#lkuk09 – A Tweetrospective

I ended up making notes at the Lean & Kanban UK Conference with good old fashioned pen an paper. Rather than try and write up those notes into something coherent and meaningful, I have decided to write them up in the style of a twitter stream. These are the things I would have tweeted if I’d been on my laptop. The quantity of “tweets” in no way represents the quality of the presentations. I also make no promises that all of the following “tweets” are actually <= 140 chars!

Monday

Mary Poppendieck – The The Tyranny of the Plan

• Plans – what did construction do before computers?
• Eliminate design loops by consulting experts early
• Design for decoupling workflow
• Cash Flow Thinking – Cost of Delay
• Design based on constraints of situation
• Establish a reliable workflow 1st
• Schedule is orthogonal to workflow
• Build schedules based on experience, not wishful thinking
• Variance from plan is a learning opportunity, not a performance failure
• Reliable workflow – output, pathway, connection, method, improvement – Steven Spears, Chasing the Rabbit
• Polaris Success – Quality of Leadership, Focus on deployment, Decentralised Competitive Org, Emphasis on Reliability, Esprit de Corps

Alan Shalloway – Creating a Model to Understand Product (and Software) Development

• 3 types of value: Discover what a customer needs, Discover how to build it, Build it

Jeff Patton – Lean Product Discovery

• There is a difference between Delivery & Discovery
• Undelivered software is a solution hypothesis (usually incorrect)
• Include discovery in the VSM
• Market demand = pull (but is post delivery)
• “Lets go to marble”
• Discovery Kanban + Delivery Kanban
• Visualisation creates collaboration
• Storyotype 1: Bare Necessity – minimally demo-able
• Storyotype 2: Capability + Flexibility – options-
• Storyotype 3: Safety – invisible
• Storyotype 4: Usability, Appeal, Performance – differentiating
• Chess analogy – Opening Game, Mid Game, End Game
• Use options when cost of iteration and failure is high

John Seddon – Re-thinking Lean Service

• If you manage costs, costs go up
• Failure demand is a signal
• Incentivising workers get less work done
• Predictable failure demand is preventable
• Lean is getting a bad brand
• The only plan is to get knowledge
• Improve flow – walk the flow
• Pull the help, keep the work
• Do “productivity” tools improve productivity?
• Make them curious

Tuesday

Don Reinertsen – Second Generation Lean Product Development: From Cargo Cult to Science

• Understand causal relationships and salient phenomena
• Scientific v Faith (Science Free) based approaches
• Faith based = Cargo Cult
• Every system has Push / Pull interfaces
• No bad tools, only wrong times to use them
• In Product Development, Requirements are a degree of freedom
• Inventory is information and invisible (physically and financially)
• Agile practitioners are going a better job at LPD than LM practitioners
• In engineering we are making economical (Profit + Loss) decisions and we have no clue what we are doing
• Quality = Process x People – If either drops to 0, the quality of the result will drop to 0
• Don’t tolerate initiative – demand it
• Chief Engineer doesn’t know better than the customer

Kenji Hiranabe – Learning Kaizen from Toyota

• Balance process control and process improvement
• Management fosters human potential
• Go to the gemba != PowerPoint
• To know and to understand are different
• Think within your constraint

Hal Macomber – Lessons from Target Value Design

• Meld planning with execution + control
• What signals do we pay attention to?
• Articulate + activate the network of commitment
• Only start work when it is in the condition to be finished.
• Embrace the contradictions of Lean
• Focus on tool users, not the tools
• PDSA – Study, don’t Check
• Creating constraints creates innovations
• Create constraints so that we can do our work
• Don’t open the trenches until you know you can fill them

Marc Baker – Lean Thinking: what is distinctive about it and where it is going?

• Pull means take the payment first
• Visual controls mean that nothing is hidden
• Standardised tasks are the foundation of employee autonomy
• Go see, ask why, show respect