What is it?
Typical change nowadays means restructuring units and teams, defining completely new way of working and managing. This very often causes the loss of working pieces and known channels. Change also causes natural fear and rejection (physical amygdala reaction) and it needs to be accepted. Kaizen workshop focus on continual improvement of business (not just IT) using small comprehensible steps leading to big and important improvements. It is repeatable activity supporting the change of mindset. It is usualy conducted with different development/operations and management roles but needs to be supported by higher management (e.g. in form of targets). What makes the difference between this workshops and other improvement workshops you may know?
- All activities and improvement proposals are done by people from the teams, not us or external consultants. People doing the work daily know the best what to do, how to change the flow, where are current limitations. They didn’t share because of fear, because nobody listened etc.
- We involve different roles and positions to cover the whole end-to-end flow and avoid sub-optimization of just one part of the process. Focus on some part is also possible in specific cases but with understanding of the whole flow.
- We focus only on a few but tangible and exact biggest pains and their specific solutions. This approach helps us to deliver tangible results. We do not try to save the world in one day by vague phrases.
- We try to get commitment of people by solving their specific problems they have and by coaching them to their acceptable solutions, not to provide ours. No change is possible without their involvement and the best way to it is to generate their own solutions. We try to destroy their boundaries and support out-of-the-box thinking.
What is the workshop structure?
- Understanding of audience expectations, ownership and identification of common goal.
- Mapping of current end-to-end value stream. This is not a virtual process map on corporate Intranet but real steps performed in the practice, containing loops, waitings that are not in process map.
- Identification of perceived problems and symptoms and analysis of their root causes.
- Brainstorming of possible solutions (acceptable and achievable as well as ideal one).
- Design and simulation of future value flow.
- Desing and agreement on Kaizen steps, responsible people and follow-up sessions.
Benefits
- Different people and roles with different needs (business people, sales, developers, managers, support and maintenance, testers) are synchronized
- Identified and discussed common goal/vision (very often different thing than corporational vision statement).
- Uncovered and visualized issues in value stream (from customer request to its delivery), where involved people see them, including waiting, waste, backward loops.
- Uncovered deeper root causes causing this perceived symptoms
- Proposed and agreed small steps leading to acceptable but still ideal solution.
- Engaged and motivated team solving real problem touching them.
Possible problems
- Not existing common goal.
- Aversion to map current status of the flow (it is pretty clear syndrome: we know how we do it, we have process maps, why to waste time). We lose important comments and perspective of others that could reveal real way of working, not the ideal one described in documents and/or process maps.
- Attempts to provide the solution without knowing the real causes of problems can lead to firefighting and sub-optimization and usually contribute to worse situation in the future with bigger impact.
Note: Every Kaizen workshop is different and this is why its facilitation is so important. We adjust the flow of workshop and tools used based on discussed values stream, customer involvement, involved roles and their variety, number of people, facts available, peoples energy and participation as well as management involvement and perceived support.
