What follows are my notes on Pascal van Cauwenberge‘s presentation at the London XP Day 2006, about The Toyota Way of Managing.
Why is it useful to us? Because it is reflected in many Agile processes and ideologies.
14 Management Principles, split into 4 categories:
- Philosophy
- Process
- People and Partners
- Problem-solving and Organizational Learning
Process
The right process will lead to the right results.
Flow
Work has to continuously flow
MUDA – The continuous quest to find waste
Forms of muda in flow – Waiting. Transportation. Movement. Defects.
The quicker you expose muda, the quicker you can solve those problems.
Agile mirrors this: Little stories, short iterations expose little problems, little issues quickly. Flow in production can increase cashflow. So does Agile, in allowing you to create sellable product quickly.
Pull
Each step delivers at the rate that the next step can take it. Every 55 seconds a Toyota is sold. So, a Toyota rolls off the production line every 55 seconds. This is their manufacturing rhythm.
Forms of muda in production – Overproduction. Inventory.
Solved by the Just in Time nature of their production, on a part and full product basis.
Agile mirrors this: Just enough requirements to make a working product in each iteration.
Heijunka
Work at a steady pace. Be the tortoise not the hare.
Forms of muda in Heijunka: Muri (Overburden)
Overburdening breaks both people and machines. Find the right pace.
Toyota finalises its production schedule one day ahead. The majority is known beforehand, but the final figures go in the day before. All production lines are flexible, capable of building all models.
Agile mirrors this: Small stories. Flexible teams.
Jidoka – Automation
Use of intelligent machines. Machines help in indicating problems.
Also, use of intelligence. Everyone is responsible for quality, anyone can stop production line in order to fix problems. Higher quality, less waste. Don’t carry on producing defective products, stop, fix, then carry on.
Agile mirrors this: Automated testing. Programmers taking responsibility.
Standardized Tasks
Tell people exactly how to do it. This is actually empowering. If you know exactly how you are expected to do your job, you can get on and do it, but also have more time to think about how to improve how you do the task.
Forms of muda in Standardized Tasks: Unused employee creativity.
Each production line makes around 1000 changes to how they do things each year.
Discipline is important. Hard and fast way of working. The automation does help to make this easier though.
Agile mirrors this: More input from the developers and the users throughout the project. Make just enough to start work quickly in a basic form. Both then suggest improvements as they work on or with the product.
Visual Control
Problems should be apparent to all, with information.
When the production line stops, different (soothing!) music plays depending on which part of the line has caused the stoppage. This then informs all the other sections as to how long it will be before it affects them. They will know if, say, it is two sections away from them, it will be 15 minutes before they stop getting the parts from the previous step. Also termed as Ardon indicators (from traditional coloured lamps).
Agile mirrors this: Indicators of success and failure in running automated tasks, green good, red bad. Also standups, the state of the stories give good indications of exactly where the project is up to, where something might be broken. If someone is having an issue with their story, you may have been planning on using their functionality in a days time. You can adapt to this, know the point at which your own production will now stop.
Reliable Technologies
New machines are a higher risk than used ones. They know how well a used machine works, what will break it, what it does. Time must be spent researching the new, but they must not be implemented until they are known and trusted.
“It is never a people problem, it is always a process problem”.
People and Partners
Grow Leaders
Leaders – Sensei. Someone working and leading by example. In Toyota, a leader is always teaching two people to succeed them when they leave.
Agile mirrors this: Well sort of, it does have the concept of coaching, but it doesn’t really take it to the same level of building into its design that a coach should aim to teach the person to replace them directly.
Develop Exceptional People
There is presently an issue in Toyota where they are growing fast than they can grow leaders.
They believe in continuous training, which is also verified and tested afterwards. Much of their training is on the job itself, to ensure that it is learnt and applied quickly. One of their methods is to sometimes give a new starter an impossible task, to teach them their first and most important lesson, that of asking for help when they need it.
Challenge, Respect, Help Partners
Partners working with Toyota must perform at the same level as Toyota. 70% of a Toyota car is built externally.
Obeta — Integrate Partners, teach them the ways. For instance for Just in Time to work, their partners must supply at the appropriate speed.
Agile mirrors this: These are helpful practices that fit well into an Agile way.
Problem Solving and Learning Organisations
Genchi Genbutsu
“If you want to know what is happening, go to where it is happening”. Manager should be on the shop floor, not in their office.
Look at the process directly, see it in action, see the problems for themselves.
Value Stream Mapping: Where are you adding value? Where do you create waste?
Hourensou – A process for staff:
- Hou Kaku – Report
- Ren Raku – Inform
- Sou Dan – Consult
Agile mirrors this: Daily standup meeting, keeps the leader a lot closer to all of the project.
Nemawashi – Gently dig around the roots of a plant, in order to transplant it carefully
Decision by consensus. Can take time to achieve, but once you have everyone’s buy-in to a decision, you can implement it much more rapidly and effectively than if you had dictated a change. Resistance to change can slow implementation. Delay commitment until the right time (set-based design). Keep your options open as long as possible. Integrate often, to see if that changes your views of the available options you have yet to commit to.
Agile mirrors this: Iteration, Integration, planning meetings.
Hansei & Kaizen
Reflection on what happens to improve & continuous improvement of self.
With any failure, ask 5 whys to get to the root of the problem.
Allows you to arrive at Poka-Yoka – a state of being mistake-proof.
Agile mirrors this: To some extent, but within the stated boundaries of the methodologies, Hansei & Kaizen are greater that what is available through agile. Obviously, be pragmatic, use elements of them to improve your agile methodologies.
Philosophy
Long Term Philosophy (deliberate leaving of the first until last, to reflect its importance).
- Value for customers/society/economy
- Decide own fate
- Accept responsibility for own conduct
- Maintain and improve skills to add value
It takes 5-10 years for a new factory to be running The Toyota Way properly. It takes patience. Agile mirrors this: Agile can be implemented very quickly, as a set of practices, but it takes longer for it to be understood and accepted, and it is when this happens that it will run more effectively.
So what did I think?
Pascal talks on his blog about how he had found it hard to capture all the necessary detail about the Toyota Way into a 60 minute talk. I thought it was a fantastic introduction to an often-mentioned, but rarely explained methodology. I liked how well he linked it into Agile, and pointed out where there was similar fit, where there was room for improvement.
I think there is more scope for understanding the similarities that a production line run in this way can have to a well-running Agile team. For instance, if you used continuous build systems, and you hit a set of errors, should someone press the button to stop development, and have the team work to fix it? I don’t know, but I would like to see if it could be an effective method of working.
Overall, I think it would be very hard for anyone not to get something useful out of this talk, and many will have got a lot. Simon at his Agile in Action blog seems to share my enthusiasm for it.