Planning seems to be so Taboo

@KarenMartinOpEx, Karen Martin, author of The Outstanding Organization: Generate Business Results by Eliminating Chaos and Building the Foundation for Everyday Excellence, is a recent podcast guest. This is an excerpt from the podcast.

Joe:  You bring up my next question and lead into it perfectly. Planning seems to be so taboo. Even the Lean Startup^TM version of PDCA is Build, Measure, and Learn. Planning, it just seems we're dropping the planning from the cycle. Is there still room for planning?

Karen: Oh, yes. I'm so glad you asked that question because a lot of my content got on the cutting-room floor because I had far more words than what my contract was for. One of the things I went into in detail, that got cut, was my...I don't know...I'm frustrated with what's going on out there around planning and there are a lot of people that are playing into it. So I touch on Gladwell's comments about planning, and I touch on other people and their anti‑planning, guys who are out there, and I think it's just wrong, just wrong because I think what happens, and I mentioned this very quickly in the book, is that people have gotten the plan confused with the process of planning.

The criticisms I keep hearing about planning is that, "Well, the world is so fluid, and you have to be flexible and agile." Of course you do but who said that once you get a plan in place, you may not ever, under any circumstances, deviate from it. No one said that and yet that's how organizations have behaved. So once again, we throw the baby out with the bathwater on an extremely robust and necessary part of performing well and people say, "Ah, forget the plans. We can't plan," and that's just wrong.

Joe: A well-thought-out plan is going to include the ability to adapt.

Karen: Well right. That's what PDSA is or PDCA. That is about adapting based on current conditions. There's a lot going on even in the Lean community that's smelling as though people were saying, "Well, stop with your plans, stop with your to‑do list, and stop with this..." I'm like, "No, no, no, no, no. Don't stop with it but use PDCA/PDSA as it was intended," which is being very present with what your experiment's results are showing, alter your hypothesis, go back experiment again, and keep on adapting based on your new information.

Karen Martin (http://ksmartin.com) provides Lean transformation and business performance improvement support to industry, government, and the not-for-profit sector. Karen’s broad understanding of operations design and business management stems from her experience building the operational infrastructure for several rapid growth start-up operations that each grew into multi-billion dollar companies.

Karen appeared a few years back and discussed Holding Successful Kaizen Events. She also co-authored The Kaizen Event Planner: Achieving Rapid Improvement in Office, Service, and Technical Environments

The Marriage in Lean Service Design

This may sound like Abraham Maslow’s saying, “If all you have is a hammer; everything looks like a nail” and if it does, I will admit that my principles and practices are with a Lean based approached. Most of the work I have seen to date in Service Design has been educational or Public Sector work. I have seen where private companies have instituted Service Design but many times the cost has been funded from a public entity. I think Service Design and its forerunner; The Service-Dominant Logic of Marketing type thinking may be Crossing the Chasm from early adaptors to early majority.

In my use of Service Design, I have had mixed results with most companies very interested in learning more about Service Design but few willing to take the initiative to design and implement Service Design.

It has been very similar to what I have found in Lean Sales and Marketing; interested but to implement? As a result, the best prospects are mature companies well into their Lean Journey and willing to take on a pilot project. Even at that, it is usually initiated by the Lean Champion who wants to introduce the Standard Tools of Lean and improve processes versus using Lean as a vehicle for growth.

The umbrella of Lean offers Service Design a method of entry into a well-established market. Lean has been very successful in Services and Design through traditional practices. However, Lean Design is rooted in tangible applications (excluding software for the moment). The leap of faith that must occur is to move away from these traditions and institute a wider scope of Design to Services. The Design Thinking concepts that are most commonly associated with IDEO seems to provide the clearest and accepted understanding.

Below is a Venn Diagram on how I view the three disciplines of Lean, Service, and Design. I have also included SDCA, PDCA, EDCA as a way to demonstrate the use of Lean in Services and Design. I like to use the term EDCA learned from Graham Hill  to designate the Explore aspect of Lean.  I view it as more of Design Type thinking content that allows for that collaborative learning cycle with a customer. This is a link to my blog post on the tools of SDCA, PDCA, EDCA: http://business901.com/?p=8490.

We live in a service centric world. Even companies to include most manufacturers are defined not by their products but the services they offer. Can we continue to give away services to sell products? Has production capacity slowed that we now have excess overhead? Maybe, we are a mature Lean Company and have become so efficient in our services that we have excess capacity? Is it time that we design around our services? Is it time to discover, how to develop our services into a profit center?

Shameless Plug: Lean Service Design Workshop  You could also attend a live presentation by joining our SlideCast on Thursday July 12^th at 1:00 PM Eastern. It is by invitation only, so drop me an email through the contact page on my website.

include a Fluff Cycle in your Day

Every Lean Enterprise practices all kinds of cycles with PDCA being the most prevalent. But has anyone ever asked you to include a Fluff Cycle? My idea of a Fluff Cycle is a deliberate effort to reward you after a period of intense concentration. Greg explains how he uses this technique to enable short bursts of useful concentration amidst his busy, distracted and multitasking life.

Ok, the video does not exactly explain the Fluff Cycle, it explains the Pomodoro Technique. But I like the idea of spending some time scheduling what you are going to do during that non-intense time. If you have several Fluff Cycles organized for those times, you will have something to look forward too. It is like having 10 pieces of candy lined up so that during each Fluff Cycle I would have a reward waiting. Simply stated don’t  leave your Fluff Cycle go to waste.

However, I do recommend that during one of those Fluff Cycles that you do absolutely nothing. That is the essence of Fluff anyway.

Check out this Lean Sales and Marketing Workshop!

Technorati Tags: Lean enterprise,Fluff Cycle,Lean Sales and Marketing

Why use a Lean Simulation Game?

The Lean Supply Chain & Logistics Simulation game was discussed in the podcast with Paul Myerson, author of author Lean Supply Chain and Logistics Management, a practical guide that will assist you in leveraging your improvements to both vendors and customers.

Why use a simulation game? As Paul says,

To be truly successful with Lean I think most people would agree that everybody has to be involved and understand that the concepts and the applications, so you always want to run as many people in your company through some kind of Lean training. The simulation is appropriate; I think, in the introductory types of setups where people might sit there and bored if they are listening to a lecture. This way, it gets them engaged. It’s a good team building approach to get them involved and see where it can really benefit them and the company and what their role in it is. So I find it to be very useful.

Download Podcast: Click and choose options: Download Here  or go to the Business901 iTunes Store.

Mobile Version of Business901 Podcast

Paul’s Lean Supply Chain & Logistics Simulation says Enna, will help your company realize its goal of becoming more Lean, more agile, and take a lead over the competition. This is a hands-on simulation that demonstrates the effectiveness of Lean in the specialized context of the Supply Chain, Logistics, and Distribution environment.

This is part of a series of blog posts outlined in A Lean Service Design Approach to Gaming your Training.

Lean Workshop in Indianapolis

Technorati Tags: lean workshop,lean indianapolis,lean indianapolis workshop

Lean Frontiers, Indianapolis, IN based, is known for producing the high quality, focused Lean Workshops. This fall (October 2-3, 2012) they are hosting the lean workshop, Lean Leadership presented by Mike Hoseus. The course is intended to demonstrate the role of leadership in connecting and simultaneously developing the “Product” and the “People” Value Streams in your organization which will drive the long term lean transformation resulting in increased profitability and long term mutual prosperity.

Lean Frontiers offers these smaller, regional workshops that provide high intensity and depth of discussion. Their smaller audience size allows for more presenter and attendee interaction. And typically at a fraction of the cost of other workshop providers.

The workshop will also discuss how to "bring to life" the Values a Company has set as their guiding principles or mission statements. We will do this by explaining the specific steps/actions to consider while using problem-solving process in daily activities. (i.e. – communication, buy-in, engagement, purpose, customer satisfaction and more). We will discuss each participants "Line of Sight" to the company goals or business plan (Hoshin), normally centered around the key performance indicators (i.e. Quality, Cost, Productivity, Safety, and HR Development). How to integrate this into a “Daily Management Development System will also be discussed and practiced.

Mike Hoseus, co-author of Toyota Culture will review how a Lean Organization establishes their culture for problem solving at all levels. A “hands on” case study and simulation with then be used to go over an 8 Step systematic process. In the simulation, the participants will be in teams, engaging in indentifying problems with works flow, standardized work, supply chain and motion. The teams will engage in PDCA “experimentation” to implement improvements to the process and evaluation results, while building an A-3 in the process.

Mike Hoseus is Executive Director for the Center for Quality People & Organizations (CQPO). Mike Hoseus brings both manufacturing operations and specialization in Human Resource experience to CQPO.

Disclaimer: I have presented the Lean Sales and Marketing workshop for Lean Frontiers and have attended workshops presented by them and by Mike Hoseus. I am not being compensated in anyway for this post.

Related Information:
Achieving Organizational Health
Include a Fluff Cycle in your Day
Understanding Lean Teamwork

Teaching Lean Supply Chain thru Simulation

Paul Myerson will be discussing his Lean Supply Chain & Logistics Simulation later in the week. This is part of a series of blog posts outlined in A Lean Service Design Approach to Gaming your Training.

Paul was my guest on a recent  Business901 Podcast, Extending Lean Supply Chain Thinking. He recently authored Lean Supply Chain and Logistics Management, a practical guide that will assist you in leveraging your improvements to both vendors and customers. Along the way, you may pick a few other Lean Tips to improve operations in general. I found it an enjoyable read and one that will find little opportunity to gather dust on my bookshelf. 

This is an excerpt from the upcoming podcast:

Joe: When would you use the game for training?

Paul: Well, I find it useful whether I'm doing Lean Manufacturing for manufacturing or Lean Office for warehouse or supply chain and logistics. To be truly successful with Lean I think most people would agree that everybody has to be involved and understand that the concepts and the applications, so you always want to run as many people in your company through some kind of Lean training. The simulation is appropriate; I think, in the introductory types of setups where people might sit there and bored if they are listening to a lecture. This way, it gets them engaged. It's a good team building approach to get them involved and see where it can really benefit them and the company and what their role in it is. So I find it to be very useful.

Joe: When you use it in a workshop setting do you use it in the introduction process or midday after you went through a few Lean principles?

Paul: Well, it's kind of a stand-alone thing. It is basically the introductory workshop. So my particular simulation game for a supply-chain logistics has three rounds, you can use less than three if you want to make it shorter, or you can do it in two rounds. It's typically meant to be a six to an eight-hour event that can be done shorter as I said or longer. However, it's typically for 10 to 15 people, probably closer to 10 are better. Again, it's kind of the introductory first-day training to get people involved and a basic understanding.

Joe: So you're using this simulation all day long and explaining the different components?

Paul: In a nutshell, we have three rounds as I said. What we do is we start off, before we actually play the first round of the game have an introduction of Lean, just a concept of the seven ways, the non-value added, value added, all that stuff. We lay out the scenario. Again if the person who purchases the software, there're roles to play, everybody plays a role; supply chain manager, shipper, customer service, etc. The person doing the training or the teaching might be the role of the owner of the company or a consultant brought in to teach the Lean.

The first round is kind of the as is. Here's the situation, business runs as usual, kind of the traditional methods of push, in this case for supply chain pushing orders in waves or in batches through a warehouse for layout, large inventories, etc. at high costs.

After the first round we do some wrap up and get some people involved. We say, "OK, here's where we are now let's bring in this expert in Lean and talk about where we might apply Lean here." The consultant or owner comes in and talks about some basic foundation concepts of Lean and where you might apply it in distribution and supply chain.

The second round you'll implement some basic improvements, not dramatic but basic ones, and you'll actually measure the end of each round. You'll measure your profitability; your costs, inventory levels, service levels, and things like that.

Then after the second round you'll do even more advance concepts teaching to the group, and they'll come up with ideas for the final round, which can be pretty dramatic in terms of using vendor managed inventory, which is really just in time, dramatic one-piece flow, things like that.

By the end of the third round and the wrap up at the end dramatically increase your profitability and service levels. Talk about steps, what you might do such as value stream mapping to get into detail about the current state and how you might dramatically change it to a future state in your workplace where you might apply some of this stuff once you get out of this classroom.

That's, in a nutshell, what the game does. It's not a game board but people actually play the roles in the game. There are game pieces such as Lego blocks to represent inventory and a stopwatch, so it's actually a complete game.

I followed up with questions such as:

Joe: Do you keep the same roles that people are in their work? Do you keep the roles in the game or do you have them mix it up?

Joe: As I hear you explain the game you go through, the key stages of gaming. You start as a newbie in an on boarding process and you go to more of a regular player, and then you develop it, in the gaming world they're called an enthusiast but more of a master level. So you're taking them through the three stages in your process?

Paul’s Lean Supply Chain & Logistics Simulation says Enna, will help your company realize its goal of becoming more Lean, more agile, and take a lead over the competition. This is a hands-on simulation that demonstrates the effectiveness of Lean in the specialized context of the Supply Chain, Logistics, and Distribution environment.

Gaming Teaches you to Plan

compLexity Gaming recently added Heroes of Newerth as a division to their championship gaming family. HoN is a solid title in eSports and complexity has contracted one of the very best teams to represent the coL Community: Trademark eSports. Trademark is currently ranked #1 in the GosuGamers rank database and #3 on the recent HoNCast top 10 rankings.

I did a podcast, Games may be your only chance to attract the best and brightest talent, with one of the members of col.HON when he was member of Trademark last year and this in an excerpt from it where we talked about preparation and teamwork. Check out his first blog post on the Complexity site.    

Joe:  Well, you mention, there is a strategy. Do you develop a strategy before a game?

Peter: We can have an idea of what we're going to do before a game, but the way the game works is the other team can ban heroes that they don't want to see in the game, so sometimes that can throw off any strategy you set up before the game. Luckily, there are multiple heroes that can fill multiple roles so even if your strategy is similar; you can just alter it with different heroes.

Joe: So your strategy can be an overview, but once you go into the game, it changes rather quickly just based on who you can use and which people you can use, which heroes you can use in it?

Peter: Yes, you can't go into a game with an absolute idea of what you're going to do because you're facing up against five other players who are going to do something to try and stop you or something different that you maybe won't expect. Every game's different and it's really about understanding and adapting to what's going on.

Joe: A lot of it is like a football game. You can go into a game plan, but if someone throws you, a different defense up, or has a different configuration, you have to change and adapt to what the other team is doing as the game progresses.

Peter: For the most part, yes, unless what they're doing is bad, and it's actually helping you more than it's hurting you. Then, you just stick with what you're doing.

Joe: Well, I would equate that to have if the fullback can run eight yards up the middle and you just keep doing it. You'll take eight yards until they stop it, right? You have played sports before. What's different between offline and online teamwork? Is the collaboration stronger, weaker?

Peter: Absolutely. When you're playing a game, you're focusing on what you're doing individually, and the only way you can understand or the only way you can comprehend what's going on with your teammates is by communication. If your teammates are not communicating, you could be susceptible to the other team ganging up on you or things you’re just not ready for unless you're communicating actively throughout a game.

Joe: There's constant chatter taking place such as in a dog fight or a fighter pilot with your other teammates or your other squadron members whom you're constantly saying 'watch for this' or 'watch for that'. Is that taking place?

Peter:  When we're playing at full force, there's hardly a silent moment on Skype, which is what we use to communicate within each other.

Joe: That chatter, I mean with five... Do you find yourself talking over the other one or is it by the roles that are being played, there's kind of a leader who should be talking?

Peter:  People speak over each other when it's necessary. For the most part, our team is very good about not talking over each other unless, obviously, something's going on and something needs to happen. People will shout or yell over another in order to get that done.

Joe: Is there a planning aspect or do you just jump into the fray and “inspect and adapt”, as I would call it?

Peter: If you're going to jump into the fray and try to inspect and adapt against a good team, you're almost always going to lose. There is a lot of preparation that goes into games before they happen that's usually done behind the scenes, in order to get the one up on your opponents; you want to be prepared.

It's almost like practice. You want to scout them, you want to know what they're going to do, just like a football team, they might watch replays of the other team before. You do the same thing in video games. You want to understand how they play, what they're trying to do as a team, and you want to be able to counter that.

Joe: You're out there watching the other team’s stream. Let's say that you're in a tournament, and you know the formidable competition within a tournament is going to be these two or three teams, then you might as a team go watch video and talk about the other team?

Peter:  Yes.

Joe: So you're just talking to each other about what you could do and how the other team plays?

Peter: We talk about what they do as a team. We talk about how they play, what heroes they like to play, what wards they like to place, which gives sight of the map by identifying what they do with certain timings, we can counter that with our own timing, timing pushes.

Joe: When you go through this process, I think about a football team, for example, they practice all week for two hours in a game. How much practice in relation to playing do you do?

Peter: We practice; I would say, probably, five to ten times as much as we play. One, that's because we just like to play the game, and we enjoy playing with each other more than playing with the general public or other people. As a team, we enjoy playing as five, so we try to do that whenever we can. Honestly, tournaments aren't scarce, but they aren't every day. People like to play the game every day, whether it's after they get home from work, or after they get home from school. We try to get some games in and just hone our skills and stay fresh for when that tournament comes up.

I thought that the upcoming discussions this week on teams warrant a re-visit of this podcast and encourage you to listen to the entire podcast, Games may be your only chance to attract the best and brightest talent.  I used to think Gaming was all about “Inspect an Adapt”. That Mario and Luigi thing. However, gaming is not just child’s play. To reach the professional level of gaming, it requires planning and dedication. More importantly, it teaches you the correct way to plan. Good plans require the ability to adapt to present situations. Understanding when to deviate from your plan through adjusting or even discarding it entirely can be learned and simulated through gaming. 

In The Gamification of Learning and Instruction author Dr. Karl Kapp, had his son write the last chapter of the book for a Gamers perspective. In my series of blog posts outlined in A Lean Service Design Approach to Gaming your Training, I hope to include a few perspectives from a Gamer such as the one above. Dr. Kapp recommends that if we are serious about Gamification, play games. I would like to add, if we are serious about learning about planning, try planning a strategy out for your next game, Euchre anyone? 

Time Based Thinking limits Lean Sales and Marketing

Lean has an infatuation with time, just look: Lead Time, Takt Time, Cycle Time, Machine Time, Process Time, Value Add Time, etc. With all this time-based thinking what it the first thing we try to do when applying Lean to Sales and Marketing?

The first step involves mapping our sales cycle looking for waste and improving the total time from the beginning to the end of the entire stream. This is great stuff! The power of the Value Stream Mapping process is that it enables the team to see the entire picture. We know waste in marketing is not as readily identified as in other areas. But one example of sales and marketing waste that can be identified is sales cycle time. We can even get agreement that the longer a customer/prospect stays in one of the process stages of the value stream or in the queue waiting to go from one stage to the next, the greater the chance of losing the customer.

We know enough to look at how to optimize the entire process instead of just a particular stage. Therefore, our first step would be to evaluate the total time spent, not resources allocated or used. Moving through the value stream quicker is many times just a matter of evaluating the internal delays that occur in the process. By removing them, we enable the customer to make faster and better decisions. We also create more credibility with our customer for ourselves as the “go to guy (organization)” and as an organization that has done this before.

It makes sense, the perfect application to apply Lean to Sales and Marketing. You try to find the one best path – the value stream. It is easy; we have already created a marketing funnel to allow us to readily identify the process. We just need to use a few Lean Tools to bring the process under control.

Houston, we have a problem! Organizations can no longer feed products to customers, as I described in the blog post, Kill the Sales and Marketing Funnel and in a few other posts that you can find on this blog under the Marketing Funnel Category.

In the process of interviewing Mary and Tom Poppendieck for an upcoming Business901 podcast, I got off the subject and discussed project versus product management. Afterwards, they sent me an excerpt from their second book, Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash. In the excerpt (which I have paraphrased and shorten) they gave the typical description of projects; they are funded and have a beginning and an end. Success is than measured based on whether or not the cost, schedule and scope commitments are met.

This mimics many of our traditional thoughts in sales and marketing. When we try to apply Lean to Sales and marketing it is re-emphasized. Project thinking is basically closing a sale in the shortest amount of time.

What if we treaded our sales cycles more like a product than a project? What if we treated scope (what we will do) with an expectation that it will evolve as knowledge is gained (My book, Marketing with PDCA discusses that Lean Sales and Marketing is built upon the philosophy that there has been a subtle shift to knowledge as the way to engage, develop and retain your customer base). What if we viewed success on engagement and dollars (lifetime preferably) per customer? Or increase in market share? Or even rewards based on number of long term customers? What if funding occurred not on monthly budgets but incrementally on engagement?

The overwhelming theme that has evolved is that engagement has replaced time as a defining metric in sales and marketing. An example is one of the defining metrics at a retail store, time spent. We have always viewed that the more time spent in the store, the more purchased. If we take this thinking and put an interactive component to it and rather than view time spent in the store but the experience and level of engagement created with the customer at the store and online, time becomes relatively in material. It is the experience.

How does Lean apply? Forrester Research identifies four measures of increasing engagement as Influence (Plan), Interaction (Do), Intimacy (Check), and Influence (Act). As you may notice, I assign the PDCA cycle to these measures of engagement as a way of combining Lean Thinking to the Engagement cycle. Demonstrating a shared outcome with your customers should be the ultimate strategy of your organization and your PDCA improvement cycles. Many organizations still view improving capabilities of internal processes in sales and marketing as an effective strategy; such as the reduction of cycle time. The strategies that we need for improvement must be on the demand side. We must simply focus on the customer, not internally. We do not live in a world of excess demand. As a result, our planning cannot be isolated. It is only validated through customer engagement, not a time-based derivative.

Related Information:
PDCA Cycle of Zingerman’s Deli
In love with your products more than your customers?
PDCA for Lean Marketing, Knowledge Creation
Lean Marketing Creates Knowledge for the Customer

How Fast can you get Feedback from your Customer?

At #LSSC!12, I had a chance to listen to Mary Poppendieck’s talk on, Continuous Feedback: Process Control for Developing Software-Intensive Systems. This Thursday, I continue the conversation with both Mary and Tom Poppendieck on the subject of process control in software. This is an excerpt of the podcast.

Joe:  I find it quite interesting that you look at the delivery by a team as no longer an iterative cycle, but one based on flow. Is that the influence of Kanban over scrum or maybe you should tell me what the influence is?

Mary:  Even iterations are a flow when it comes right down to it. If you develop software in two week iterations and actually deliver it every two weeks to customers, that's as much a flow... that's almost continuous.

In fact, when I think of continuous delivery I think of daily or possible twice a week, or weekly. If you look at the kind of delivery that Facebook does, it's once a week with small chunks in the middle of the week.

Gmail for example, is delivered twice a week. Chrome is deployed every day. Those kinds of vary rapid deployments, you find inside of software as a service, where they're websites, or you find them sometimes inside of the enterprises.

The idea of iteration has been, how about we develop software and get it ready to deploy every couple weeks. Well, if you just stop thinking about being ready to deploy and say what would it take to actually deploy it. Just get it out there and start getting the value from it and getting the feedback from it now, you can do that in two week iterations. You can do that with a Kanban system, it doesn't matter.

The optimum thing is how rapidly do we deploy our software rather than how rapidly do we get little chunks of it done.

Tom Poppendieck:  The primary thing that we are advocating is not to think of software development as coding and testing. But rather to think of it as figuring out what is worth doing, what's going to delight the customer, doing it, making sure it's working well, getting it out in service to the customer, and getting feedback from the customer.

The really important metric is how fast you can get feedback from the customer about the actual, deliverable application that you are creating. That is beyond the realm of most people who are thinking about software all by itself. It gets toward the devox on one end and it gets toward the design thinking on the front end.

When we're thinking about flow, we're thinking about rapidly getting feedback from your best design ideas all the way from production.

So, either a two week iteration or a continuous flow like kanban can be rapid, say a couple of weeks to a couple of hours, compared to the very common approach of having dozens of two week iterations before you get any feedback from actual production.

Related Information:

Mary Poppendieck has been in the Information Technology industry for over thirty years. She has managed solutions for companies in several disciplines, including supply chain management, manufacturing systems, and digital media. As a seasoned leader in both operations and new product development, she brings a practical, customer-focused approach to software development problems.

Tom Poppendieck is an enterprise analyst and architect, and an agile process mentor. He focuses on identifying real business value and enabling product teams to realize that value. Tom specializes in understanding customer processes and in effective collaboration of customer, development and support specialists to maximize development efficiency, system flexibility, and business value.

Lean Teamwork

Many organizations start practicing the tools of Lean and fail to understand that it is the people side that makes Lean effective. I have seen where organizations will develop the skill set of Value Stream Mapping, A3 Problem Solving or even Hoshin Planning. But spend little time developing a Lean attitude around the most basic concepts of Visual Management, Overlapping Responsibilities or Individual Kaizen. As a result, they simply do not act like a Lean Company. They are a collection of their tools not a collection driven by culture. The mistakes that you were trying to correct by instilling Lean continue to happen. Teamwork is non-existent and individual silos remain.  How do you change that? 

The Lean Concept of Respect for People was the topic of my recent podcast  with David Veech (@leansights). After reading the transcription of the podcast (below), I realized how much we talked about individuals and how they perform within teams. David has some great points. This transcription is well worth the time to read.

You can find David at The Lean Way. David is also a founding member of the Institute for Lean Systems and serves as its Executive Director. He is a faculty leader for Penn State University’s Smeal College of Business Executive Programs, and is a guest lecturer in The Ohio State University Fisher School of Business Masters program in Business Operational Excellence.

David has a knack of getting to the point, which he demonstrates in this excerpt, Can Standard Work be fun and lead to Enthusiasm?

Why is Product Thinking still the Prevalent thought?

Many of us believe that all we need to do is create better, more innovative products, the Apple mystic? The product continues to be the primary focus of business. Can we stay ahead of competition by products alone? Or even with products in general?

We have used Lean to make products that are easy to use, manufacture and make money with. Manufacturing is shrinking, and services have become the dominant force of business. Many companies are defined by their services, versus their product. There is a need for organizations to differentiate through service quality and customer experience. However, we still market services in much the same manner as we do products, through features and benefits.

We typically think of Service as a verb or an activity that is consumed by our customers. We think of Service in forms of organizational functions such as Engineering, Purchasing, Shipping, Marketing, Accounting, IT, Human Resources. When we set out to improve one of these functions, we look at how we do the work. We focus on our own activity.  The carryover of product thinking that better, faster, cheaper wins is a total misnomer. The focus on our own activity encourages internal thinking and misplaces our priorities. While addressing services from this viewpoint may seem to be productive and worthwhile, it misses the point in design. If we intend to make services profitable, we must accept that customers do not care how we do our work. They might not even care that we are incompetent at certain functions. Customers want us to provide a service to help them achieve a desired outcome. However, have we designed our services to demonstrate that value?

Shameless Plug: Lean Service Design Trilogy Workshop (Learn More) teaches us how to…

• Think of services as products or deliverables.
• Close the performance gap between customers and your organization.
• Create services that are countable, occur in discrete units and can be plural.
• Create services that can be part of a package.
• Create services that are not only supporting but also self-supporting. 
• Create services that can be cost leaders not cost losers.
• Create opportunities through services.
• Create revenue through services.

The workshop is based on this outline developed for the Lean Service Design Trilogy. We will use the Lean methods of SDCA, PDCA and EDCA as they relate to each discipline and the path between Service through SD-Logic (The Service-Dominant Logic of Marketing) to Design.

Sign up Now for Lean Service Design Trilogy Workshop

The above is an online workshop, if you would like information on the full day offline workshop, please contact me.

The Pull in Lean Construction

Gregory A. Howell, co-founder and managing director of the Lean Construction Institute (LCI), a non-profit organization devoted to production management research in design and construction. A popular speaker, educator and author Howell regularly addresses industry groups on the need for a lean production revolution in design and construction. His expertise in improving productivity has resulted in consulting engagements on power plants, petro-chemical facilities, commercial and industrial buildings, and infrastructure projects in North and South America and Africa.

Being the project management fanatic that I am, we centered most of our discussion on The Lean Project Delivery System™ (LPDS) and The Last Planner.  LPDS uses lean methods to provide improved project control. The decentralization of decision and the empowerment of the people that are in direct contact with the work are the key components of the work. Many of us will think there is nothing  new; this is what we have all been talking about the last few years. The revelation I had is that Greg has been doing this for 20 years.  Lean and the construction industry are both fortunate to have Greg as a leader of this movement. Enjoy the podcast! 

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Accessing the Full Value of the Cloud

Thomas Koulopoulos, author of Cloud Surfing: A New Way to Think About Risk, Innovation, Scale and Success (Social Century) was my guest on the podcast, The Next Step in Cloud Computing–Humans. Tom is the author of eight books and founder of Delphi Group, a 20-year-old Boston-based think tank, which was named one of the fastest growing private companies in the US by Inc. Magazine. Delphi provides advice on innovation practices and methods to Global 2000 organizations and government agencies.

This is a transcription of the podcast.

Tom is an engaging speaker, (samples at http://tkspeaks.com), and you will find the podcast very entertaining. He left me thinking about the cloud and the possibilities in a totally different way. It’s not about technology. It’s about how we collaborate, work, influence and experience the world!

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Lean Service Design Trilogy Workshop

Business901 will introduce Lean Service Design Concepts in a rather unique way. Five times a week, Monday through Friday, you will be sent a link to view a video, a presentation, interactive lessons, workbook sheets, or a pre-recorded webinar. The worksheets are at the heart of the workshop and will give you the opportunity to construct a Lean Service Design Experience.

Sign up Now for Lean Service Design Trilogy Workshop

Lean Service Design changes the way you think about business.  No longer can companies focus their efforts on process improvements. Instead, they must engage the customer in use of their product/service rather than analyzing tasks for improvement. We no longer build and hope that there is a demand. We must create demand through our product/service and Lean Service Design is the enabler of this process. It changes our mindset of thinking about design at the end of the supply chain to make it look good and add a few appealing features (all within budget). Instead, it moves design and the user themselves to co-create or co-produce the desired experience to the beginning of the supply chain.

Program Outline:

Week 1: The 5 Lean Principles are discussed not in your typical Lean point of view of reducing waste. We view this as knowledge building exercise with continuous improvement through iterative cycles of learning.

Week 2: Services are discussed in the concepts of gaps and how to recognize, measure and improve them as part of everyday work.

Week 3: How do you innovative within the confines of every day work? Design Thinking concepts are introduced and blended with the other components.

Week 4: Team Engagement and empowering people to put these concepts into practice. You’re the teacher now. How can you engage, implement and spread these ideas? 

Time is spent on application and ways to apply Lean tools in a new context. We will not be attempting to teach you individual tools rather expose you to the use of tools through SDCA, PDCA, and EDCA and give you resources to dig deeper into a tool if needed. We encourage membership in the Lean Marketing Lab to expose you to additional sources of information. 

Sign up Now for Lean Service Design Trilogy Workshop

Program starts on the following Monday after sign-up. If you sign up on weekend, program will start Monday of the following week (7 days later). The workshop price is $149. Training is immediately applicable to your business.

Related Information: 90 Day Program: Lean Service Design Workshop