Adopt Project Kaizen to Tap Ingenuity

December 5th, 2005 by Hal

Article Series - Project kaizen Co-Blogging

We know the least about a project at the beginning, the usual time that a team plans their project. Unfortunately, too many teams don't revisit their project plan as they encounter the future that unfolds. Not only do they find themselves struggling to conform to a plan that doesn't match their experienced reality, but they fail to incorporate what learning occurs along the way.

It is also your job to do your tasks with a mindfulness that they can be done better the next time.

Project kaizen is an opportunity to deliberately incorporate learning, innovating, and improving performance into the everyday workings of the project.

Project kaizen cannot be an add-on or afterthought to the way the project is conducted. You need to declare that it is part of each person's role. As a project participant it is your job to carry out the tasks that you accept. It is also your job to do your tasks with a mindfulness that they can be done better the next time. All it takes is noticing what was difficult, what required effort, what didn't go as expected, and what could provide more value to the customer and your firm.

Improvement creates a capacity for more improvement.

Many project teams report on measures for their success. Two usual measures are cost performance index (CPI) and schedule performance index (SPI). When doing projects a lean way you also want to measure learning. You can do so by tracking the overall number of improvements adopted along with the percent of improvements adopted versus those attempted. Both the number and the percent should be increasing over the life of the project.

There's an expression, "What gets measured gets done." Maybe! I've learned to take an extra step. To be successful with project kaizen also requires making time for engaging the project team in conversations to elicit proposals for improvement along with offering help to get their proposals adopted. These conversations can be preemptive. Rather than needing to react to the problem in your lap, you and your team have learned and made your project more robust to the circumstances you encounter. Improvement creates a capacity for more improvement.

I have come to trust the innate ingenuity available in everyone of us. I'm sure you can identify moments where you have been just brilliant in the work you've done on projects. It is in those moments that I have been at my best. I bet that is true for you, too. Systematically adopting kaizen in the way we go about our projects is the opportunity for each person to shine. Nothing could be better than that!

Read what the Gang-of-Seven has to say:

We’ve Just Begun Exploring Project Kaizen

Kaizen and Safety Go Hand-in-Glove

Quick ‘n Easy Kaizen: Winning with Project Kaizen

Project Kaizen Day Two

Start Sharing Your QnEKs

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2 Responses to “Adopt Project Kaizen to Tap Ingenuity”

Mark at Swim Says:
December 5th, 2005 at 5:44 am
Well done for tackling this subject Hal. I shall be very interested in the discussions. I like your idea of ‘mindfulness’ - anyone who has read about or practiced meditation techniques will recognise the concept of adopting an attitude of neutral obervation. I think the term elegantly captures what team members must do to ensure that improvement opportunities are recognised and acted on.

I hope the discussions include the topic of personal motivation for project kaizen activity. I suspect that in typical projects where workers may feel that they are always a step behind the schedule, the fact that they personally may not stand to gain in the long term from any effort they expend in working out, testing and documenting better methods, may prevent them from doing so.

Maybe your idea of a metric of the number of improvements will help, but how do we ensure that when the chips are down, CPI and/or SPI do not automatically trump everything else?

Mark
Hal Says:
December 5th, 2005 at 1:14 pm
CPI and SPI can certainly trump other concerns. I’ve worked on defense projects where incentives were paid to the contractor based on CPI and SPI. As one of my colleagues says, “Incentives often have the effect of perverting behavior.” It is up to each of us on projects to see that it doesn’t happen.

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