Principle 1: Establish Customer-Defined Value to Separate Value-Added from Waste

The customer is always the starting point in a lean system, so defining waste starts with defining what a customer values.

“What is our business is not determined by the producer but the customer. It is not defined by the company’s name, statutes, or articles of incorporation but by the want the customer satisfies when he buys a product or service. The question can therefore only be answered by looking at the business from the outside, from the point of view of the customer.”
Peter F. Drucker

Waste in product development generally occurs in one of two broad areas: 1) engineering and 2) product development process.

Waste by poor engineering that results in low levels of product or process performance. This is the most destructive waste.
Waste in the product development process itself.

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13 principles of the Toyota Product Development System (TPDS)

The Toyota Product Development System (TPDS) is a Sociotechnical System (STS) divided upon three major areas; Process, People and Tools&Technology as discussed earlier. Hence, this division of three major areas are based upon 13 principles¹;

¹ _{Liker, J.K and Morgan, J.M, The Toyota Product Development System: Integrating People, Process and Technology, Productivity Press, 2006}

What motivates us

It’s been a long time since I last updated my blog. There are of course many various reasons for this. However, they depend mostly on two major reasons; the first reason is me taking on a challenging assignment in Shanghai (China) for a couple of months, and the second reason is me taking on the very exciting responsibility to start up the new Softhouse office in Gothenburg area, Sweden. I am amazed myself on how much I have learned and experienced during this past year – I will love to share it all!

First thing I would like to share is my insights within the area of motivation, and in short; What motivates us? I have been thinking, figuring, debating, discussing and reflecting over this for quite some time. How is it that highly sophisticated skilled people work for free and yet without getting payed for their product and contribution (i.e. Wikipedia, Linux, Apache etc)? What keeps those people motivated? What keeps all of us motivated? Is money the only motivator? What different motivators are there? Which ones are most important? Finally I think I found the answer to those questions in a very interesting video clip by Dan Pink on “What motivates us”. According to this discussion our motivators are; Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose drives and motivates us!

Please invest 11 minutes of your time to watch this informative and eye-opening clip!

Assigning teams instead of persons

One of the biggest challenges when starting up a project is to create a team. What usually happens is that a certain amount of resources (or I would prefer calling them what they really are; persons) are given to the project. Then it is the project managers task to create a team out of the group of individuals given. This is a tremendous, complex and very time consuming effort that simply just has to be done. All this effort is not even giving you any guarantee what-so-ever of succeeding. Failure in the beginning of a project can be devastating for the whole product and/or project. Hence, why do we keep struggling with this problem every single time we start up a project? My ideas is to keep the team(s) intact and then assign a product and/or project to the team! This way we get rid of all the tremendous, complex and very time consuming effort(s) that has to be done in order to create a high-performing team!

Team versus Group

What is the difference between a group and a team? Is there really a difference? I argue that there is a definite and fundamental difference between a group and a team. To be able to understand this further one must start by defining the terms “group” and “team”.

A group can be defined as;

“a small group of people with complementary skills and abilities who are committed to a leader’s goal and approach and are willing to be held accountable by the leader.”
Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith on The Wisdom of Teams (Harvard Business School Press, 1992)

Whilst a team can be defined as;

“a small group of people with complementary skills and abilities who are committed to a common goal and approach for which they hold each other accountable.”
Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith on The Wisdom of Teams (Harvard Business School Press, 1992)

Hence, a group is very individual-based (rather than team-based) where the group’s responsibility and accountability lie within every individual within the group (i.e. every individual is responsible and accountable for his/her own work). The group is dominantly held together by a leader, where the group supports the leader’s goals. The decisions made in a group are made by voting and/or implied agreement(s) whereas decisions on a team are typically made by consensus. Continue reading →

Feature Use

When developing software it is a fact that we spend way to much time and effort on implementing things that will only be used sometimes, rarley or NEVER! There are several studies covering this. One such example is the famous survey by The Standish Group in 2004.

The Agile community are trying to solve this in SCRUM by an approach of really focusing what is important for the customer right now, instead of the approach of focusing on everything-at-once. One examplary example of a product that focused only on the features used always and/or often is the.. iPod!

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Toyota Product Development System

The Toyota Product Development System is a Sociotechnical System (STS) which is divided into three main categories; people, process and tools&technology. Furthermore, these three categories consists of 13 principles. I’ve tried to summarize these three categories with the 13 principles of the Toyota Product Development System into one single picture.

Cycel Time

In order to have a better understanding of the total cycel time one also have to understand the concept of batching, and how it affects the total cycel time. Finding out your cycel time tend to seem easy:

Total Cycel Time = Number of things in Process / Average Completion Rate

The picture tries to illustrate on how the delivery is affected by driving parallel projects (all-at-once) comparing to one at the time (focused). Also, it tried to illustrate what happens when the average completion rate increases and decreases.

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Inverted Organizational Structure

More and more companies are struggling to transform their organization into a more lean and agile form. While doing this many companies fail to realize and recognize some fundamental aspects. One of the fundamental aspects is the purpose of the organization (refer to the purpose of why Toyota exists), yet another important aspect is the company’s view of their customer(s).

Those two aspects together (the purpose of the organization and customer focus) is laying the foundation of how a company chooses to organize its organization in order to meet the customers . With the illustration below in mind, I think we would need to consider and ask ourselves a couple of things:

How well does your company truly understand what really matters to your customer(s)?
What level of customer focus does your organization (really) have?
Are the workers working for management, or is management working for the workers in the company?
Is management using the organization to reach the company’s goals, or is management supporting the organization (and it’s workers) in achieving its goals?

Sociotechnical System

First, one needs to understanding the purpose of why Toyota exists before you can ask yourself why Toyota is so successful in what they do. How can they be so successful? How do they pull it all together? This post will focus on the latter; how Toyota pulls it all together.

Toyota’s success lies within that there is no single secret pulling it all together. Toyota’s success comes from hard work, excellent engineers, a culture of teamwork, an optimized process, simple but powerful tools that work, and kaizen that improves, and improves on all of these.¹

Sociotechnical System (STS)

A Sociotechnical system (STS) suggests that in order for an organization to be successful it must find the appropriate adjustment between social and technical system that will fit the organizational purpose and its external environment. Continue reading →

Process

People

Tools & Technology

Sociotechnical System (STS)