Comments on: Lean Project Implementation Is Not Adoption

By: Project Management

Project Management — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:02:46 +0000

I completely agree with Veronica!
Sometimes mistakes can teach us something for the future!

By: Kalyan Vaidyanathan

Kalyan Vaidyanathan — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 08:41:10 +0000

Hi,
Here is an article from another industry that captures the essence of lean. http://blog.nadhi.in/2009/06/what-field-marshal-said.html

http://blog.nadhi.in

By: Veronica Brown

Veronica Brown — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 21:09:13 +0000

True, please need to understand that Lean is about lowering the cost of mistakes. Most importantly its OK to make mistakes if they are small and we learn quickly from them.

Thanks

By: Joe Ely

Joe Ely — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 21:04:08 +0000

Very useful post, Hal. Central to modifying culture. Thanks.

By: Hal

Hal — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 19:11:45 +0000

I was speaking with David Meier, co-author of The Toyota Way Fieldbook and Toyota Talent about kaizen events. He was at Toyota Georgetown for 10 years. He said in that time there were only 3 kaizen blitzs (one week events). In all cases they were manager done with managers leading the way. All other team problem-solving and improving was done in the natural workgroups or problem-solving circles.

In a conversation with Matthew May, author of The Elegant Solution and In Pursuit of Elegance, he spoke of the practice of jishuken. Matt taught innovation at the Toyota Institute. If I remember correctly, he said that Toyota uses manager-led events (jishuken) for their development rather than for making rapid improvement.

It’s never too late to redirect our lean activities. We need to first be clear what kind of production we are doing. Is it process-based or is it project-based? This is a critical distinction to then select an appropriate set of improvement approaches for creating a customer value-oriented organization that is intent on making today better than yesterday. There’s nothing to implement…just a lot of hard work from a growing group of leaders.

By: John Leeper

John Leeper — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 15:25:27 +0000

We’re about four years into our lean initiative. The challenge … actually the flawed approach that we may have taken is to have gone down the ‘event’ or kaizen approach. After thinking about this a great deal for the past three of those four years I can affirm it’s a transistion of thinking and looking at projects and actually ‘doing’ projects. That change needs to occur w/i people’s heads and it does not necessarily happen through event-focused programs. Training and mentorship play a very strong supporting role in this transistion. Unfortunately some people will make the transistion and others will not and those that do not will be sea anchors in the course of change.

By: Pradeep Bhanot

Pradeep Bhanot — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 16:14:30 +0000

Hal, you are spot on.

One can sum up this thinking with a minor rephrasing of an old Elvis song from the movie Blue Hawaii:
I am more lean today,
More lean than yesterday,
But, I am less lean today,
Less, than I will be tomorrow.

Seriously, I wrote a couple of blogs over the last month on the relationship of PPM to Lean IT, with a focus on tuning processes and reducing time on wasted projects at: http://community.ca.com/blogs/ppm/

By: Matthew E. May

Matthew E. May — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 00:39:11 +0000

Bravo, Hal…This is the true spirit of kaizen. Too many think you can “do lean.” Constantly hearing about “speeding up ‘the do.’”Inevitably, their efforts are at best programmatic. Eventually, they abondon those efforts, because they haven’t captured the essence, the mindset, the spirit.

By: Project management

Project management — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 11:51:18 +0000

Nice Article