What Did Deming Really Say?

There is a really great Quality Digest Article by Davis Balestracci entitled “What Did Deming Really Say?”

An extract is below.

The 1980 NBC television show, “If Japan Can, Why Can’t We?” introduced the teachings of W. Edwards Deming to U.S. viewers and caused a quantum leap in awareness of the potential for quality improvement in industry.

Those of you familiar with Deming’s funnel rules (which shows that a process in control delivers the best results if left alone) will smile to realize that his rule No. 4—making, doing, or basing your next iteration based on the previous one—also known as a “random walk,” has been in operation for the last 30 years.

Jeff Liker, professor of industrial and operations engineering at the University of Michigan, beautifully describes the random walks that have taken place within the time spans of Six Sigma and Lean. In a private correspondence with leadership expert Jim Clemmer, Liker writes:

“Originally Six Sigma was derived from Toyota Quality Management (TQM) by Motorola to achieve six sigma levels of quality, and then through Allied Signal and GE it morphed to projects by Black Belts based on statistics to become a cost-reduction program – every project needs a clear ROI. In other words, we denigrated the program from a leadership philosophy to a bunch of one-off projects to cut costs. It was a complete bastardization of the original, and it rarely led to lasting, sustainable change because the leadership and culture were missing.”

“A similar thing happened to Lean when it got reduced to a toolkit (e.g. value-stream mapping, KPI boards, cells, kanban).”

“Lean and Six Sigma in no way reflect the original thinking of excellent Japanese companies or their teachers like Deming.”

Clemmer also cites multiple studies from 1996–2007 concluding that about 18 to 24 months after these various quality systems are launched, 50–70 percent of them fail. Liker concurs and feels that the four key failure factors, in this order, are:

1. Leadership lacking deep understanding and commitment
2. Focus on tools and techniques without understanding the underlying cultural transformation required
3. Superficial program instead of deep development of processes that surface problems solved by thinking people
4. Isolated process improvements instead of creating integrated systems for exceptional customer value

Virtually everyone agrees that the No. 1 barrier to improvement is still top management’s inability to be visibly committed to quality. Is this the “elephant in the living room” or as Clemmer calls it, “the moose on the table”?

The Kanban Dance LSSC11

Here is the Kanban dance from LSSC11*

The moves are

• Double Loop Learning
• Columns
• Swimlanes
• Cards

Kanban Dance

►

* Not in any way endorsed by David J Anderson and Associates.

Learning at Conferences

• An ounce of information is worth a pound of data.
• An ounce of knowledge is worth a pound of information.
• An ounce of understanding is worth a pound of knowledge.
• An ounce of wisdom is worth a pound of understanding.
• That makes an ounce of wisdom about 42,000 ounces of data.

Despite this, most of the time spent in school is devoted to the transmission of information and ways of obtaining it. Less time is devoted to the transmission of knowledge and ways of obtaining it (analytical thinking). Virtually no time is spent in transmitting understanding or ways of obtaining it (synthetic thinking). Further more, the distinctions between data, information, and so on up to wisdom are seldom made in the educational process, leaving students unaware of their ignorance. They not only don’t know, they don’t know what they don’t know.

The reason so little understanding is transmitted by teachers is that they have so little to transmit. They are more likely to know what is right than why it is right. Explanations require discussion if they are to produce understanding. The ability to lead fruitful discussions is not an attribute of most teachers.

Russell Ackoff, 1999

This is why I feel I have greater learning from corridor conversations at events such as LSSC11 than actually in the sessions themselves. Some feel the conference format is outdated, but I’m unsure on the alternative.

We Are Beyond Your Mindset

Your firms are built on the Taylor model. Even worse so are your heads. With your bosses doing the thinking while workers wield the screwdrivers, you’re convinced deep down that is the right way to run a business. For the essence of management is getting the ideas out of the heads of the bosses and into the heads of labour.

We are beyond your mindset. Business, we know, is now so complex and difficult, the survival of firms so hazardous in an environment increasingly unpredictable, competitive and fraught with danger, that their continued existence depends on the day-to-day mobilisation of every ounce of intelligence.

Konosuke Matsushita founder of Panasonic, Technics

Lean Software Management BBC Worldwide Case Study

Dr Peter Middleton and I have had our “Lean Software Management BBC Worldwide Case Study” paper accepted by the IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management. It will be published in the February 2012 issue. The paper was edited by Dr Jeffrey K Liker, author of the Toyota Way.

You can download a copy of the paper prior to its publication here.

I believe it will be one of the most significant papers in Software Engineering this decade.

David Anderson

Abstract

This case study examines how the lean ideas behind the Toyota production system can be applied to software project management. It is a detailed investigation of the performance of a nine person software development team employed by BBC Worldwide based in London. The data collected in 2009 involved direct observations of the development team, the kanban boards, the daily stand-up meetings, semistructured interviews with a wide variety of staff, and statistical analysis.

The evidence shows that over the 12-month period, lead time to deliver software improved by 37%, consistency of delivery rose by 47%, and defects reported by customers fell 24%.

The significance of this work is showing that the use of lean methods including visual management, team-based problem solving, smaller batch sizes, and statistical process control can improve software development. It also summarizes key differences between agile and lean approaches to software development. The conclusion is that the performance of the software development team was improved by adopting a lean approach. The faster delivery with a focus on creating the highest value to the customer also reduced both technical and market risks. The drawbacks are that it may not fit well with existing corporate standards.

Value Delivered

The paper doesn’t include the increase in business value delivered over the period of study. This was due to confidentiality agreements. What I can say is that during the period of study, the digital assets produced rose by hundred of thousands of hours of content, a 610% increase in valuable assets output by software products written by the team.

Authors

Peter Middleton received the M.B.A. degree from the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, in 1987, and the Ph.D. degree in software engineering from Imperial College, London, U.K., in 1998.

He is currently a Senior Lecturer in computer science at Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is the coauthor of the book Lean Software Strategies published in 2005, and the Editor of a book of case studies on applied systems thinking: the Delivering Public Services that Work published in 2010. His research interests include combining systems thinking with lean software development to help organizations significantly improve their performance.

David Joyce is a Systems Thinker and Agile practitioner with 20 years software development experience of which 12 years is technical team management and coaching experience. In recent years, David has led both onshore and offshore teams and successfully led an internet video startup from inception to launch. More recently David has coached teams on Lean, Kanban and Systems Thinking at BBC Worldwide in the U.K. He is a Principal Consultant at ThoughtWorks.

Mr. Joyce was awarded the Lean SSC Brickell Key award for outstanding achievement and leadership

I Used to be a Toolhead, but I’m Alright Now

Great video from managers and consultants who have learned that successful change can’t be done through tools, success requires a change in thinking.

14 Principles, 5 Principles, 5 Pillars, Which do you use?

I have read various books, articles, blog posts, slide decks, or attended presentations, or have spoken to Lean practitioners who tell me about Lean’s 14 Principles, or Lean’s 5 Principles, or the 5 Pillars of Lean. This can become very confusing and typifies our lack of understanding of the TPS. Which do you use?

Dr Peter Middleton (coauthor of the book Lean Software Strategies) writes

There is no pure lean approach as demonstrated by the different descriptions of lean in the literature, which identifies a range of overlapping lean principles.

For example, Liker [1] has 14 principles, Womack and Jones [2] have five principles,  Shingo [3] also has five but different principles, and Anderson has five pillars [4]

Ohno’s [5] focus was to reduce the time from customer order to product delivery by eliminating waste. Arguably he preached many principles, even though they are not laid out as such.

The complexity of analysing lean is due to the specifics of each lean implementation being context dependent.

When Toyota was setting up a new plant in America, Liker and Hoseus noted that Toyota ‘‘. . .were not interested in teaching us to copy. They were trying to teach us to think and act in the Toyota Way’’ [6, p. xxii].

Therefore, for Toyota, it was more a philosophy of management combined with their experience of what was successful that was important.

Ohno was never keen on codifying method for the above reasons. John Seddon says

Ohno said “Don’t call it anything. If you call it something, managers will expect it to come in a box. He was right.”

Deming reminds us about the hazards of copying in his book Out of the Crisis.

Improvement of quality is a method, transferable to different problems and circumstances. It does not consist of cookbook procedures on file ready for specific application.

It is a hazard to copy. It is necessary to understand the theory of what one wishes to do or make. We are great copiers. The fact is that the Japanese learn the theory of what they wish to make, then improve on it.

This idea of copying reminds me of a great story from Deming, again in his book Out of the Crisis.

The management of a company that makes furniture, doing well, took it into their heads to expand their line into pianos. Why not make pianos? They bought a Steinway piano, took it apart, made or bought parts, and put a piano together exactly like the Steinway, only to discover that they could only get thuds out of their product. So they put the Steinway piano back together with the intention to get their money back on it, only to discover that it too would now only make thuds.

[1] J. K. Liker, The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World’s Greatest Manufacturer. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004.

[2] J. P. Womack and D. T. Jones, Lean Thinking. London: Touchstone Books, 1997.

[3] S. Shingo, A Study of the Toyota Production System. Portland, Oregon: Productivity Press, 1981.

[4] David J Anderson, Is Kanban Just a Tool? http://agilemanagement.net/index.php/Blog/is_kanban_just_a_tool/

[5] T. Ohno, Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production. Portland, Oregon: Productivity Press, 1988.

[6] J. K. Liker and M. Hoseus, Toyota Culture: the Heart and Soul of the Toyota Way. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008.