Ely offers us an elegant solution to the problem of having just the information needed when and where it's needed. Owner manuals are generally not needed for operating equipment. However, when there's a task that is performed only every once-in-awhile that manual is indispensable. But where did I put that manual? If you're like me then that bit of information needs to be more readily available than in the misplaced manual. Have a look at Joe' Two Cycle Solution.

The everyday understanding of lean is do something without waste. Another aspect is to reduce variability. Doing so increases throughput and quality. The fancy way of understanding that is Six Sigma. One of the easier ways to reduce variability is by pacing the flow.

Traffic lights are popping up at on-ramps on the busiest highways to pace cars merging with on-going traffic. Studies have shown that smoothing the arrival of vehicles during rush hours has eliminated collisions and maintained traffic speed at higher levels.

How could pacing arrivals work in the project setting.

After Joe Ely's wonderful example of not passing along errors — Fizzy Coke — I proposed that he and I share examples throughout the month of July. Joe started today with Jugban. Joe will be posting at the beginning of the week; I'll follow that with an example mid-week. But don't let us do all the work. Send along your examples, or post them on your weblog.

In the last week saying "No" on your projects is getting attention. Thanks to Frank Patrick for pointing us to postings from Jeffrey Phillips, Getting to No, and Ester Derby No Is in the Air. I couldn't help but add my two cents Be Responsible, Say "No". Long time readers know this as one of my soap boxes. In November 2002, I was writing about uncertainty Reduce Uncertainty by Promising Reliably.

Promising is in our control. We can say "yes" or "no". (I know some people think they must say "yes" to keep their job.) When we say "yes" but we mean "no" we add uncertainty to the project. When we say "yes" but fail to allocate sufficient capacity to the task (blocking time in our calendar) we add uncertainty. When we say "yes" but don’t understand what will satisfy our customer we add uncertainty. Do I need to go on?

A few years earlier (1994) Greg Howell and Glenn Ballard, both of the Lean Construction Institute, wrote the paper, Lean Construction Theory: Moving Beyond 'Can-Do'. They claim that we can't improve our project performance without people saying "No".

(C)urrent management approaches are built on and entice dishonesty. We cannot improve performance unless new thinking exposes the contradictions and weaknesses in our underlying mental models and injects certainty and honesty into the management of projects. It is simple in concept and not hard in execution once we take the challenge of no longer accepting "Can Do" when "Won’t Do" is appropriate. Only then will we have the consistent feedback needed for rapid learning.

The idea of saying "No" as being responsible has been around for quite some time. While "simple in concept and not hard in execution", we still get far too many yeses when no is more appropriate. It may be simplistic to suggest fear is in the way of saying no.

Here's one action you can take to get the no you need to get. Make it your routine to invite people to say "No". Only then will Can-Do mean anything. That's right, by inviting people to decline requests you and others make you are creating the situation for honest conversations among your team. It's in that setting of honesty that we can be most successful.

U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur, OH, is holding OSHA accountable for lack of oversight at the Toledo I-280 Bridge crane accident resulting in four deaths of Fru-Con employees in Feb. '04. Thankfully, this is a story that just won't go away.

OSHA cited Fru-Con for four willful violations and assessed a fine of $280,000. Later, OSHA reclassified (negotiated) the violations to "unclassified" keeping the fine the same. This potentially has consequences for the families in civil litigation with Fru-Con. Negotiating citations and fines has been a regular practice at OSHA. Congresswoman Kaptur sees it as part of the reason that we continue to have so many deaths in the construction industry.

"(T)hese men died, in my view, because of the apparent willful negligence of the U.S. Department of Labor and OSHA … and there are allies here in the Congress who have been cutting back on worker safety laws and have abdicated their responsibility to conduct aggressive oversight"

The cause of the crane collapse is not completely understood. However, this is not Fru-Con's only problem with cranes. The firm was fined $49,500 for nine serious violations for a death at the Four Bears Bridge. OSHA also negotiated the fines in "settling" this case.

Watch out for Kaptur, "There is a serious abdication of responsibility by the U.S. Department of Labor because this Congress has not held them to a higher standard." She's not letting go of this one.