Improving Interactions through the Lean Value Chain

Making products fly involves more than just the development team. So how do we involve, interact and improve with the non software parts of the value chain? Let Mattias Skarin walk through lean techniques and thinking that helps drive improvements across organizational borders.  Mattius is one of thought leaders of the Kanban Movement and is speaking at the upcoming Lean Kanban Central Europe Conference (It is in Hamburg, Germany, Nov 4-5, 2013). He is speaking about: Improving the full value chain & Visualization – What‘s my brain got to do with it? (Lightning Talk)

Mattias Skarin works as a Lean and Kanban coach, building systems that enables you to cut time to market and improve quality. He has helped several software teams deliver with confidence, scaled Scrum over multiple teams (cutting game cycle time from 24 months to 4) and improved life at operations using Kanban. He is an author of the book, Kanban and Scrum – making the most of both, and regularly train and coach in Lean, Kanban and TDD. He blogs on http://blog.crisp.se/mattiasskarin and the blog has one of the best set of sample Kanban boards on the planet.

 

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Life doesn't stand still. Work doesn't stand still.

Why should our processes be cast in stone?

Beyond Agile co-author Maritza van den Heuvel is my guest next week on the Business901 podcast. She is 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). Beyond Agile other authors were Jim Benson and Joanne Ho. It is the latest publication of Modus Cooperandi. Maritiza also appeared in another Business901 Podcast,  Becoming an Agile Family thru Kanban.

An excerpt from the podcast:

Joe: They are all real life stories, of course, but you even listed a failure in it which I thought, now that's someone that has a lot of confidence and faith in their process.

Maritza: I will admit that particular story you refer to was one we had some angst about because it is difficult for people to write about failure. We thought it was really important to do that because learning from failure is a key component to Kanban and Lean and the feedback loops that we strongly believe in as Agile thinkers. How could we not show a failure in some way?

Joe: I wanted to commend you. In fact, it was the first story I read.

Maritza: I think there's also bravery on the part of contributors to that specific story. Ultimately it is their company that we write about. It is their story that we're telling, and I think they were extremely brave to allow us to write that story in the way that we did because we did quite exclusively write about some of the things that we think went wrong, but I think the key win here for everybody, the team and the company concerned was from that failure in arose a new company and lessons learned and all of that perceived failure was actually rich learning that helped them to do it better the next time.

Joe: I remember talking to someone when I was down on a business that I had started years back, and he said, "Is this your first business?" I said, "Yes." He said, "You always fail at your first business." Kind of renewed my confidence that it was OK. It's a learning process. It's a journey. You don't have to stop. You learn and you move forward.

Maritza: I think that is such a key component of what we try to express in the book. We specifically wanted to include the phrase "continuous improvement" in the title, and you'll read it throughout the book in various contexts, but it's inherent in each and every one of those stories that nobody gets it right the first time. You define a process. You pick certain methodologies and techniques and you implement them, you observe them, and you adapt as needed and to continually improve what you're doing. Life doesn't stand still. Work doesn't stand still. Why should our processes be cast in stone?

About Beyond Agile: Tales of Continuous Improvement: 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.

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.

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.

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

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).

Developing a Learning A3

Matt Wrye is a Lean Implementer that has a passion for continuous learning on all subjects related to business and lean. He is the author of the popular blog "Beyond Lean," which centers on evolving leadership and changing business.

Our discussion center on his development of a Learning A3. From his blog post Learning A3:

A3s are used for solving problems, developing proposals and everything else.  Why not for laying out a plan to show what people are expected to learn during a project or coaching session.  Layout a standard or plan so expectations and progress becomes visible.

 

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Download Podcast: Click and choose options: Download Here  or go to the Business901 iTunes Store.

Below are several formats for your use. I recommend viewing one before or during listening to the podcast.

Learning A3 Example PDF

Learning A3 Blank Template PDF

Learning A3 Blank Excel Template

About Matt: Matt has a Bachelor of Science degree from Purdue University in Industrial Engineering. Among his other accomplishments are Lean Principles and Kaizen Certification from Lean Learning Center, Lean Coach/Mentor, Proficient in Lean tools and concepts, Shainin Red X Certified Journey and Master Candidate, and a ProModel Simulation Software expert.  He is proud to have played a large and significant role in starting the Smith County Lean Consortium in Tyler, TX.

Related Information:
Turning your Conference Learning into Action
A Short Course in Design Thinking
4 Disciplines of Execution – Lean Simplified
Why A3, Why Now in Lean Thinking?

How Fast can you get Feedback from your Customer?

At #LSSC!12, I had a chance to listen to Mary Poppendieck’s talk on, Continuous Feedback: Process Control for Developing Software-Intensive Systems. This Thursday, I continue the conversation with both Mary and Tom Poppendieck on the subject of process control in software. This is an excerpt of the podcast.

Joe:  I find it quite interesting that you look at the delivery by a team as no longer an iterative cycle, but one based on flow. Is that the influence of Kanban over scrum or maybe you should tell me what the influence is?

Mary:  Even iterations are a flow when it comes right down to it. If you develop software in two week iterations and actually deliver it every two weeks to customers, that's as much a flow... that's almost continuous.

In fact, when I think of continuous delivery I think of daily or possible twice a week, or weekly. If you look at the kind of delivery that Facebook does, it's once a week with small chunks in the middle of the week.

Gmail for example, is delivered twice a week. Chrome is deployed every day. Those kinds of vary rapid deployments, you find inside of software as a service, where they're websites, or you find them sometimes inside of the enterprises.

The idea of iteration has been, how about we develop software and get it ready to deploy every couple weeks. Well, if you just stop thinking about being ready to deploy and say what would it take to actually deploy it. Just get it out there and start getting the value from it and getting the feedback from it now, you can do that in two week iterations. You can do that with a Kanban system, it doesn't matter.

The optimum thing is how rapidly do we deploy our software rather than how rapidly do we get little chunks of it done.

Tom Poppendieck:  The primary thing that we are advocating is not to think of software development as coding and testing. But rather to think of it as figuring out what is worth doing, what's going to delight the customer, doing it, making sure it's working well, getting it out in service to the customer, and getting feedback from the customer.

The really important metric is how fast you can get feedback from the customer about the actual, deliverable application that you are creating. That is beyond the realm of most people who are thinking about software all by itself. It gets toward the devox on one end and it gets toward the design thinking on the front end.

When we're thinking about flow, we're thinking about rapidly getting feedback from your best design ideas all the way from production.

So, either a two week iteration or a continuous flow like kanban can be rapid, say a couple of weeks to a couple of hours, compared to the very common approach of having dozens of two week iterations before you get any feedback from actual production.

Related Information:

Mary Poppendieck has been in the Information Technology industry for over thirty years. She has managed solutions for companies in several disciplines, including supply chain management, manufacturing systems, and digital media. As a seasoned leader in both operations and new product development, she brings a practical, customer-focused approach to software development problems.

Tom Poppendieck is an enterprise analyst and architect, and an agile process mentor. He focuses on identifying real business value and enabling product teams to realize that value. Tom specializes in understanding customer processes and in effective collaboration of customer, development and support specialists to maximize development efficiency, system flexibility, and business value.

Turning your Conference Learning into Action

I attended an outstanding conference (#LSSC12), The Lean Software & Systems Conference 2012 held in Boston, MA. In addition to the conference there was 2 days of tutorials, Lean Camp (Open Space), Interactive Cooking, Living Room, Lightning Talks, and Lean Coffee. It was an excellent agenda and well-hosted by the Lean-Kanban University.  Every attendee that I had a chance to ask, echoed my assessment.

A question that permeated throughout the conference was how do I take what I learned and implement it in my organization. Most of us know that if you do not start immediately a great deal of information will be lost and eventually little if any will be implemented. My efforts this week will be to assist to make this great learning experience turn into actionable items. If we can do this, you certainly will be assured of coming back next year and I might even get another speaking opportunity.

The problem most people face when coming back from a conference is that they soon get inundated with all their regular work again. It’s not that we don’t want to introduce what we learned but there is so much to do and so little time. As part of my presentation, I discussed the aspect of Standard Work. Standard Work can be simply stated as an outline on the way you do things. It is very similar to determining a budget. A budget does not save you money it just allows you to see where the money is going. It allows you to make choices. Standard Work does the same thing. It allows you to make choices. So, the first step is to accept that we will continue to do our Standard Work but have the ability to make choices to implement something new and to allocate time and a budget if necessary to the initiative.

My preferred method of learning is utilizing an A3. If you missed Claude Perrone, the Agile Sensei talk on A3s, I have included a link to a blog post that discusses A3s, Why A3, Why Now in Lean Thinking? Utilizing an A3 will give a structured format for putting your thoughts together and outlining a course of action. Download an outline of a Problem Solving A3.

The work on the A3 should have started before you went to the conference with an outline of the purpose for going and the expectations from both a personal and an organizational perspective. If you did not do that, you can do it in retrospective.

Next determine what you learned from the conference. If you went as a group, I would encourage the entire group to be present for this step. Outline all the different thoughts and how they may apply to you organization.

Can any of these thoughts be completed simply by the stroke of a pen, something that does not require a change in culture? They may be items that are can be taken care of by a simple budget allocation, a new piece of equipment, etc. Separate these thoughts and evaluate them in your next strategic meeting or in the conference overview meeting.

Let’s get back to that cultural part, the difficult part. You have all heard the saying that “Cultural eats Strategy for Lunch.” The first thing you must realize is that you may have come back from the conference with great ideas and breakthrough thoughts. However, there is an existing culture that is going to eat all of them in one big gulp. You may even be the person that swallows the whole thing as you get tied up in all your Standard Work once again. So don’t try to change the org structure or how management thinks. Create a few wins first.

Do you have one takeaway from the conference that you are passionate about? Can you take that passion and demonstrated to the rest of the team? This should be a team exercise, try it out and see what others think.

It is best to take one initiative; one thought (not necessarily the easiest) and focus on this. Ideally, the initiative should be tied to the current strategic direction of the organization. It is your responsibility to clearly define the Why to Leadership. If you cannot, you may want to rethink and choose another initiative. The important thing is to get agreement on one single item. After doing this, set your goal with a measurement and a time. State the current state and the goal (future state) by a certain time.

In addition, you should have the power to spearhead or at a minimum be a significant participant of the implementation. Stay away from discussing the How. The how should be the responsibility of the implementers or the team. Leadership has the power to veto the how. If you are familiar with the Lean term, Catchball, this a good time to play.

I am going to focus my blog on the subject of “Turning your Conference Learning into Action” for the balance of the week. This is an outline of this week’s discussion.

Conference Learning

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Lean Software & Systems Presentation – Business901
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Critical and Creative Thinking benefits the Problem Solver

Below is a presentation that I gave recently to the Plantmix Asphalt Industry of Kentucky. It was during the winter training school and focused on using both Critical and Creative Thinking benefits the Problem Solver. It also included how to prevent the failures of most decision processes. This an hour long presentation. What are your thoughts? Any improvement ideas?

Problem Diagnostics - Q & A

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Lean Marketing Board Game Introduction

Following The Lean Startup Principles of Build, Measure, Learn, I am introducing a MVP version of the Lean Marketing Board Game which surprisingly is not based on the Lean Startup but instead my book the Lean Marketing House.  I really don’t teach Build, Measure, Lean and the Pivot, I just stick to the old PDCA cycle. Now granted my Plan–Do-Check–Act (Adapt maybe) do resemble the Build, Measure, Learn – Validate theories of Eric Ries but even though we beat to same drum, we go about it slightly different.

The main difference being is my adaption of viewing Lean as a knowledge building platform and using Service Design or Design Thinking Principles that put the customer at the forefront versus the product or service. My thinking is also firmly rooted in the Service Dominant Logic theories that your product/service has little or no value without the customer. The value comes in the use of your product/service by the customer. Your marketing should be centered on that side of the fence versus internally.

I have put a presentation of the initial steps of the Lean Marketing Board Game in place. My Minimum Viable product, I hope you enjoy.

Lean Marketing Game

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The game will be included in my upcoming Lean Marketing House 28-day Program.

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Scaling the Customer Decision Making Process

7 Habits, Getting Things Done and now, Personal Kanban

I started practicing and finding Personal Kanban an answer to many years of frustration in looking for a time management system that allowed me to manage it rather it managing me.

How I started with Kanban:

Each year, I take one subject matter that I am going to concentrate on. I started doing it many years ago when a friend of mine told me he took one president every year and read about him. He is getting to an age now that he should be getting close to finishing.

In the latter part of 2009, I had become intrigued by Kanban and how I could use it for managing work flow and especially work in process. Trying to use a Value Stream Mapping process with sales and marketing people was a huge hurdle that I could not get over. The theory of the Kanban was closely related to Value Stream Mapping  and through the use of post-it-notes I simply transferred a Value Stream to a Kanban board. I assigned numerous values from a budget perspective to the number of clients/prospects in a pipeline and so on. People seemed to understand that approach must better. As a result, I made Kanban my 2010 project of the year.

I have to admit, I did not get as far with it as I wanted. I was unable to attend a David Anderson workshop or pick-up a Lean Software Kanban client but I was able to learn a great deal about it and further engrained it into my Lean Marketing teachings. In fact, my next book, Marketing with PDCA has a chapter on Kanban.

However, these efforts led me into working with it on a personal level and that is how I became familiar with the Personal Kanban teachings of Jim Benson & Tonianne DeMaria Barry co-authors of Personal Kanban. In fact, the podcast Kanban too simple To be Effective? with Jim Benson led to others.

David Anderson, author of the recent book, Kanban appeared on the Business901 podcast and added 50 minutes of Kanban discussion. David covered a lot of ground in this discussion and answered a lot of questions for me that his book raised. David is a thought leader in managing highly effective software teams. He is President of David J. Anderson & Associates, based in Seattle, Washington, a management consulting firm dedicated to improving leadership in the IT and software development sectors. Related Podcast: Kanban, could we call this podcast anything else?

Bandit Software is the maker of an electronic Kanban tools for Lean Software and Systems development teams called Lean Kit Kanban. Related Podcast: Lean Kanban lessons from a Software Developer 

Eric Landes is an Agile  Project Manager who has been using Kanban for software development since 2007. He has worked with Scrum, XP and other agile methods for over the past 5 years, and has been managing software projects for over 10 years. Eric has his own blog, Corporate Coder which can be found at http://EricLandes.com. He is also a frequent contributor to http://developer.com. Related Podcast: Scrum + Kanban = Agile Discussion with Landes

Though this was not directly related to Kanban, one of my favorite podcast all year was Creating Flow with Don Reinertsen. Don Reinertsen is president of Reinertsen & Associates, a consulting firm specializing in improving the product development process.  I have followed Don’s writing for many years and recognize him as THE leading expert in the field of Flow. His writings are insightful, packed full of information and readable. When editing the podcast, I could not bring myself to cut hardly a word out of it.

Each and everyone gave me a deeper appreciation for Kanban and it has been a great experience. This Tuesday I will have Patty Bielderman of Layers of Love discussing how she uses her Personal Kanban in her Nonprofit and in a grade school classroom. The following week, I will host Pascal Pink and the discussion of his use of PK as a Strategic Collaborator.

Enjoy the Book: Personal Kanban by Jim Benson & Tonianne DeMaria Barry

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Quallaboration Video

I follow up to the Quallaboration Podcast with Jim Benson is this you tube video of the same name. Jim did a lightning talk about a recent project.

About Jim Benson: His company, Modus Cooperandi, helps organizations change through the application of Lean principles, Agile methodologies, and social media. He is also the developer of the productivity tool Personal Kanban, an adaptation of Industrial Kanban. His book on Personal Kanban, which applies Lean thinking to daily living, will be out in the Fall of 2010.

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Pull: The Pull in Lean Marketing

12 Steps to business Survival

If you want to survive, what do you need to do?

Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Laurence Gonzales officially distilled these observations down 12  points the seemed to stand out concerning how survivors think and behave in the clutch of mortal danger. Some of the same steps for staying out of trouble. Here's what survivors do:

1. Perceived, Believe: Even the initial crisis, survivors perceptions and cognitive functions keep working. They notice the details and may even find some humorous or beautiful. If there's any denial, is counterbalanced by a solid belief in the clear evidence of their senses. They immediately begin to recognize, acknowledge, and even accept the reality of their situation. They may initially blamed forces outside themselves, to; but very quickly they dismiss that tactic and recognize that everything, good and bad, emanates from within.
2. Stay calm: In the initial crisis, survivors are making use of fear, not being ruled by it. They understand at a deep level about being cool and never ever on guard against the mutiny of too much emotion.
3. Think/analyze/plan: Survivors quickly organize, teams, and institute discipline. In successful group survival situations, a leader emerges often the least likely candidate. irrational voice emerges and is often actually heard , which take control of the situation. Survivors perceive that experience as been split into two people and they obey the rational one.
4. Take correct, decisive action: Survivors are able to transform thought into action. They're willing to take risk to save themselves and others. They are able breakdown very large jobs into small manageable tasks. They set attainable goals and develop short-term plans to reach them. They are meticulous about doing their task well.
5. Celebrate your successes: Survivors take great joy from even their smallest successes. That is an important step in creating ongoing feeling of motivation and preventing the descent into hopelessness.
6. Count your blessings: This is how survivors become rescuers instead of victims. There is always someone else they are helping more than themselves even if that someone is not present.
7. Play: Since the brain and its wiring appear to be the determining factor in survival, this is an argument for expanding and refining it. Just as survivors use patterns in rhythm to move forward in the survival voyage, they use the deeper activities of the intellect to stimulate, call and entertain the mind. Careful, careful, they say. But they act joyfully and decisively. Playing also leads to invention, an invention may lead to a new technique, strategy, or piece of equipment that can save you.
8. See the beauty: Survivors are attuned to the wonder of the world. The appreciation of beauty, the feeling of awe, opens the senses.
9. Believe that you will succeed: All the practices just describe lead to this point: survivors consolidate their personalities and fix their determination. Survivors admonish themselves to make no more mistakes, to be very careful, and to do their very best. They become convinced that they will prevail if they do those things.
10. Surrender: Survivors manage pain well. Resignation without giving up, it is survival by surrender.
11. Do whatever is necessary: They know their abilities and do not over or underestimate them. They believe that anything is possible and act accordingly. Survivors don't expect or even hope to be rescued. They are coldly rational values in the world, obtaining what they need, doing what they have to.
12. Never give up: There's always one more thing that they can do. They are not easily frustrated. They are not discouraged by setbacks. They accept that the environment is constantly changing. They pick themselves up and start the entire process over again, breaking it down into manageable bits. They come to embrace the world in which they find themselves and see opportunity in adversity.

If you are tough times, I recommend pinning these 12 points up and reviewing them several times a day.

P.S. Buy the book, Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why

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Marketing Kanban
Story of Going Lean in Healthcare: On the Mend
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How much Planning is enough – Use Lean and Standardize

Providing Clarity to your Marketing Process

One purpose of Value Stream Marketing is to provide clarity to an individual or organizations marketing process. This gives you the ability to walk a prospect through the process, understanding where they are at in the process. Typically, I have a customer add the activities or in lean terms map the process he uses to gain a customer. It should mimic the path a customer makes in his decision process.  However, don’t look at this as just a simple exercise for a small organization. I use this in larger organizations by just repeating this process for each sales channel they may have. The secret to this is that it really forces you to layout your marketing process and is really the beginning of development of transferring your marketing into a process.

The purpose in creating your Value Stream is to achieve better cooperation of the multiple phases. Each interlinking phase depends upon the other links. In each of them, you will have different capabilities, normal variation and a changing workload making it practically impossible to balance. (You will often find that the Value stream is dependent upon the cooperation of all phases and as a result it highlights the strength of your handoffs. I have often found that in many organizations the individual steps or phases of the value stream are quite good but the quality of the handoffs is where the problems occur).  

Many organizations do not look at their sales and marketing process in a linear fashion, let alone segmenting it. When organizations first map out the process, they look at connections where people come from being all over the map such as the diagram to the right. They look at a simple linear process as an oversimplification of reality.

Not everybody goes through each step of the cycle. Some will skip from step one to step three. Someone may enter the cycle in step three. These interconnections are not trivial, it is what makes your process work and it also may be stopping it from working. So what is the purpose? The purpose of creating your Value Stream is very simple: Which is harder to manage, the above diagram or the next one? (The Post-it notes represent a tactic such as a webinar, newsletter, financing, sales calls, etc.)

Your flow system, your Value Stream will allow an organization to operate at maximum efficiency. The secret in creating such a linear flow is segmentation. Without it, you will continue to operate in less than an optimum manner.  Keep segmenting your list, till you gain a linear flow. Yes, there may be a few exceptions.

This is a simplified version of how a Value Stream would look. As you can see the natural progression of the flow (Involve, Interaction, Influence… flow to the right), the enablers or information to move the process forward is provided above each step. Taking a group of current customers, you can identify this in your current process. If this seems difficult, make a certain group that you can segment and document the process. Many companies will find huge gaps in their processes, which are supported by other departments such as sales or service or maybe by repetitive marketing.

Creating a horizontal segment/swim lane for each of your marketing channels will allow you to not only create your value stream but also serve as a basis for your Marketing Kanban and execution of your marketing process.

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Quickest way to deal with a Marketing Constraint, Slice it!

If we find the constraint what is the first thing we want to do, fix it. That’s our natural tendency. Many of us have learned to go through the Theory of Constraint Five Focusing Steps:

1. Identify the system’s constraint.
2. Decide how to exploit the system’s constraint.
3. Subordinate everything else to the above decisions.
4. Elevate the system’s constraint.
5. Don’t allow inertia to become the system’s constraint.

This way we can fix it and increase throughput. In a previous post I stated:

Marketing Kanban, I like to use the constraint or the bottleneck as my control point. You can argue that you have an external constraint, outside of your marketing. If that is true, then the dollars and resources must be allocated appropriately. However, I would argue that there is a constraint within your organizations marketing cycle that is limiting your throughput. I believe that dealing with this constraint is easier, less costly and more efficient than dealing with trying to fill the funnel.

The overriding principle of the Theory of Constraints is that any work done outside of the constraint will not increase throughput. If you take that principle as a fact, than I would venture to say that any segmentation of your marketing that is not based at the constraint will provide little improvement.

Identifying the constraint however can be quite a chore in marketing. Finding it may be one thing and even changing it may be another. However, if the change is not so apparent there are a couple of things that I have learned from software developing people and primarily Donald Reinertsen author of The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development. He suggest when attacking a bottleneck, you may prefer reducing batch size versus adding capacity. In the Marketing Kanban after identifying the constraint we would review the preceding queue. The action of filling that queue would be where we would want to segment our prospects or value stream.

The segmentation does not need to be equal. If you could just identify a portion of your value stream and become more targeted you would gain better and quicker feedback resulting in better management of the constraint. The smaller batch size is a proven method of increasing throughput.

Testing or qualifying a prospect is a key component of effective value stream management. With a reduction of batch sizes you can ask more direct questions of that group that will also allow for better sales management.

These methods lead to better reviews and knowledge of the process. When you are focusing on this process only at the constraint, you will see how this will effectively increase capacity at this point. So before you create a new website, re-do auto responders or ad capacity, you may want to simply slice a portion of your bottleneck creating several smaller segments.

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Kanban Podcast with David Anderson

David Anderson, author of the recent book, Kanban appeared on the Business901 podcast and added 50 minutes of Kanban discussion. David covered a lot of ground in this discussion and answered a lot of questions for me that his book raised. David is a thought leader in managing highly effective software teams. He is President of David J. Anderson & Associates, based in Seattle, Washington, a management consulting firm dedicated to improving leadership in the IT and software development sectors.

David has been part of the agile and lean methodology movement since 1997 when he participated in the team that developed Feature Driven Development at United Overseas Bank in Singapore. He has 26 years experience in the software development starting in the computer games business in the early 1980’s. As a pioneer in the agile software movement David has managed teams at Sprint, Motorola and Corbis delivering superior productivity and quality. At Microsoft, in 2005, he developed the MSF for CMMI Process Improvement methodology - the first agile method to provide a comprehensive mapping to the Capability and Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) from the Software Engineering Institute (SEI).

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His first book, Agile Management for Software Engineering: Applying the Theory of Constraints for Business Results, published in 2003 by Prentice Hall, introduced many ideas from Lean and Theory of Constraints in to software engineering.

David can be found at AgileManagement.net

Related Podcasts:
Bootstrapping the Kanban
Value Stream Marketing eBook Released
Marketing Kanban 102, Work in Process

Successful Marketing should be a Game!

What keeps your attention? As a small business owner do you find yourself struggling to stay on top of your marketing, always something else to do? I would recommend to establish an effective marketing program that you create a game out of it. Creating a visual process with your Marketing Kanban can effectively do that and make your marketing interesting and challenging.

I read the recent book Game-Based Marketing: Inspire Customer Loyalty Through Rewards, Challenges, and Contests and they recommended 5 ways to Game your business:

1. What consumer behavior are you trying to drive? Don’t just think about broad or bottom line objectives (“more engagement”, “greater brand exposure”) when considering ways in which you’d like to effect the behavior of your consumer base, but instead, focus in on easy-to-achieve activities that will have an overall impact on your bottom line.

2. Assign points to those behaviors. Think about how much value each of the behaviors has to your business and assign points to each action accordingly. Points should be weighed relatively, so if opening a new account is ten times more valuable than clicking on an advertiser’s link, make sure the point system reflects that reality.

3. Create a leaderboard to display points. Just like the Employee of the Month plaques at restaurants, create a socially-networked leaderboard that allows users to feel like they are accomplishing something relative to their friends and peers—A little encouragement goes a long way.

4. Develop challenges and message them. Just like Frequent Flyer promotions, creating simple challenges can have a profound effect on user behavior once they are connected to your community. Keep your challenges fresh and topical by knowing your players.

5. Make “fun” your goal! Whether your business is finance or funerary, making fun a principal objective will substantially increase consumer engagement and generate remarkable new revenue opportunities.

It is not as tough as you may think. Foursquare, Farmville, Chase, US Army and the old standby Frequent flyer programs are prime examples of Game Marketing. These are all strategies used for your customer. However, using a Marketing Kanban board within your organization can help make your own marketing a game. Think about a visual board showing some basic marketing metrics. If you started showing people how many times a subject was Re-tweeted or a Press Released viewed or published, would the quality of writing improve? What do you think?

Turning your Marketing Cycle into a Kanban

One of the first steps that I recommend in developing your Marketing Kanban is to create a Value Stream Map of your Sales or Marketing Cycle. Many people struggle with this concept and in a workshop I asked them to create their best known channel without really discussing their marketing tactics at all. I ask them just to define how many clients they need in this Value Stream to be successful. For illustration purposes I use a common internet model that is recognizable to most of us. A typical Value Stream may look something like this:

• Google Ad
• Website
• Auto-responder
• 30-day trial
• Purchase
• Upsell
• Buzz it up
  Of course there are numerous ways someone may reach your website such as Referrals, Search, Social Media, PR, etc. You could include them all, but if you do not measure them individually it will be difficult to improve them as time goes on.

I am going to take just a section of the above Value stream and define an Entry and Exit point to the Kanban(see Bootstrapping the Kanban). The Entry point will be Google Ad and the exit point will be the Purchase point. This will simplify my explanation.

When we discussed the Marketing Kanban before, we discussed creating Work in Process (WIP) limits. The above diagram will demonstrate a very important beginning point for the use of a Marketing Kanban and how we go about determining the basic structure. Start developing your WIP limits by asking these questions:

• How many prospects do you engage with?
• How many become prospects?
• How many are qualified prospects?
• How many use the Free Trial?
• How many become clients?
• How many repeat?
• How many are referred?

I have already confused myself, have I confused you? This is where the Kanban becomes so effective.

This simple structure is easily adjusted and can be used for just about any channel you wish to develop. How do you determine these numbers? Well first, if you don’t already know any of these numbers or just starting out, look at what will be your constraint or control point. Where are you limited?

Maybe, you can only handle 30 clients? Start with something that you know or fill in the blanks with your best guestimate. If you can only complete three of the five examples, complete the others by considering the conversion rates that you have between each. Don’t overly worry about accuracy, especially if you have not measured these before. You can even create a best and worst scenario to the Value Stream.

Are you limited by the dollars you spend on Google ads? Take a known number and plug into your Kanban and just multiply it across. Can you see what happens? Is a client worth $500? Are you Google ads effective enough? Do you need to increase conversion rates thru your free trial? 

This particular Marketing Kanban is just a starting point. You may not even use your clients as the basis, you may prefer total sales for the month. However, when you visually display it in a Kanban it does create a very easy observation point, especially for small business.

The next step is to consider the other entry points to your website, for example and/or completely different distribution paths. More than likely these other channels (paths) will have different cycle times and budgets. Do not try to fit one Kanban or Value Stream to everyone. 

Related Posts:
Bootstrapping the Kanban
Value Stream Marketing eBook Released
Marketing Kanban 102, Work in Process

Technorati Tags: Value stream Mapping,Value Stream Marketing,Marketing Kanban,Marketing Cycle,Marketing Hourglass,Marketing Funnel,Kanban

Agile, Scrum, Kanban, or a Marketing Funnel?

Do you think it is Scrum? Do you think it is Kanban? Do you think it is a Marketing Funnel? …or is it all three? Or maybe Agile? This is an empirical view of Value Stream Marketing.

The drawing is reflective of a Scrum sprint. Scrum is an iterative, incremental framework for project management and agile software development. The sprint is typical a two to four week process with the large loop representing the overall process and the smaller (top) loop representing a twenty-four period and the daily scrum meeting. In the Value Stream Marketing Process, I use the loops to demonstrate a higher level of intimacy with a prospect. The top loop is for existing customers to nurture an even stronger relationship.

The three separate areas of the diagram will have their own Kanban board, if there are separate teams working on them, or you could visualize each as a separate swim lane. Separating these three processes apart allow you to better identify the process steps and the tools needed to facilitate the value stream flow. And, of course, using a Kanban board for this process will help you identify where the process is not working or where the bottleneck is occurring.

The Kanban board is where the actual work gets done. We want to limit unnecessary work in process to be no higher than it needs to be to match the control point or pacemaker of the process (bottleneck). We will use these boards to limit Work in Process into each stage and as a result create a smoother work flow(Heijunka) with a goal of eliminating what Lean refer to as the 3 M’s, Muda (Waste), Mura (Unevenness or Inconsistent) and Muri (unreasonable). This way we maximize your marketing efforts to the fullest extent.

Scratching your head a bit? We will develop our Kanban Boards in later posts which will clarify things a bit. Don’t get hung up on process. All you really need to do is break down your present marketing systems onto a Kanban board and start.

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Work in Process is Wasteful even in Sales and Marketing

One of the tenants I am convinced of is that Work in Process is wasteful and unproductive. If you look at this from a Sales and Marketing Process it basically says that the more people you have in your sales and marketing funnel the more unproductive you are. A blog recently by Jim Benson of Personal Kanban said this (and more) in a recent post Inventory makes Work:

Inventory lowers organizational effectiveness because the time and money spent taking care of the inventory could have been spent making the company more successful. Therefore, Lean organizations tend to receive the things they need to operate at the last responsible moment, this is called “Just in Time” (JIT). A JIT organization does not take on inventory until the moment they need it and therefore spends as little as possible maintaining inventory, greatly reducing the risk of having overstock.

But inventory isn’t just “stuff.” Inventory for us as individuals includes anything we have that requires maintenance or on-going attention. We have responsibilities, they aren’t going away. We will have a yard, it will need to be mowed. Dishes need to be washed. Children need to be raised.

Inventory for sales and marketing is prospects! As you think about what stops your marketing from being effective it is all about trying to appeal to the masses and as a result losing effectiveness both in time and money. As Jim said above, you should be taking the time making your company more successful and working on ineffective or wasteful leads is not going to do it..

The past several years the buzz word has been Inbound Marketing. Though I am a advocate of the basic approach and an advocate of using Social Media I have found that it really has resulted in a failed marketing strategy for many companies. Though it has increased the number of prospects it has done little to increase qualified buyers. That is why there has been push back from many organizations. It just has not been effective as the principle seems to indicate. Just because we automated the process does not mean we are managing Work in Process better.  

So what happens if we limit work in process or the numbers of leads that we receive? Marketing to a targeted audience results in a cost savings and time savings. Would you need to hire more salespeople? Would you be able to use more experienced people at the right time and in the right place more often? Would you nurture and promote to a better qualified prospect? I believe the most important part of limiting Work in Process is that your message would simply be better. Not only would your information packet be much more targeted and information rich, it would also have a better chance to be delivered on time or in other words when a prospect is ready for it. Giving a prospect what he needs, when he needs it and how he wants it is a pretty important factor in today’s market. If you look at what vehicles prospects and your customers use to acquire the information they need, you will notice one important factor: they are just about all different. Multiplying that number by the number of prospects should certainly give you reason to start narrowing your field.  

Why is now, the best time to convert to this strategy? The market itself has caused a constriction for most companies. This constriction has narrowed your market that should enable you to readily identify your target market. What are the last minute adjustments or concessions you make (JIT) to capture the sale? These are the present value drivers of your business. Are these the value drivers that you are willing to live with in the long term? How do they help you in identifying your present and future market? 

Work in process is wasteful. It is wasteful in your personal life when not managed well, it is bad in manufacturing, it is bad from a sales and marketing perspective. Quit marketing at the top of your funnel. Instead learn how to manage your Work in Process!

P.S. By the way, I don’t even believe in a marketing funnel any more. I will tell you more about that later!

Technorati Tags: Lean,Sales Cycle,Marketing Funnel,Work in Process,JIT,Inventory,Prospects,Kanban,Agile Marketing

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