How to unite Development and Operations?

DevOps is becoming a familiar word in the world of IT and as a result shifting the focus away from separate departments working independently to an organization-wide collaboration. It’s about addressing all the work as a whole, versus looking only at the bits and pieces, or only looking at capital versus expense.

One of the leaders of the DevOps movemen is Dominica DeGrandis (@dominicad), who teaches and coaches teams using Kanban for IT Operations and Development Operations.  She is an independent consultant as well as an associate of David J. Anderson.  Her background includes ten years of doing Configuration Management, build and deployment automation, and server & environment maintenance, followed by leading teams performing those functions.

I think whether you are a DevOps or just a Kanban fan,  you can take some insight from this podcast. You don’t just have to be in IT to receive value from this conversation. Enjoy the podcast.

Download Podcast: Click and choose options: Download this episode (right click and save)   or go to the Business901 iTunes Store.

Mobile Version

Additional conversations with Dominica:

• Audio file on Dominica explaining her Dev/Ops Class
• Another short Audio with Dominica DeGrandis discussing Personal Kanban

More into Social Media? Using Lean Thinking in Social Media

Enabling the Lean Service Design Trilogy

This is the introduction page to the Trilogy Module of the Lean Service Design Trilogy Course. There is a special offer located on the page. 

First, I would like to emphasis the importance of knowing, understanding how a customer/prospect views and uses your Service Products. In the Service/Train module, I introduced the pyramid of the Progressions of Economic Value and Valuable Intelligence from the book, The Experience Economy. Each level of economic value corresponds to a level of valuable intelligence (commodities to noise, goods to data, etc.).

From the book:

While the economic offering becomes more and more intangible with each step up the next echelon, the value of the offering becomes more and more tangible. Economists often talk about the line of intangibility between goods and services to which we add the line of memorability before experiences and the line of sustainability before transformations. Goods and services remain outside of the individual, while experiences actually reach inside of the individual to the value of the offering.

They go on to say:

Nothing is more important, more abiding, or more wealth-creating than the wisdom required transforming customers. And nothing will command as high a price.

In the book Idealized Design, the authors used a similar hierarchy for the key terms involved in describing organizational learning. They are as follows:

• Data consist of symbols that represent the properties of objects and events. They have little value until they have been processed into information Data are to information as iron ore is to iron. Little can be done with iron ore until it is processed into iron.
• Information consists of data that has been processed to be useful. It is contained in descriptions, answers to question beginning with such words as what, who, when, when, and how many.
• Knowledge is contained in instructions, answers to how-to questions.
• Understanding is contained in explanations, answers to the why questions.
• Wisdom is concerned with the value of outcomes, effectiveness, whereas the other four types of mental content are concerned with efficiency. Efficiency is concerned with doing things right; effectiveness is concerned with doing the right thing.

These key terms can help you in developing user stories and understanding how a customer may view your service offering. Do not underestimate the value of understanding current state. It serves as a guideline to communicate the opportunities so they may be prioritized and then acted upon. It helps build a shared and consistent understanding of the customer’s experience of your process and of your business as a whole. Understanding where your service product fits into the hierarchy above is one of the first steps in creating and effective Service Product.

Secondly, you should pay particular attention to identify critical control points (moments of truth) or interfaces with the customer. These critical points deserve special consideration as they typically will be the deciding factor for your customers. You may ask what they will look like. I typically find two obvious areas are the cause of most concern. First is the area of flow. If your service process does not flow well in its delivery to the customer, it seldom flows well for the customer. Your service must be in sync with the customer’s ability to react to the moment. A crystal ball would be great but if your typical customer takes three months to make a decision about your service, trying to accelerate or stretch that process out will seldom prove successful.

Thirdly, a clear-cut understanding of how that service meets your customer’s needs is imperative. A strong value proposition is the first step in building a successful service product. Many organizations struggle with this concept and do not utilize the tools available to understand their service product from the customers’ viewpoint. They are in love with what they do. Understanding how your customer perceives your position in the marketplace relative to your competition may be the single most important issue you face.

Many organizations try to build their first service product journeys into a simple stream. I encourage breaking it down and allow for exceptions but don’t spend the energy scrutinizing each and every one. Seldom will your organization’s service products be so clear-cut that have one customer journey. Many of the answers to these exceptions will be found as you take the deeper dive into the primary journey. One of the powers of mapping the customer journey is that it enables the team to see the entire picture. This coincides with the fundamental Lean thinking of optimizing the entire process versus the individual stages.

P.S. Many times exceptions are a result of limited resources. If this is a new service product, I would start by suggesting that you have unlimited resources then ask what the structure would look like.

Fourthly, respect your people. Trust your team knows how to improve their process more than anyone else. They can tell you if the paperwork, request for proposals, and specifications are flowing. They know the degree of misunderstandings that are occurring internally and with customers. And always remember, the customer experience will mimic the employee experience.

The fundamental goal should be one of discovery, learning and adaptability with a shared responsibility for a successful outcome. That implies that it is all about engaging both organizations into effective problem-solving and learning. In applying this, think of the customer journey in terms of a series of iterative loops of problem solving and knowledge creation. Taking this approach, each iterative cycle should be built around (adapted from the “Manifesto for Agile Software Development”):

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Content-rich material over-elaborate promotion
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Response to changing customer needs over following a plan

In ‘The no-nonsense guide to standardized work’, Robert Thompson explains;

Employees, not ‘outsiders’, study the jobs they know intimately in order to uncover best practices and create methodologies for continuous process improvement. Thus they become responsible for solving problems and own the standards that result.

In a Dennis Stevens post, Does Process Discipline Really Reduce Creativity?, he says:

Something I find interesting is the push back. I hear from Agile developers that process discipline will inhibit their creativity. They say, “Software development is a creative activity. If you put process rigor around it you will inhibit our creativity.” I have heard others complain about applying Lean concepts to software development. “This isn’t manufacturing,” they say, “There is no place for standard work in what we do.

These are the same arguments that I hear time and time again in developing standards for sales and marketing and service processes. The importance of standard work is that it is the starting point to create efficient and effective ways to communicate with your potential customers. Standard work begins with understanding the customer. We determine customer requirements and make sure we can deliver on those requirements. Delivering on these requirements consistently means that we need to be in control of our processes.  And simply stated, we are only in control of our processes when we have documented procedures.

Sales and Service Planning with PDCA

Many of us use different planning instruments and schedulers. Kanban being one of the most familiar methods to readers of this blog. In the last several months, I have written about the Last Planner®  (Last Planner is a registered trademark of Lean Construction Institute (LCI)) and have had several podcast on the subject most notably with Lean Construction experts  and specifically with Alan Mossman discussing his latest updates in the Last Planner® – 5 + 1 crucial & collaborative conversations for predictable design & construction delivery.

In the podcast, We don’t use a Transactional Contract for Marriage, Why for Projects?, with Alan Mossma of The Change Business we discussed The Promise Conversation Cycle. An excerpt from that conversation is in the blog post, The Discipline of Managing Promises. This conversation is the key component of The Last Planner. If we are going to create collaboration, a social process, we must define and adhere to a structure that builds trust and removes uncertainty in an uncertain world.

Our world is increasingly more collaborative driving changes in the way decisions are made. Our organizations need to change to a collaborative structure but the question is, where do we begin? I am amazed how Lean happens to be there when I am ready to use it. It reminds me of the old Buddhist proverb, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” The workplace mission is defined within Toyota from the question “For whom and what type of value added products and services should be provided?” In this way, measures are created from the value added problems from the conversation.

When people consider Lean in Service Design or in Sales and Marketing, they think of Standardization. In the people word of Design and Sales, it is strongly resisted. Even in software development, I see strong resistance to the term standards. They instead call them policies. In another post, I disagreed with the terminology used in  David Mann’s book,  Creating a Lean Culture: Tools to Sustain Lean Conversions, Second Edition (which I consider the bible for Leader Standard Work). In the book, he allocates the time spent in standard work from a high as an operator of 95% to executive having as little as 10%. When that message is translated to services or sales many times people/organizations take that number literally and try to apply it to sales and service. I think customer facing jobs should have a high degree of flexibility and the reason for is stated very well in  Dave Gray of The Dachis Group recent book, The Connected Company. He says,

Customers have a tendency to resist standardization. The more you try to standardize their service requests, the more you will anger them. Not a good recipe for customer satisfaction or long-term business growth.

Dave’s also discusses The Law of Requisite Variety stating that any control system must be capable of variety that’s greater than or equal to the variety of the system to be controlled. We will agree that the greatest variability and greatest value occur in our customer facing jobs of sales and service. If we also use the “Job to be Done “ metaphor of Clayton Christian explained in blog post, Can we drop Product and add Value to Development or Innovation?, we recognize the place of work in sales and service needs to handle the greatest variability.  It seems to be a non-standard process.

Lean is a methodology, some call it culture, that is built on the scientific problem-solving method which is in Lean terms called PDCA.  We form a (P) hypothesis, (D) test it, (C) measure it and (A) adjust to it. PDCA is a method that is built to handle the variability. It is a perfect match but why is it so often resisted. First, if we choose to recognize our conversation with the customer as a mini-PDCA cycle, Lean starts making sense. Earlier, we discussed the Promise Conversation Cycle; I see it as a well detailed conversation based on PDCA. However, we split the PDCA cycle in half with one side being the Performer (Seller) and the other side the Customer.

The fundamental goals of this cycle should be one of discovery, learning and adaptability with a shared responsibility for a successful outcome. That implies that it is all about engaging both organizations into effective problem solving and learning. In applying this, think of the cycle in terms of a series of iterative loops of problem solving and knowledge creation.  For a more detailed explanation of this refer to blog post, SALES PDCA Framework for Lean Sales and Marketing.

How this fits in with Lean Standard Work and The Connected Company will be discussed in a series of blog posts this week.

You may be interested in the Lean Service Design Trilogy Workshop.

Should Innovation be driven by Capabilities?

Innovating in services is the escape route from the commodity trap and a solution for growth, giving firms a significant competitive advantage. As they innovate into the future, companies must think beyond their products and move outside their own four walls to innovate. –says Henry Chesbrough’s, author Open Services Innovation: Rethinking Your Business to Grow and Compete in a New Era.

I am a firm believer that Standard Work is the 1st step of innovation followed closely by continuous improvement. Detailed in the blog post, The Lean Innovation Engine–Turn the Key. In summary:

• SDCA: Standard Work that creates a CAN-DO attitude and free up time to spark problem solving.
• Applying PDCA, allows you to “see” opportunities for improvement.
• A Continuous Improvement Culture (Kaizen) catalyzes the creation of stimulating habitats, leveraging the resources in your environment.
• These habitats, along with your attitude, influence the culture in your community (The Customer Experience will mimic the Employee Experience).
• The culture allows for EDCA and the BIG “I” of innovation.

So it is our culture that allows for effective innovation. Why do we believe that out of the box thinking drives the innovation engine. Seldom are we short of great ideas. We are short of the capabilities to deliver on the great ideas. But we proceed and make choices on what we need to “innovate” without this understanding.

In the The Lean Startup, we discuss the idea of the Pivot (a way to adapt and adjust before it’s too late). Many pivots may take place not because of improper product/market fit, but because we lack the capabilities of moving forward  with the idea. Even in mature companies, if our capabilities are not matched to the innovation, we may disband the idea (I think that is one of the values that can be derived through Osterwalder and Pigneur’s Business Model Canvas described in the book, Business Model Generation).

In most of my improvement engagements, I start with a current state map of someone’s existing process. We utilize the Business Model Canvas and future state mapping to “design” the new innovation. We will map out the process first, assigning the resources as needed. This normally exposes our weaknesses and highlights the additional training and outside resources that may be needed. We continue down this path, but why?

Should we consider, internalizing more of the “design” process? Would that help us to better understand the solution that we can design for the customer? Would it allow us to better utilize our existing resources? Would it allow us a better chance of delivery? Would it create a better ROI?

We hear a lot about change and change management but is evolutionary change better for us than disruptive change? Can we have disruptive innovation without disruptive internal change? Will we have any innovation implemented without a thorough understanding of our existing capabilities? I wonder.

Lean Sales Infographic

Lean Marketing House (More Info): A starting point for creating true iterative marketing cycles based on not only Lean principles but more importantly Customer Value. Recommended 1st reading of series.

Marketing with PDCA (More Info): Targeting what your Customer Values at each stage of the cycle will increase your ability to deliver quicker, more accurately and with better value than your competitor. It is a moving target and the principles of Lean and PDCA facilitates the journey to Customer Value.

Marketing with A3(More Info): Enables sales and marketing to use the Lean tool of A3 as a structured approach for their problem solving, strategies and tactics.

Lean Engagement Team(More Info): The ability to share and create knowledge with your customer is the strongest marketing tool possible.

All 4 titles above available for instant download

Using Lean Thinking in Social Media

Ric Dragon’s organization is DragonSearch, one of the best boutique SMM (social media marketing) and SEO agencies in New York. They help companies use existing internal resources to monetize their investment in social. As a result of this work, Ric recently authored Social Marketology: Improve Your Social Media Processes and Get Customers to Stay Forever.

From Amazon:

Drawing from such process methodologies as Lean and the Capability Maturity Model, Dragon helps you develop a social media process that is quantifiable, repeatable—and improvable. His process is based on these basic steps:

• Focus on desirable outcomes: Vision, Goals, Objectives, and Metrics
• Pinpoint the very smallest segments of your customers
• Determine the communities to which these microsegments belong
• Identify the influencers of those communities
• Create an action plan for your project
• Measure and constantly improve your efforts

The beauty of Dragon’s method is its core flexibility. New social media platforms are guaranteed to pop up in the near future. Any strategy based on the methods in this book can be adapted to take full advantage of them.

The age of blind trial and error for social media marketers is over. Social Marketology provides the means to implement an effective campaign that is testable, controllable, and fully integrated within broader campaigns and goals.

Enjoy the podcast:

 

Download Podcast: Click and choose options: Download this episode (right click and save)   or go to the Business901 iTunes Store.

 

Mobile Version

 

Ric also has another eBook published: The DragonSearch Online Marketing Manual.

Culture Change, What we want is ROI

A lot of mutual trust and respect, and that faith has to develop over a period of time. We have to prove that the system is going to yield the kind of culture change results that we're looking for. You don't have too many CEOs that are out there looking for culture change. – David Adams

Below is an excerpt from next week’s Business901 Podcast with David Adams (@commanderadams), the executive director of the Kennametal Center for Operational Excellence. As of this writing there is still time to attend their North American Operational Excellence Summit. It is being held in Latrobe, PA at Saint Vincent College on October 16th this year. This year’s theme is “A Blueprint for Kaizen Culture“ and intends to draw connections between current continuous improvement efforts and the need for a human and operational balance.

David Adams: There has to be some sort of a management system that undergirds the system of tools. It's the management system that's the harder thing to get. You can throw a book about the Toyota management system at a group of people and say, "Go do this." But implementing a management system is like switching from Windows to Mac OS. It's a painful experience. You have to retrain your mind to think about the decisions that you're making, perhaps even down at the values level, if you will.

What does customer‑first focus mean? How does that translate into a daily decision‑making experience whenever problems are occurring in, say, quality or productivity or cost? Which one do I work on first? There're thousands of problems occurring every day. Which one do I work on first? If I'm customer‑first focused? We may address the quality over the cost problem, depending on the severity of it.

Joe:  When you take this on as an organization, there has to be such a leap of faith. It's not quite the blind leading the blind, but you have that feeling, don't you?

David: Absolutely. In your introduction, you mentioned mutual trust and respect. The first thing that has to happen is mutual trust and respect has to develop between the coach, and substitute whatever word you want there. We use the word "coach" the same way people use the word "mentor" or "sensei."

We've been down the road. We've seen the system and the framework implemented in enterprises as far‑ranging as car sales, to automotive or motor manufacturing, to health care settings and hospitals. A large portion of our business right now is in hospitals. Part of that is just developing mutual trust and respect, and it has to be at the highest level of the organization.

A perfect, perfect match for us is whenever a CEO, myself or my colleague coaches, would see eye‑to‑eye. You've heard the phrase or the cliché, "Being like‑minded," and that's essentially what it is. I can work with CEOs that maybe are expressing their management system differently, but if we're like‑minded, then we can begin to have that mutual trust and respect.

It involves the kinds of things that you wouldn't expect, the CEO who calls ‑‑ maybe even the most tactical question that he or she might have ‑‑ they're calling back to say, "How does this work in the system? How does this work in the framework that you're trying to teach us?"

A lot of mutual trust and respect, and that faith has to develop over a period of time. We have to prove that the system is going to yield the kind of culture change results that we're looking for. You don't have too many CEOs that are out there looking for culture change.

They may be mouthing those words and saying, "We want culture change," but truly what they want is a return on their investment and a change on the bottom line. We can get you there, but we can only get you there after you change the culture that undergirds your improvement system.

Service Design Presentation

 

Marc Stickdorn is one of my favorite resources on Service Design. Even without that endorsement, he has earned his recognition as the co-author of This is Service Design Thinking. Marc appeared on the Business901 podcast, Service Design Thinking Podcast with Marc Stickdorn. Below is an excellent presentation on Service Design with a little Service Dominant Logic mixed In.

 

 

Marc graduated in Strategic Management and Marketing and worked in various tourism projects throughout Europe. Since 2008 Marc is full-time staff at the MCI – Management Center Innsbruck in Austria, where he lectures service design and service innovation. His main areas of interest are service design and strategic marketing management particularly in a tourism context. Marc is co-founder and consultant of “Destinable – service design for tourism” and guest lecturer at different business and design schools.

You may be interested in the Lean Service Design Trilogy Workshop.

Lean, IT, Kanban, Dev/Ops, DeGrandis

I interviewed @dominicad (Dominica DeGrandis), who teaches and coaches teams using Kanban for IT Operations and Development Operations.  She is an independent consultant as well as an associate of David J. Anderson.  Her background includes ten years of doing Configuration Management, build and deployment automation, and server & environment maintenance, followed by leading teams performing those functions.

Dominica is my podcast guest next week. In lieu of a written excerpt introducing the podcast,  I removed the portion of podcast that specifically discussed Dominica’s Dev/Ops Class.  From Dominica’s website:

The DevOps movement is shifting the focus away from separate departments working independently to an organization-wide collaboration — a “systems thinking” approach. It’s about addressing all the work as a whole, versus looking only at the bits and pieces, or only looking at capital versus expense. It’s about work flowing across functions (versus lurking in silos) and delivering the right thing quickly.

I think whether you are a Dev/Ops or just a Kanban fan,  you can take some insight from her workshop outline.

Audio file on Dominica explaining her Dev/Ops Class 

Well heck, a short excerpt from the podcast:

Joe:  One of the statements I heard in your talk in Boston is that you can set policies in place, instead of solutions. Could you explain what you mean by that?

Dominica I love policies. We talk about making policies explicit. This is all about, stop hiding the rules. That's really what we mean when we say, "Make process policies explicit." "Stop hiding the rule on page 200 that's in some document that's buried out on a share that nobody can find." If there's a policy, for example, say developers are supposed to check their code into this branch, then put it up, make it visible to them. Especially new people being hired, they don't know where to go find policies. Put policies up next to your Kanban board, or put them at the bottom of your Kanban board. Sometimes you'll see a policy at the bottom of each column, and that's the policy for the criteria before the item can be pulled into the next column. Policies can be changed when they need to be changed.

Policies are really just a short‑term, tactical fix to make an improvement while you're waiting on some longer term strategic fix. Policies can come and go, and be modified. The idea is that if a policy is staring at you, it's much easier than to have a discussion about why it's a bad policy or a good policy, or how it needs to be changed.

Another short Audio with Dominica DeGrandis discussing Personal Kanban

P.S. There is plenty of material left for the Podcast next week!

We don't use a Transactional Contract for Marriage, Why for Projects?

Lean Design and Lean Construction Consultant, Trainer and Author, Alan Mossman of The Change Business says;

For the same reason that we don't use a bilateral transactional contract for marriage, we use a relational contract. It's now recognized that there's much more sense in using a relational contract for these long‑term arrangements where we need to work together to get things done.

Our conversation centers around The Last Planner® a project management system created by Glenn Ballard and Greg Howell co-founders of the Lean Construction Institute. In long term building projects, they have found that managing relationships is the important part of project management. Last week, I had a post that discussed this, Crucial & Collaborative Conversations for Predictable Design & Delivery and talked about it even more in this post, Is Relationship Mapping the new Critical Path?.

Download Podcast: Click and choose options: Download this episode (right click and save) or go to the Business901 iTunes Store.

Alan Mossman trained as an architect and worked for many years in management and organization development. He only returned to construction in 2000 building on his knowledge and understanding of collaboration, systems thinking, quality and lean. An accredited UK based Last Planner trainer, he has coached teams implementing Lean and Last Planner for a wide range of clients in Europe, Africa and Australasia. From 2004 to 2010 Alan was a founding Director of The Lean Construction Institute UK. He helped set up the Lean Construction Journal www.leanconstructionjournal.org and was co-editor from 2003 to 2012.

You may be interested in the Lean Service Design Trilogy Workshop.

Are you structured to deliver waste free services?

The other day, I wrote about all the Maps in Service Design. Right or wrong, there has to be a reason we like all these maps. I think the idea of doing one is attractive to most but after starting the process many people get hesitant, the questions get hard. Whether we are mapping in Lean Service Design or in Lean Marketing, I find that the mapping process brings up a few questions like…

Who do we serve?

Is the service personalized?

Is customer experience everyone’s job?

Is service thought of as a competitive advantage?

Are we looking at measures holistically?

Is the service (touchpoint) good enough to create a desire to visit us again?

It becomes clear that many of us are simply not organized, structured in a way, to be able to deliver waste‑free services or sales support to customers. Many of us have years of work-arounds established to handle even the simplest of processes. And simply stated, we are only in control of our processes when we have documented procedures (paraphrased from Masaaki Imai). With proper documentation, mapping, it really starts making us think about the restructuring of our resources to better serve the customer. Or, at least it should.

You may be interested in the Lean Service Design Trilogy Workshop

Each one of these maps should be based on the end to end customer experience.  Creating that end to end mapping process is a struggle for most organizations.  And to get the most out of the process, we should understand and do the mapping exercise from the perspective of the customer. However, it starts getting more complicated and more questions surface:

Who are the influencers?

Are we creating memorable experiences, stories?

Is everyone willing to take ownership of the experience?

Is service reinforcing our company’s value proposition?

Are we measuring what counts to our customers?

It's a great focusing mechanism. What has to happen is the customer and value (as considered by the customer) must be kept at the forefront of the work. The biggest struggle most organizations have is just working (improving) on that little piece that they have direct control of instead of figuring out how to create that value for the customer.

What I like to see done is have customers become involved in this activity. Its remarkable how we can just get the blinders on and think that certain things that we believe are valuable to customers are found to be the direct opposite. So, if we don't get customers involved in some of these design processes, we don't end up with as good a result as a competitor that does.

You may be interested in the Lean Service Design Trilogy Workshop

What type of thinking solves dilemmas?

• What if there are conflicting requirements that ensure that you will be wrong?
• What if you have to pay an extortionist or suffer the loss of someone?
• What if you have to make a choice between resources, fairness, payment?
• What if your choice becomes take it or leave it? 
• What if your choice only have bad results?
• What is your choice is giving money to your child or withholding it to make them become responsible?
• What is more important a short term gain or a long term benefit?

You are just between a rock and a hard place, technically called a dilemma. It is a problem offering two possibilities, neither of which is acceptable. The simple fact; we face more dilemmas than we care to admit. And most of the time they go unsolved.

One of the best tools that I have run across in handling dilemmas is Eliyahu M. Goldratt, Evaporating Cloud, which is also referred to as The Conflict Resolution Diagram. It was developed to find a solution between two opposing points of view trying to reach the same point of view. You can get dig a little deeper by going into  the other Thinking Processes of the Theory of Constraints. (Check out the Business901 podcast with Bill Dettmer).

Another method for handling dilemmas is The Cynefin Framework. It allows executives to see things from new viewpoints, assimilate complex concepts, and address real-world problems and opportunities. Using the Cynefin framework can help executives sense which context they are in so that they can not only make better decisions but also avoid the problems that arise when their preferred management style causes them to make mistakes. You may also want to view, Using Cynefin for a Lean Transformation.

Does Lean thinking prevail; can I go through the seven step problem solving process of an A3 and find root cause? Can I effectively create counter measures for a dilemma? Is everything black and white? I struggled with a few of these thoughts and always justified my thinking by saying that I was achieving the best possible solution and applying a countermeasure to it. If it did not work, we would go through another  learning cycle, PDCA.

Design Thinking practices seem to embrace dilemmas. They might even try to create them. I use the term EDCA learned from Graham Hill  to designate the Explore aspect of Lean.  I view it as more of Design Type thinking concept that allows for more creative or productive type thinking (When Lean Thinking is not enough!). When you are dealing with a high degree of uncertainty, I believe there still needs to be a process in place. If not, you may end up fighting the process versus working on the problem.

One of my favorite authors is Alex Lowy. He has authored The Power of the 2 x 2 Matrix and No Problem (which is the basis for my outline below). Alex outlines a method for managing dilemmas.

1. Map Symptoms: What are the effects of the dilemma? Dilemmas tend to be messy and difficult to define. It often helps to begin at the end by looking at the consequences or symptoms of the dilemma. Identify symptomatic patterns to define the underlying dilemma.
2. Identify the Core Dilemma: What is the core dilemma? This is very challenging and he recommends two steps: Generation of trial dilemmas applying symptoms, metaphors and brainstorming to identify aspects of the dilemma and synthesis by making sense of material by naming, testing and constructing scenarios.
3. Analyze, Model and Redefine using the Archetypal Dilemmas: What else is going on here? He cautions that when we get to the core dilemma that it is harder to think creatively and see new options. He defines eight recurring archetypal patterns of dilemmas and by applying the archetypes to the core dilemma; you gain new insights that advance understanding and progress.
4. Resolve Gaps: What need to change so that we can successfully handle the core dilemma? He discusses the change and development gaps that need to be managed; social and technical.
5. Plan and Implement: How do I ensure successful follow-through? Implementation is easier if you have a plan that everyone supports. He forewarns that most change in dilemmas do not happened immediately.

I found Alex’s approach is very understandable and comfortable to use. He turns the process into solving through his specialty of a 2 x 2 matrix but that is ok, I like matrixes.  Next time you are stuck between a rock and hard place, No Problem may be you answer. 

Lean in Sales and Marketing or

Sales and Marketing in Lean. I have always had a tendency to write about Lean in Sales and Marketing.  And, I have written a lot:

1. Lean Marketing House (More Info): A starting point for creating true iterative marketing cycles based on not only Lean principles but more importantly Customer Value. Recommended 1st reading of series.
2. Marketing with PDCA (More Info): Targeting what your Customer Values at each stage of the cycle will increase your ability to deliver quicker, more accurately and with better value than your competitor. It is a moving target and the principles of Lean and PDCA facilitates the journey to Customer Value.
   
3. Marketing with A3(More Info): Enables sales and marketing to use the Lean tool of A3 as a structured approach for their problem solving, strategies and tactics.
   
4. Lean Engagement Team(More Info): The ability to share and create knowledge with your customer is the strongest marketing tool possible.

However, I believe that was only one approach and the other approach I have failed to address directly and that is Sales and Marketing in Lean. I was recently approached by several sales and marketing people for that very reason and looked for a course that I could recommend for them. I never found what I was quite looking for. I found the traditional Lean Terms and a few Lean Services, but never found one that explained Lean from the outside-in. The way a Sales and Marketing person would view it. I put together a 90 day course outline:

1st month:

1. Principles of Lean
2. SDCA - Standard Work
3. PDCA - Continuous Improvement, 
4. EDCA - Lean Design (Explore)

2nd Month:

1. Leader Standard Work -  Standard Work
2. Kaizen & Kaizen Events - Continuous Improvement
3. Lean 3P - Lean Design, Product Development
4. Mapping - Process, Value Stream, etc.

3rd Month

1. Learning A3s
2. Hoshin Kanri
3. Applying Sales and Marketing in Lean 1
4. Applying Sales and Marketing in Lean 2

Would you add anything? Is there anything I am missing? Your thoughts?

 Do want to view the Lean in Sales and Marketing Workshop?

Applying Lean in the Lean 3P Design Process

Allan R Coletta is a chemical engineer with an extensive background in manufacturing operations, supply chain and engineering, gained while working in the chemical process and healthcare diagnostics industries. He recently authored a book, The Lean 3P Advantage: A Practitioner's Guide to the Production Preparation Process.

Allan is my guest on the Business901 podcast next week where we discussed the Lean 3P Design process. This is a great follow up to a recent podcast, Lean Design interview with Ron Mascitelli.

Joe: You made a statement to me, that the 3P process applies Lean liberality at the point in the process where it can have the most influence. Now, I'm an old manufacturing guy, and I know that most of the cost is designed into a product and is not the fault of purchasing or production, but the word liberality stuck out to me. What did you mean by that?

Allan: When I used that statement, it really is a significant part of what you're trying to do when you think about it. Particularly, I was just involved in a week ago, in a week long 3P event, looking at a layout for a new production facility. When you're looking at a new facility of any type, or even an expansion of an existing facility, you're considering the maintenance of the equipment. You're considering the location of people or a Kanban system. When you think of normal Kaizen type of approaches that we use, in manufacturing, particularly, you'll select a tool, you'll say well, this week, we're going to look at quick change over, and so you do quick change over. Then you say; now we're going to apply standard work, so you look at applying standard work to your process, or then we're going to use some visual work display, and we're going to start applying that. We tend to take our tool off a shelf and apply it. With 3P, what you're trying to do, during  this event structure, is you're trying to get all of those tools out onto the workbench.

You're trying to play with them, look where things are stored, look at how things are going to be maintained, look at the flow within the layout, look at the impact of the operators, on the operators, the material handlers, all of that gets dialed into your thinking. When you're building something, it's a situation where you're actually getting all of those various inputs, brought to the table, checked around, tossed around, argued about, and finally, resolved in some way that satisfies the majority of the needs. It really is a neat process for bringing all the tools in.

In the 3P process, one of the things that you always do with almost any change event is you try to establish a charter, and you set the boundaries that you need and establish what criteria are the most important for you to try to evaluate your designs. When I say that, I found it's probably around 30 different criteria you could select from, and different people use different ones, but there are certain ones in any project that are going to bubble up to the top as more important than some of the others.

In some cases, one of the criteria might be low capital costs. If you don't have a lot of budget, then it's saying that, by virtue of that, you're going to have to find some ways of being very creative in coming up with low‑cost solutions. In other cases, you may say that, well, safety and environmental is a major concern because of the nature of the products we'll be dealing with or the materials. But upfront, people select what the major criterion is that they're looking at. As they develop these various designs, it could be people involvement, it could be capital, it could be any number of criteria.

Then you're evaluating your designs based on the criteria that you know are important to your business, so it makes it a very flexible process. But it makes it one were upfront you understand what the key things are you're looking to accomplish, so it takes some of the arbitrary nature of the decision process out of the way and allows you to have a very data based decision process that you go through in evaluating these designs you come up with.

Allan’s Lean experience started while serving as Site Manager for ICI Uniqema’s largest Specialty Chemicals plant in North America and continued to expand is his role as Senior Director of Engineering for Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics. His passion for manufacturing and engaging people in continuous improvement continues to grow through personal application of Lean principles. Allan serves on the Delaware Manufacturing Extension Partnership’s Fiduciary and Advisory Boards, and is a member of the Delaware Business Mentoring Alliance. He is also a member of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and the Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME).