If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Earlier this week I was discussing this project kaizen series with a colleague who practices agile project management. He told me he does project kaizen routinely. In fact, he was off for two days of project kaizen. I encouraged him to write something on his weblog when he got back. It occurred to me afterwards the he was talking about a kaizen blitz. He was joining a project team to rethink and replan how they would go about organizing the work and themselves to do the project. This is the big bang of kaizen activities. (Read Norman's recount of the Birth of the kaizen Blitz.) In the case of my friend, the project circumstances had changed to such an extent that it made sense to come back and do a complete revisit and rethink of the project. This is the time for innovation.

In my experience a kaizen blitz must always start by revisiting the promise(s) of the project. The customer receives value when the project team delivers on the promises.  In all cases the promise must be tested with the customer. In all but the shortest projects the customer is sure to have learned something that could influence the desired conditions of satisfaction of the promise. In manufacturing settings the next step in the process would be value-stream mapping. Answer the question, "What exactly must we deliver or complete along the way to deliver just what we promised to the customer." Again, test your answers and the sequence of the completed work with your customer.

Create the circumstances for an innovation free-for-all.

At this point the fun begins. You have a revised project promise and a set of intermediate work products that will satisfy the customer. What various ways might you organize the work and yourselves to deliver on the promises? Note I said "various ways". During a project kaizen blitz we want to explore alternatives. Be careful not to settle on one alternative too early in the process. Develop two or three alternatives so you can make a whole systems assessment of workable alternatives. While this might look wasteful developing three workable approaches, what better time to do it then when you are revisiting the project. Also, when we limit our choices early we risk choosing a lower optimal approach based on an early assessment of a local optimum. This approach is known as set-based design in the design world.

Eventually, you'll get to the point where a good approach emerges. There is a big advantage in doing the project kaizen blitz with the whole team. Not only do you bring the best of all the expertise to the initiative, but you establish a new planning context for the work that they will later perform. This effort establishes a shared basis for the actions they'll take and prepares the team to respond to the inevitable different world that they encounter. There isn't better preparation for dealing with the unexpected than to take a team through multiple workable project scenarios.

The project kaizen blitz finishes with a new statement of the project promise, a clarification of the project deliverables, a re-examination of the roles people will play, and an initial plan of action that gets the team immediately back in game.

While I could go on and on describing various approaches to preparing for and conducting the blitz, I'll limit my last comments to the one action to take to maximize your chances for success. Prepare and organize the event so the easy and obvious thing for participants to do is to lose themselves in the project kaizen blitz. You want your team to leave their urgencies behind, to engage with each other without inhibition, and to have their attention on others' contributions with the sole intention on helping each other be creative. In other words, create the circumstances for an innovation free-for-all. You won't miss being successful.

Gang-of-Seven

• Bill Waddell
• Chuck Frey
• Hal Macomber
• Joe Ely
• Jon Miller
• Mark Graban
• Norman Bodek