Another great day of work. We got through the Daily Scrum in 13 minutes (without standing). I asked for a weekly retrospective to examine what we are learning and what needs our attention. In short, team members assessed they were learning and accomplishing far more than they expected. Let's see if we can keep this going. There's a lot for us to accomplish in the coming vacation week.

Is Toyota paranoid? They are according to BW. Staying Paranoid at Toyota, BW July 2, 2007 claims Toyota has become paranoid. They point to the following quote by Katsuaki Watanabe, Toyota President:

"The scariest symptom of 'big-company disease' is that complacency will breed."

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We had our first Daily Scrum. It took 16 minutes. I minute too long. Our ScrumMaster asked each of us the 3 Scrum questions:

1. What have you done since yesterday's meeting?
2. What are you going to get done today?
3. What impediments (obstacles) do you need to be removed?

What do I know? I'm just a beginner. A happy beginner!

We got through the questions in under 10 minutes. We then asked follow-up questions to some of the team members' responses. One issue was left to be addressed by tomorrow's Scrum. Once the meeting was closed I called for a Spike¹ to address the issue with three people on the team. In 5 more minutes we resolved an assignment that in other settings might have taken a number of phone calls, emails, and interruptions. Spike over!

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1. The word spike refers to a focussed high level of engagement to get just one thing done. Everything else is on hold for that time. [ ⇑ back ]

This is the super event…15 years running. It's here in the US…won't return for at least four more years. Don't miss meeting lean leaders in an informal setting. But the big reason is to get a first look at the most recent thinking on lean construction and lean project delivery. Register for IGLC-15 now!

What I like most about the Carnival of the Agilists is the self-organization for publishing. It's quite agile. Don't miss best of agile stories.

There's nothing like learning-in-action.¹. We just finished our planning session for our development project. I was surprised by how much time we spent defining what it meant to be done. In the LPS world we call that establishing conditions of satisfaction. But we struggle to get team members to stay in that conversation. "Just tell me what you want!" The ScrumMaster wouldn't let us move on 'til he confirmed that the whole team understood what would satisfy the Product Owner.

I'm looking forward to comprehending!

Towards the end of today's session, I noticed that our ScrumMaster frequently said, "We'll inspect and adapt." (He said it before we started the planning. I just hadn't noticed.) "Of course," I thought. The future is uncertain and unknowable. That's just what we do on (LPS) projects. But I also know it's not what is usually done on CPM-style projects. Conventional wisdom (and scheduling software) guides people to put a plan in place and stick to it. The result is project managers often try to get reality to match their plan. Doesn't work. Never did.

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1. Chris Argyris claims it's the primary way we learn. See his book Knowledge for Action. [ ⇑ back ]

Why would a lean projects guy hire a Scrum software development ScrumMaster? Short answer: it seemed like a good idea at the time. Seriously, I'm doing some work for an architectural engineering firm. The company focuses on designing technically sophisticated manufacturing facilities. We are developing for them a responsibility-based planning approach. It's starting out as a Scrum adaptation of the Last Planner System® (LPS). I thought…what better way to understand how Scrum can inform the changes to LPS than to perform our own development effort as a Scrum project.

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Sign-up for IGLC-15. The organizers of this year's IGLC have included a second industry day where they are conducting two ½-day workshops. The first workshop will led by Norman Bodek, Godfather of the lean movement. The second will be led by the TWI Institute. This is new for the IGLC community to include workshops with their program. And they're starting off with big guns.

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We've all heard about kaizen. It's a practice for individuals, teams, and across process. People seem to take to it quite well in the factory and process environments. That's not the case in the project setting. At the TWI Summit, I was introduced to the Job Methods (JM) improvement approach. JM teaches how to see waste. JI in combination with JM teaches people the skills of improving.

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Have you tried drinking from a fire hose? I did last week at the TWI Summit. It was the largest meeting of TWI proponents in over 50 years. Next year will be bigger. How do I know? They've reserved more rooms and moved to a larger venue at Disney World. But the real reason it will be bigger has to do with a happy accident. But before I share that I'll give you a taste of the summit. It started with a few answers to some tough questions.

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The TWI Summit Presentations are available. Make sure you look at John Shook's description of TWI and Toyota. John had a key leadership role in the start-up of NUMMI.

We often discount great accomplishments by saying people were just lucky. The luncheon speaker at the TWI Summit says otherwise. Luncheon speakers are about as good as the conference budget allows. I wasn't expecting much at the TWI Summit. It's the first of its kind conference. While it was the largest meeting of TWI proponents in over 50 years, it was only about 135 people. Boy was I surprised by the luncheon speaker on the first day. Jim Swartz spoke about finding and seizing great opportunities. His talk was based on his book Seeing David in the Stone, by James and Joseph Swartz.

Due to significant Florida weather delays, I had the opportunity to read and finish Seeing David in the Stone in one setting. I am impressed. Very impressed. I shouldn't be. Norman Bodek introduced Jim to me calling him a genius. After listening to his speech, being in a private conversation and reading the book I can see that Norman is right. Not only is he a genius, he's written an easy-to-read and engaging book.

The book is based on many years of private research into what makes the great ones successful. They studied 70 great people to discover what was common among them. In addition to Gates and Einstein, the authors studied Galileo, Edison, Michaelangelo, DaVinci, Pasteur, Curie, Eisenhower, and Walton. The authors identified three groups of behaviors with a total of 12 actions. Here they are:

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Norman Bodek opened the TWI Summit challenging participants:
Make mistakes
Copy others
Look forward to Mondays!

See Norman at 2007 Lean Construction Summit, July 18 - 20, 2007.

This is quite funny. While The Dip made the hard-to-break NYT Best Sellers list, one of the editors shared how much muscle they're willing to flex. Don't I wish I had that much power.

It's that time of year again. The International Group for Lean Construction is holding its conference. This time it's in the US. East Lansing, MI. It won't be held in the states again for another 4 or 5 years. It's quite a full program. Check it out at 2007 Lean Construction Summit.

The program is in three parts:

• Lean Construction Workshop (July 16-17, 2007)
  In addition to an intro to lean construction, the TWI Institute will present the approach Toyota uses to train their employees. That will be followed by Norman Bodek, the godfather of lean, conducting a workshop on Quick 'n Easy kaizen.
• IGLC-15 (July 18-20, 2007)
  Authors will present their peer-reviewed papers on research and advanced practice of lean construction.
• Lean Construction Postgraduate Conference (July 21-22, 2007)
  This session is a big bonus. The grey beards will stay around to work with students.

I'll be there to spend time with some of the best thinkers in the industry. Please join me.