kaizen
"Change for better"
How we work matters. This is our guide.
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"Agile planning balances the effort and investment in planning with the knowledge that we will revise the plan through the course of the project."
Learn & Adapt
Respond to unpredictability through incremental, iterative work cadences and empirical feedback.
Kaizen is a personal mindset and a practice. As a mindset, it suggests “My work is to do my work and to improve my work” and “continuously improve for its own sake.”
- Master techniques/processes “by the book”
- Experiment until you find a better way, then make that the new ‘standard’
- Repeat forever
Steps 2 and 3—Relentlessly and incrementally change and improve practices, usually in small experiments, though large-scale systems. Almost no practice, process, or existing policy is sacred—anything can go. “Challenge everything”
Methodology
Make decisions slowly by consensus, thoroughly considering all options; implement decisions rapidly.
- Today’s problems come from yesterday’s ‘solutions
- The easy way out usually leads back in
- Small changes can produce big results…but the areas of highest leverage are often the least obvious
- You can have your cake and eat it too—but not all at once
- Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants
- There is no blame
- Once a decision is made, execute fast!
- Be reliable and thoroughly test the work
Be Thoughtful
Personal Mastery
Personal mastery is a discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively."
Aim for mastery
To have a kaizen mindset—to have high expectations and to challenge ourselves, team members, and partners to levels of skill, mastery, waste reduction, and vision far far beyond the status quo.
- Why? - The battery is dead. (first why)
- Why? - The alternator is not functioning. (second why)
- Why? - The alternator belt has broken. (third why)
- Why? - The alternator belt was well beyond its useful service life and not replaced. (fourth why)
- Why? - The vehicle was not maintained according to the recommended service schedule. (fifth why, a root cause)
Go to the source [the place of real value work—"gemba"] to find the facts to make correct decisions, build consensus, and achieve goals at our best speed.
The 5 whys...
Find Truth
Base management decisions on a long term philosophy, even at the expense of short-term goals
- Consider a relay race
- The racers are standing around waiting for the baton from their colleague. This may appear as a terrible underutilization ‘waste,’ and would probably mandate a policy to ensure all the racers are 'busy' and 'productive.'
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Long Term
- Watch the baton, not the runners
- Whenever there is a choice to optimize a team output or the whole product, we always chose the whole product.
- Stop & Fix
- Build a culture of stopping and fixing problems to ultimately build quality in; teach everyone to methodically study problems.
- Stop and Fix is a deep and repeating theme about understanding root causes and introducing deep countermeasures.
- Minimize debt
- Actively work to drive the open-defects list down to zero before adding new items and feature.
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Stop & fix
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Process Agility
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ITTERATE AND IMPROVE
Out-learn the competition , through generating more useful knowledge and using and remembering it effectively.
Share Knowledge
- Standardize
- Learn and communicate system design patterns and leverage the use of existing design insight and standards.
- Standardization is the foundation for continuous improvement and collaborative empowerment.
Standardize
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The Gordian Knot
an intractable problem (disentangling an "impossible" knot), solved easily by "thinking outside the box" ("cutting the Gordian knot")
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Minimize waste
- Continually build the framework
- Encourage & teach
- Collaborate with partners
- Respect for all
Grow
Jason Greenwald
jason@livexyz.com
See you on the map!
LIVE XYZ
Kaizen
By livexyz