Should your Processes be cast in Stone

Beyond Agile: Tales of Continuous Improvement is the latest publication of Modus Cooperandi. Co-author Maritza van den Heuvel is my guest on the podcast. Beyond Agile examines 10 companies, mostly in the tech world, but also in innovative automotive and business consulting, that have actively evolved their processes. Using tools from Lean, Agile and other schools of management thought, these companies have actively engaged in continuous improvement. Beyond Agile other authors are Jim Benson and Joanne Ho.

Maritza is also the author of the Becoming an Agile Family blog where she writes about the ways her family uses Personal Kanban to navigate work and life. You can also find Maritza on Twitter (@maritzavdh). Maritiza also appeared in another Business901 Podcast,  Becoming an Agile Family thru Kanban. A written excerpt of the blog appeared last week, Life does not stand still Work does not stand still.

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About Maritza van den Heuvel: Maritza spent six years doing research in computational linguistics after completing a Postgraduate degree in Linguistics. She eventually left academia for the software industry where she cut her teeth on Agile and Scrum as a Scrum Master and Product Owner, helping teams to evolve from waterfall to Scrum. Along the way, her unquenchable thirst for knowledge led her to Kanban and Lean systems thinking. Since then, she has become a passionate proponent of the power of constraints and visual controls to transform the world of work in the 21st century. She is currently with Pearson Southern Africa, where she’s applying her background to leading innovation in technology-enabled education.

Using a One Page Project Manager

I have been a big fan of the The One-Page Project Manager for many years. In fact, the author Clark Campbell reminded me in a phone call that I was the first one to write a review on the first book. Since then, they have added three more books to the collection with the most recent, The New One-Page Project Manager: Communicate and Manage Any Project With A Single Sheet of Paper replacing the first book. In this one, they even tackle Agile Project management that I found extremely useful.

I was finally able to run down Mick Campbell co-founder, co-author and Managing Partner of OPPM International to discuss their latest efforts. Mick brought a rich portfolio of both technical and qualitative experience in traditional and agile project management.

Joe: I think it's (One Page Project Management) better than a reporting thing. I have always used it as a communication tool. I think, it raises questions, allows things to move around, assigns a lot of responsibilities and you can even do some "what ifs" with it if you would like. How has it developed in your mind? It's more than a reporting tool isn't it?

Mick: It really is. In our new book, as we thought on how to get the idea of communication to the market in general, we used the analogy of a watch face. For anyone who flies knows that still dials are well used, despite all the electronics that we can still put into our planes. It is because they communicate so crisply.

So, we used that analogy to say that communication if I take one step back, communication is the great statistical difference maker in, certainly, in project success and we would probably take, even, a step back and say in business and life and other elements. Our ability to communicate well provides for us an opportunity for success.

Recognizing that you have hit the nail on the head identifying that the One-Page Project Manager, albeit, the genesis of a report, facilitates for communication, pushing really, a lot of, what we might call from a Lean perspective, non-value added work out of our communication and making it intuitive.

You look at your watch, you don't do calculations, you just have a general sense if you've got a meeting at 11:30 and you're looking at your watch, and it's 11:00 you know in your gut how long a half an hour is how many different things you might be able to accomplish before that.

We wanted to have the OPPM, the One-Page Project Manager, be just that. A communication tool that, when provided to any individual, they might look at it and have a sense intuitively as to what's going on, what's the status, how are we doing, what areas might we need some more help on, or, at a high level, you were spot on.

t's a tool that facilitates communication. We've had a woman send us her daughter's wedding on an OPPM and maybe a little bit later I can tell the listeners how the effort to put Governor Romney in the White House from a transition team was done on OPPMs as well.

The One Page Project Manager is not meant to replace a full blown project management system. It helps you identify and communicate the essential details of a project. I recommended the book in my book, Marketing with A3 as an effective reporting tool. I have also written before about the The One-Page Project Manager for Execution: Drive Strategy and Solve Problems with a Single Sheet of Paper. I think the OPPM is a great companion to Lean and especially A3s. I utilize the OPPM with A3s slightly different than the book describes. I use the entire back side of the A3 for the OPPM. I take advantage of a little artistic interpretation of what constitutes one page.

Related Blog Post:
Learn the One Page Project Manager at Shingo Prize Conference

P.S. I have certainly stretched the use of OPPM and managed some rather in-depth and lengthy projects with it. In fact one such project I actually reconfigured the Excel sheet to hold over 100 tasks.

The Dead Language of Systems Thinking

This year as a result of Dr. Deming, I had decided to dig into Systems Thinking more. I re-read The Fifth Discipline, which had been my introduction into Lean and Six Sigma.   Being a business owner, I did not have a problem looking at the whole or as it later became known as viewing the entire value stream. However, Systems Thinking through its theory is quite useful, in practically it served little purpose. I gravitated towards Lean and Theory of Constraints.

After starting this year with renewed energy for System Thinking, re-reading many old books and even dusting off some casual loop material, I started reaching out for the latest and greatest. My initial path took me through Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges by Otto Scharmer and Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations, and Society by Peter Senge, amazingly similar to CAP Do as explained by Joiner and Akao. This thought is being captured  in what I call the Lean Marketing  Conversation. Still working on that, as it coincides with the principles of Service Dominant Logic and the way I believe how value is created. Or I might say, co-created.

The next step of my journey took me towards some mapping where it can be done in clusters and around conversations. Which again solidifies the idea of the sales and marketing conversation and how it is dispersed between organizations. I am just about as excited as you can be, about research, and ready to take the deeper dive into Systems Thinking. What I need is human interaction to solidify my theory and see how practitioners are using this material.

I  link up with a few System Thinkers on LinkedIn and join several Systems Thinking Groups on LinkedIn and started monitoring a few of the conversations.  Each conversation on LinkedIn though is relatively uninspiring. Systems Thinkers seem more worried about solving  world hunger and telling everyone how it should be done from the 20K level. It was practically all theory. Finally, a question was asked how Systems Thinking and Lean are related. I wait for a few answers and chimed in when someone says Lean is just a set of tools. I say that is not so true even though Lean has a great toolbox, it is a little more than that.

I am taken to the cleaners and explained by more than one that Lean is a set of tools. I ask for a little evidence, and I am referred to 1986 Womack and Jones. I corrected someone on the origin of the Lean name and a few other minor points. I mention that, yes it favored the tools in 90s, but that was the age of process methodologies. I was asked for more evidence, and I mention that if you look at how Lean has matured through the years, or better yet observing just the progression from the original Toyota Way book (basically a tool book) to the Toyota Way material of today, you can see the progression of Lean. I also ask how Systems Thinking has progressed and could someone name an organization that would call themselves a Systems Thinking Company. The reply was that everything was a system and that they deal in the social...blah blah world. I am given a link to a page to explain everything. The central theme of the page to include an outline was a value map, a tool. I asked why a tool was chosen to explain Systems Thinking.

The funny part was the moderator commented on how myopic this conversation was etc. I apologized and just said that I had come to learn about Systems Thinking and hoped I could still do so. After the moderator participates in the thread, there was a flood of others that joined in and the conversation was civil for a while till the original Lean bashing returned. I even read that Dr. Deming held an isolated view of Systems Thinking.

I finally left the group and un-Linked a few contacts from my profile. The group seems highly knowledgeable, but they came across to me as an elitist group protecting their elitism. I bash Lean for being to supply-side orientated all the time. I bash Lean for being tool-happy. I can understand others for doing it and thinking that way. What I could not accept in the conversation was the elitism that occurred and the failure to be willing to discuss the original question, the similarities. Instead, it continued as another onslaught of what I would call Lean bashing. I left the conversation and the group as I really did not see what I could contribute.

In summary, I believe that all systems are very similar. The difference from DMAIC to PDCA to Casual Loops are not all that different. The difference is the path we take to get there and the people we align ourselves with to accomplish it. It is a shame we spend so much time bashing the other methods. Lean happens to be a popular business model at this time. For Systems Thinkers to say that it is a tool box, it appears to me that they are internalized in their own thinking. They even cited ASQ as adding Systems Thinking to the Lean body of knowledge. What they failed to realize, it was being added to the Lean body of knowledge, not the other way around.

I left thinking that Systems Thinking may be a dead language. It is seldom spoken in business and only a few study it.  It may be the basis and important part of how we must view things, but it has been swallowed up in the dialect of other methodologies. It reminds of the Latin language. Latin is an important part of most Mediterranean languages, but it is not spoken. Its usefulness has passed.