Tag Archives: Lean

The Secret History of Agile: From Japan to America

Agile, PMP, , , , ,

Note: Click on the video above to watch.

hand drawn comic software and car manufacturer working togetherThe Secret History of Agile: Unveiling the Roots of a Revolutionary Methodology

The Agile methodology, a transformative approach in software development, is often mistakenly attributed solely to the Agile Manifesto of 2001. However, the roots of Agile stretch much deeper into history, with influences from manufacturing and even early industrial practices. Let’s check out the lesser-known origins of Agile, and see how it has really evolved from the 19th century to today.

The Waterfall Model: A Misunderstood Beginning

The story of Agile cannot be told without mentioning the Waterfall model, traditionally seen as the “enemy” of Agile. Interestingly, Winston Royce, who formalized the Waterfall model, came up with a more iterative and feedback-driven approach in his final notes. Royce emphasized the importance of integrating feedback from testing into design and requirements, advocating for an iterative process and customer involvement.

This philosophy, remarkably similar to Agile, shows that even the origins of the Waterfall model came from principles that Agile later embraced.

Early Industrial Influences: Toyota’s Innovations

Agile’s principles can be traced back to early industrial practices, particularly those pioneered by Toyota. In 1896, Sakichi Toyoda introduced the “Stop and Notify” concept, also known as Jidoka or autonomation. His invention of an automatic loom that halted production if a needle broke was revolutionary, combining human oversight with machine efficiency. This concept of built-in quality control is a cornerstone of Lean manufacturing and, subsequently, Agile.

Post-War Innovation: The Birth of Lean and Kanban

The real transformation began in 1948 when Toyota faced severe resource constraints post-World War II. This led to the creation of the Toyota Production System, the precursor to Lean manufacturing. Lean emphasizes waste reduction and Kaizen, or continuous improvement. From Lean, Kanban emerged, a method of visualizing the work to optimize flow. This later became integral to Agile software development.

The Agile Manifesto: A Culmination of Decades of Ideas

Agile as formally recognized today was crystallized in 2001 with the Agile Manifesto, but its foundations were laid much earlier. The Manifesto was influenced by various methodologies, including Lean, Kanban, Extreme Programming, Feature Driven Development and Scrum. These frameworks collectively contributed to Agile’s emphasis on flexibility, customer collaboration, and iterative development.

Scrum: A Revolutionary Approach

Scrum, often synonymous with Agile, has its roots in a 1986 white paper titled “The New New Product Development Game” by Japanese researchers Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka. They proposed a holistic, team-based approach to product development, likening it to a rugby team working together to move the ball down the field. This approach emphasized overlapping development phases, self-organizing teams, and continuous learning—key principles that underpin Scrum and Agile.

The Six Secrets of The New New Product Development Game

Takeuchi and Nonaka identified six characteristics of successful product development teams, which resonate strongly with Agile principles:

  • Built-in Instability: Assigning broad goals to capable teams, granting them autonomy and flexibility to meet that goal.
  • Self-organizing Teams: Teams acting like startups, from ideation to implementation, fostering autonomy, self-transcendence, and cross-functional collaboration (the Product Owner idea in Scrum today).
  • Overlapping Development Phases: Continuous interaction between research and development and production to ensure constant progress and iteration.
  • Multi-learning: Encouraging team members to pursue ongoing learning, both within and outside their areas of expertise.
  • Subtle Control: Implementing visual management and maintaining open workspaces to facilitate communication and collaboration.
  • Organizational Transfer of Learning: Converting project activities into standard practices to spread knowledge throughout the organization.

As you can see there are many similarities between Scrum as we know it today, and The New New Product Development Game introduced in 1986, even if some of the names are different.

Conclusion: The Ever-Evolving Journey of Agile

The history of Agile is rich and multifaceted, drawing from various disciplines and evolving over decades. From Royce’s iterative vision for Waterfall to Toyota’s Lean principles and the collaborative ethos of Scrum, Agile embodies a continuous pursuit of improvement and adaptability. Understanding this deep and varied history not only enriches our appreciation of Agile but also underscores its enduring relevance in today’s fast-paced, ever-changing technological landscape.

For those eager to dive deeper into Agile’s principles and practices, comprehensive courses and coaching can offer valuable insights and practical skills. Embracing Agile is not just about adopting a methodology; it’s about joining a long-standing tradition of innovation and excellence in product development.

See more PMP Articles and Tips for Passing your Exam: 

You can see what people are saying about David McLachlan here: REVIEWS

Navigate to Free Project Management and Leadership Articles through the links on the right (or at the bottom if on Mobile) 

PMI PMP 35 PDUs CourseThe Ultimate PMP Project Management Prep Course (35 PDUs)
Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP 21 PDUs)The Complete Agile Course: PMI-ACP (21 PDUs), Coaching, Jira and MORE! 
50 Project Management Templates Gantt Chart Risk Matrix and more Excel50+ Project Management Templates in Excel and PowerPoint (Gantt Chart, Risk Matrix and more!)
Project Management Plan TemplatesPre-made Project Management Plan Template: Save 100 HOURS!

 

How to Make a Lean A3 – Project on a Page

Project Management Tools, , ,

How to Make a Lean A3 Project on a Page

A Lean A3 is a project summary on a page. It tells the story of your change, improvement or project from the time it is just an idea all the way through to delivery and implementing the change. It also shows the main people involved, the data and reasons for the improvement, and a high level schedule for making the improvement.

It follows the “Deming Cycle”, of Plan, Do, Check, and Act (or Adjust). Check out the video to create your own PDCA Lean A3 in PowerPoint below!

Step 1

First create the heading area, by Inserting a Square shape, and colouring it grey.

Place two tables over the heading area, both without a “header” and unchecking banded rows. Turn these into our people and schedule list.

Plan Do Check Act picture 1

Step Two

Create seven more squares underneath this as our plank PDCA template,which will include the seven problem solving steps of a Lean PDCA A3. These are:

  1. Define the problem
  2. Grasp the current situation
  3. Plan
  4. Do
  5. Check
  6. Act (or Adjust)
  7. Lessons Learned

Lean A3 PDCA Blank Template

Step 3

Now we can fill in the Lean A3. For each step:

  1. Gather data and the “Gap” between where you are and where you want to be
  2. Use Value Stream Maps, process maps, Pareto charts, Fishbone diagrams to grasp the current situation and potential root causes
  3. Create an action plan based on the root causes, assign actions to people and give due dates.
  4. Show the schedules and actions in progress using a Gantt chart or Kanban board.
  5. Check your measures – what were you aiming for, and what was achieved?
  6. Update the Standard Operation Process (SOP) with the new process
  7. Perform a project Post-mortem, Retrospective, and gather lessons from the project.

Lean A3 PDCA Complete Template

– David McLachlan

Lean Management For White Collar Work – DO NOT Be Fooled By Well Meaning Consultants

Lean CX, , , , , , , , , , ,

Lean Management white collar

When it comes to Lean Management in general, there is a lot of mis-information and mal-practice out there in the world.  After all, Lean Management and operational excellence sound good at face value.  If it’s been well defined, it will look like “Quality, Delivery, and Cost” – improving quality and tasks being first-time-right, improving delivery times and getting things to customers (and team-mates) faster, and reducing cost.  But most companies and leaders don’t even get that far.

Add to this another challenge – that being a manager often involves many parts of a business, not just manufacturing.

These are areas in your business that need Lean Management too – like technology, software or website development, customer service, sales, administration, human resources, quality assurance, projects, training, change programs, communications and much more.  They can all benefit from the right approach and start to improve on those Lean Management measures of “Quality, Delivery and Cost”.  But it just can’t be done using the old Lean Manufacturing way.

So buyer beware – Lean is traditionally a manufacturing methodology, and few (if any) leaders have gotten it right when applying it to the other important parts of a business – parts that are considered “white collar”.

Every company, even if they are primarily in manufacturing, has these white collar areas to be managed and apply true Lean Management to.  Sales have to be made, scheduling has to be done, items have to be handed between departments, customers have to be served.

So how do we adjust this decades-old approach to a white collar world to achieve real success?  Simple – we strip the principles of Lean and operational excellence back to their core, to the outcome they are trying to achieve, and take the parts that give us a meaningful result as leaders and applying true Lean Management.

Five Steps to Lean Management for White Collar Work

Before we define Lean Management for white collar work, traditional manufacturing Lean is based on a handful of solid principles, most commonly shown like this:

Continue reading Lean Management For White Collar Work – DO NOT Be Fooled By Well Meaning Consultants →

A Framework For Operational Excellence and Customer Obsession

Lean CX, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
This is a powerful definition of Operational Excellence, how it relates to Customer Obsession and has a huge impact on revenue, profit and employee engagement.  You can download a PDF version for yourself, free.  Enjoy!

 

A Framework For Operational Excellence and Customer Obsession

Operational Excellence.  It’s a term most of us have heard, maybe even used, but when it comes down to it few people know what it really, truly means.  Operational Excellence certainly sounds like something we should want – after all, everyone would say they want their business or team to operate well, and we want it to be excellent rather than average, right?

We need Operational Excellence

Operational Excellence is important enough for Jeff Bezos (the richest man in the world and the CEO of Amazon.com) to mention repeatedly in his shareholder letters, so there has to be some value in it.  And let me ruin the ending for you here – because when it comes to well defined operational excellence there is massive value indeed.

It’s a strategy that has helped Amazon become the most feared (and revered) business of the century so far – sending whole industries running for cover at the slightest mention of working there.  It’s a strategy that helped Toyota thrive for over 100 years in one of the toughest industries on earth.  It’s a strategy that took McDonald’s from one store to over 36,000 stores worldwide, and it’s a strategy that enabled Uber to grow to more than 2,000,000 drivers worldwide.  Bezos says:

Congratulations and thank you to the now over 560,000 Amazonians who come to work every day with unrelenting customer obsession, ingenuity, and commitment to operational excellence.

 

The thing is, when Jeff Bezos talks about customer obsession, he’s not talking about meeting a customer at a cash register and giving them a smile.  He’s talking about reducing any friction a customer might have in doing business with Amazon.com, and making it ridiculously easy for them to buy (and continue to buy) from them.

Which gives us some good news.  When it comes to Customer Obsession and Operational Excellence, those two things are 100% related.

Continue reading A Framework For Operational Excellence and Customer Obsession →

Leadership Card 33 – Problem Solve for Exponential Growth

Leadership Cards, , , , , , , , , ,

Leadership Card 33 – Problem Solve for Exponential Growth

See all the Leadership Cards here

Leadership Card 033 Problem Solve

Leadership CardsView All The Leadership Cards (48)

- or - Have the Leadership Cards delivered for your next meeting

Solving The Root Cause of Operational Problems

Wow, that’s a mouthful, isn’t it?  Solving the root cause of operational problems.  What does that even mean?  Well it must mean something, because Jeff Bezos (he’s the CEO of Amazon.com if you haven’t heard of him, and currently the richest man in the world) makes a point of doing it day in and day out in his business, and ensuring his managers do the same.

And it might sound fancy but in fact it’s very simple – find out what is bothering your customers, then don’t just fix it one time, fix the reason behind it.  Here’s an example from the book “One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon” by Richard Brandt:

“When one elderly woman sent an email to the company saying she loved ordering books from the site but had to wait for her nephew to come over and tear into the difficult-to-open packaging, Bezos had the packaging redesigned to make it easier to open.”

 

He had the packaging redesigned.  He didn’t just apologize.  He didn’t go to her home and open the package one time.  He had the packaging redesigned so it wouldn’t happen again.

Lean Cartoon Next 352 Problems

Companies With the High Velocity Edge

A man by the name of Steven Spear found the same thing, through research in his book “The High Velocity Edge”.  Companies who outperformed others over long periods of time had leaders who:

  1. Designed their work to reveal problems and opportunities
  2. Solved the root cause of those problems
  3. Shared that knowledge throughout the organisation, then;
  4. Developed the problem solving skill in others.

This meets the actions of Jeff Bezos perfectly.  By solving the root cause of problems customers are having, they stop those problems from happening again.  They are saving time, money, and retaining customers.  Then by sharing that knowledge and building the problem solving skill in others, the managers and teams at Amazon.com are building upon previous successes in a way that starts as small improvements and gains, but soon grows to large gains as the improvements compound on each other.

Start and Finish with a Repeatable Process

Problem solving by itself may not give you the results you want.  If you improve something, but don’t lock in those changes, there’s a good chance things will revert to normal after a short period of time.

This is where a standard, repeatable process comes in to play.  By ensuring each product we sell, and each operational process we perform to get there has a clear, repeatable way of doing it, we can use that process to improve.  Something as simple as a checklist, or screenshots, can work wonders with ensuring everyone knows what to do and can do it the same great way every time.

Then when you improve things, you can lock in the changes by updating the process, checklist, screenshots (or any other way you prefer), so the improvement isn’t lost and you can continue to grow over time.

In that way, small incremental improvements will compound on each other over time, leading to large improvements overall.

In that way, solving operational problems is the key to operational excellence.  And by solving problems your customers bring to you (whether through complaints or other feedback) you are unlocking the door to a customer obsession mindset.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

Leadership CardsView All The Leadership Cards (48)

- or - Have the Leadership Cards delivered for your next meeting

Leadership Card 25 – What Looks Like A People Problem…

Leadership Cards, , , ,

See The Leadership Card Deck Here

Ease of Use, Lean CX Leadership Card 25 – What Looks Like A People Problem…

Leadership_Card_025_PeopleProblem

Leadership CardsView All The Leadership Cards (48)

- or - Have the Leadership Cards delivered for your next meeting

…is often a situation problem.  Have you ever had a really bad day – maybe your car breaks down, your boss yells at you, you break your watch and then someone asks you to do something and instead of helping out you yell at them to leave you alone?  And they think “What a rotten guy!” when the reality is you would normally help, you were just having a bad day.  It was a bad situation.

People tend to blame the person, instead of realizing that it’s the situation that is the real issue.  If you were having a great day it would be easy to take on one more thing with a smile.  But the situation made you cranky, and lowered your likelihood of helping as a result.

What looks like a people problem, is often a situation problem.  This is one of the greatest lines from an excellent book – “Switch” by Chip and Dan Heath.  And they make an excellent point.  If you change the situation, more often than not you change the people as well.

This is also where designing your work and your customer experience for Ease of Use comes in.  If the work is easy to do for your teams – with no rework, no waiting, no searching, as few steps as possible, and the right result at the end, then there is a very good chance they’ll do it right and do it more often.  The thing is, most people don’t really design their work at all, let alone get intentional about designing their work for ease of use.

Most leaders just let the work happen, and give some vague outcomes to their team to try and make it work.  In reality they are trying to find the treasure without making a map.

And in most cases, it’s not your fault.  The majority of people don’t know how to define difficult work in a way that reveals solutions to their problems.  Having the right framework, in the form of Lean CX, makes it easy.  By ensuring you have a clear outcome and a clear set of steps to get there, you are closer to getting the right result every time.  But by reducing the steps to getting that outcome, ensuring your staff or people know what to do first time without having to ask, make it impossible to make a mistake, and check in to see if they are on the right track, you will be creating a process that is extremely easy to do and you will see the profit, productivity and engagement flow as a result.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

Leadership CardsView All The Leadership Cards (48)

- or - Have the Leadership Cards delivered for your next meeting

What Is Lean CX?

Lean CX, , , , , , , , ,

You can recognise disruptors before they become a reality.

Lean CX is a step by step framework for Operational Excellence and how it relates to disruptive companies and technologies – especially as they grow and are ready to scale.

Disruptive companies are those that can deliver something a customer wants faster, cheaper, with better quality and sufficient brand recognition.  Think McDonald’s in the 1950s, the model T Ford in the early 1900s, the Apple iPod in the early 2000s or the iPhone in 2007, Uber disrupting the cab industry, Netflix disrupting DVD hire and Amazon disrupting retail.

All of them have at least three of these four in common:

Continue reading What Is Lean CX? →

Lean CX Infographic – The Huge Benefits of Employee Engagement

Lean CX Infographic, , , , , , , , , , ,

Lean Infographic Employee Engagement Benefits

Get all the infographics here

It’s Official: Employee Engagement Has A Huge Impact On Your Profit

For years the greatest leaders have had an inkling that teams who are most engaged actually perform better, and bring more prosperity to their business.  Well now it’s official.  As the latest numbers from the Gallup Engagement Study show, in the state of the American workforce there is a very telling difference in the productivity, sales, and overall profit of businesses within the top quartile of engagement.

If employee engagement is something that you are struggling with, or even just want to improve, I have some good news.

There Is A Proven Way To Higher Engagement: Design Your Work

The Lean CX Score, a book by David McLachlan, outlines six key steps to creating disruptive products and services, and it also improves the speed, morale and engagement of your teams.

With the latest research pointing to the fact that engagement and profit are inexplicably linked, it may not surprise you that if the Lean CX Score impacts speed and morale, it also has a higher likelihood of creating disruptive products and outstanding businesses.

The six key steps of the Lean CX Score have been linked to research in psychology, business, and plain old motivation.  But the main aspect of all of them is the principle of intentionally designing your work, and intentionally designing your product and your experience, so that it meets the needs of your users in a way that keeps them engaged.

When we say “keeping them engaged”, it works for both your customers and your team.  Engaged customers are the ones who return to your product, again and again.  They are the ones who are your biggest fans, the ones who would walk an extra block to buy from you instead of your competitor.

And engaged team mates are the ones who will go the extra mile for their managers and for their customers – whether it is internal “customers” that they serve with a report or task, or the final, end customer who pays their wage by buying your product or service.

If you haven’t got a copy of the Lean CX Score, I highly recommend you check it out.  I guarantee it will have a huge impact on your life.

Get all the infographics here

Lean CX ScoreGet "The Lean CX Score" now, and start creating disruptors in your industry that completely annihilate your competition.

Oh and good news!  You'll be improving the speed, morale and engagement of your teams at the same time.  Get the Lean CX Score now.

Lean CX Infographic – Employee Engagement (and Disengagement)

Lean CX Infographic, , , , , , , , , , ,

Lean CX Infographic Employee Engagement

Get all the infographics here

That’s Right – 67% Of Employees Are Disengaged At Work

And that’s just in the U.S, where people get coffee breaks and are paid more than two dollars an hour.  It’s even worse if we look at the broader world where those things aren’t guaranteed, factories can pay a handful of dollars with inhumane conditions and employees are not protected by basic laws.

But having 67% of your employees be disengaged is still pretty bad.  After all, disengaged employees are the ones who are more likely to leave, more likely to be sick on average, and even (according to the research) more likely to steal.

But there’s more, and it is discovered and outlined in the book, “The Lean CX Score” by David McLachlan.  In the Lean CX Score, David outlines the benefits of designing your work, and your products, properly.  And they all point to improved engagement and improved profit as a result.

For a start, disengaged team members or employees are six times more likely to leave their job than their engaged counterparts.  That’s a 600% difference.  Do you think it’s expensive to acquire customers?  Well it’s extremely expensive to find and hire good staff.  Between the downtime caused with a lost employee, to the cost of advertising, vetting resumes, interviewing, and training, it is much easier to keep them engaged in the first place.

Engaged team members are also more likely to make you more money.  A study by Kenexa found that businesses with highly engaged employees – those in the top quartile of engagement – achieved twice the annual net revenue on average, when compared to businesses with lower engagement scores.

It’s for these reasons that there are entire companies dedicated to the discovery of employee engagement around the world, and companies are lining up to buy their services.  Engagement matters.

But You Don’t Have To Suffer Through Low Engagement

If you’d prefer to live in the higher engagement end of town, there is good news.  You don’t have to suffer through low engagement scores, as a business owner, a leader managing a team, or a “leader without a title” inside a team of your own where you feel engagement could be higher.

Designing your work for happiness has been proven to have a huge effect on your employees, and it doesn’t have to be complicated.

Take just two steps in the Lean CX Score book – a Repeatable Process, and Checking In.

In 1961, a US psychologist called Mihaly Csikszentmihali interviewed 1000 peole, asking them about the circumstances that made them happy.  He called this happiness a state of “Flow”, when things went well, and things just seemed to flow well – when participants felt on top of the world.  Mihaly found five main things in common when it came to creating happiness.  It happened when his subjects were:

  1. Intensely focused on an activity,
  2. Had control over the outcome,
  3. That was neither too easy not too hard,
  4. That had a clear objective, and;
  5. That gave immediate feedback

The good news about this is having a Repeatable Process, whether it’s interacting with a product in a predictable way each time, or knowing the boundaries of your work so you can easily move into a flow state, has a deep impact on happiness and flow.

And Checking In, which is step five in the Lean CX Score, means we check regularly to see if we’re on track – with our customers, our users, or our team.

There are many more stories and a lot more research in the Lean CX Score book, making it a nice, easy read that will have a huge impact on your results.

I highly recommend you get yourself a copy today.

Get all the infographics here

Lean CX ScoreGet "The Lean CX Score" now, and start creating disruptors in your industry that completely annihilate your competition.

Oh and good news!  You'll be improving the speed, morale and engagement of your teams at the same time.  Get the Lean CX Score now.

Lean CX Infographic – The Ideal Shopping Cart Experience

Lean CX Infographic, , , , , , , , ,

Lean CX Infographic Shopping cart abandonment Form Fields

Get all the infographics here

Customers Are Leaving Your Online Shopping Cart

Recent research by the Baymard Institute found that up to 69% of customers were leaving your online shopping cart instead of buying your product or service.

They also found that 35% of those online abandonments were recoverable solely through a better checkout flow and design – in other words most businesses are making things more complicated than they should be, and customers are leaving as a result.

Needless to say, keeping even a small portion of these abandoned orders would have a significant effect on your profit as a business.  But the best part about it is that it makes sense, because I know I have been guilty of leaving a complicated shopping cart, and there’s a good chance you have too.

Fast and Easy, or Long and Complicated, Which Would You Prefer?

If you had a choice between your checkout experience being fast and easy, or long and complicated, which would you choose?  It might seem like a silly question – even an obvious one – when we put it like that, but the truth is most companies are answering “Long and Complicated” without even knowing it.

They’re answering “Long and Complicated” because they haven’t put in the work or thinking necessary to reduce the complexity in their shopping cart and make it as simple as it needs to be.  And they haven’t put in the thinking because they don’t have a simple step-by-step framework like the Lean CX Score that is proven to make it simple and improve their profit as a result.

Reduce The Steps, Reduce The Checkout Fields

The latest research by the Baymard Institute found that the average online shopping cart had more than 14 form fields for a customer to fill out.  But the shocking thing is they also found that the ideal customer flow included just seven form fields – around half of what most companies had.

Companies were making it more complicated than it needed to be, which prompted a reduction of 35% of customers in buying their product or service.

Amazon Did It In One Step

Of course you know the story by now – there’e a good chance you have used Amazon.com’s online shopping cart and in many cases, such as with their prime service or Kindle store, you can buy what you want in just one click.  If customers leave too often with 14 fields, and a checkout can be done in 7, then Amazon have taken it to the next level and reduced the steps to one.

Do you think that had an effect on their profit?  Of course.

Doing things in “One Step” is also one of the recommendations in “The Lean CX Score”, by David McLachlan.  In that book there are many more real life examples of companies getting things to a customer in “One Step” instead of many, and gaining stellar results.

There are also five scenarios similar to the “too many fields” dilemma, where customers are prompted to leave a company.  Outlined in the “The Lean CX Score”, they are scenarios where a customer leaves because their experience is harder than it needed to be.  Apart from extra steps, it might mean extra hand-offs, having to redo things over and over, and having to wait too long to get what they wanted.

If you haven’t read The Lean CX Score yet, I highly recommend you get a copy today.

Get all the infographics here

Lean CX ScoreGet "The Lean CX Score" now, and start creating disruptors in your industry that completely annihilate your competition.

Oh and good news!  You'll be improving the speed, morale and engagement of your teams at the same time.  Get the Lean CX Score now.