Closer To The Ideal

Actually, the title should be “Kaizen is an attitude, not a skill level?”. The question mark is needed because these are issues I’m still thinking about.

Dr. W. Edwards Deming had a method of increasing the quality of any business process, but he was unable to get a hearing in America till towards the end of his life. After their defeat in World War II, the Japanese were desperate to rebuild their country and they were open to new ideas. And so Deming found an audience in Japan, and he taught the Japanese how to make high quality products. It wasn’t till the 1970s, when Japanese competition was hurting American companies, that American companies finally took an interest in Deming’s ideas.

The production of software and web sites can beneift from Deming’s method, which is neatly summarized as the Deming Cycle. Robert Hoekman has a nice, short page summarizing the Cycle:

The Deming Cycle is a proposal for handling changes. It includes four steps that repeat in a cyclical pattern:

1. Plan a change
2. Do the change
3. Check the results
4. Act on the results

Hoekman also has a page on the Japanese practice of Kaizen, which has made companies like Toyota the best in their industry. The software industry has a lot to learn from the practice of Kaizen.

Kaizen (pronounced “kigh-zen”) is the time-honored practice of continuous, incremental improvement. In the software industry, it’s the practice of actively improving designs, code, processes, and everything else, continuously, now and forever, to create a complete customer experience. The principles of the Kaizen Software Manifesto are:

1. Make continuous improvements in every aspect of the business.
2. Actively pursue a superior, complete customer experience.
3. Continually improve designs, code, and processes.
4. Strive to increase agility (binshou) while reducing costs.
5. Use the Deming Cycle to minimize disruption from change.
6. Prevent errors (poka-yoke), in software and in business.
7. Respect people, leverage expertise, and trust staff.
8. Reward suggestions, improvements, and progress.
9. Always move forward.

This last year, I’ve been working with Bluewall, and they’ve been trying to hire additional programmers and designers. I started off thinking that we could hire relatively inexperienced people and train them on the job. Perhaps this strategy will pay off in the end. However, the last two hires have both been extremely talented people, and it is a relief to work with them. They require very little of my management time, for the most part they manage themselves. This recommendation by Hoekman combines with my own recent experience to change my thinking about who we hire:

Build a kaizen team

Create a team of “change agents” to manage change and make it less interruptive.

One team, in fact, can be dedicated to improving the whole customer experience. Staff from different parts of the organization – marketing, development, management, etc – can all be part of this team. The team should have a clear goal of keeping an eye on the big picture of how customers experience the company and improving it in every way possible.

Of course, a kaizen team is not necessarily made up of highly experienced people. Kaizen is an attitude, not a skill level. So long as people have the right attitude then, given time, they will achieve improvement, which over time will amount to dramatic breakthroughs.

But these are things I’m still thinking about. I sometimes think that a kaizen team must have some experienced members, who can informally act as leaders. Otherwise the team makes improvements, but at a slow pace. Without experienced members, one would have (at least initially) a team of highly motivated individuals who are unsure what to do.

I should add, I have hired one person in the last year who was inexperienced but who has worked out wonderfully. The person is ambitious and dedicated to learning fast. So attitude is more important than skills. All the same, when one can find those rare individuals who have both the right attitude and advanced skills, then, I think, one should always hire such people, to the maximum extent that one’s budget can possibly allow.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 10:52 am and is filed under Edwards Deming, kaizen, Robert Hoekman, labor, management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.