Today I’d like to follow up on the last couple of posts. We’ve been talking about systems thinking and knowledge management. If you can think back to the very beginning of this video series we talked about a framework, developed at EAC, for looking at product development as a system. We call it the Product Development Operating System. The foundation of this system is the Information Flow management system. The idea is to present information where it’s needed, in a timely way, inside of your operation.
As Thomas Davenport pointed out, pure technology is not enough. Your knowledge management system needs to include other elements like Obeya rooms or even face-to-face communication.
Information, when presented and encountered by a human mind, has the opportunity to be converted into new knowledge. This happens inside another subsystem of the Product Development Operating System, the Continuous Improvement subsystem. The learning that occurs in the Continuous Improvement subsystem is applied in the Workflow subsystem where learning about product or technology is applied as innovation inside of product development.
The design of a system of flow, the presentation of information and its conversion to knowledge through your knowledge worker environment is a key factor in increasing productivity. When you look at your product development operation, can you see it as a system? Do you understand how the various elements interoperate? Are you getting the results that you want or do you find yourself fighting fires?
Contact us if you cannot see your system as a system and understand where your points of leverage are. We can help. We have a service product called the Product Development System Assessment. It not only baselines your current state, but it also presents a series of recommended improvements to move your system towards a more systematic operation and a healthier state. Our assessment service is designed to get you back on the road to higher productivity in your product development environment.
Contact us to learn more about how Systems Thinking and the application of our Product Development Operating System can help your organization become more efficient, productive, innovative, and competitive. Follow Bill at http://www.twitter.com/systhinking
In previous videos we talked about a framework we’ve developed for looking at product development as a system. In the last two videos and posts we talked about two of the subsystems, both of them flow systems, one being information flow and one being workflow. The third subsystem of the Product Development Operating System is the system of Continuous Improvement. This subsystem is often missing when we begin to work with an organization, and in organizations that are “committed” to continuous improvement; in many cases the efforts are ad-hoc and underwhelming
If you’re familiar with the works of Stephen Covey, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, you are probably familiar with his thesis about the tension between our urgent work and important work, and how our urgent work tends to overwhelm our important work. We see this in product development where we see continuous improvement as the important work. Often times it gets pushed aside and overwhelmed by the urgent work of completing projects.
Patrick Lencioni, an author whose work I enjoy reading, talks about the metrics of organizations. He talks about the ultimate metric of an organization as being the health of the organization. In our Product Development Operating System we see the health of your product development system as the ultimate metric of your productivity and effectiveness. It brings to mind the aphorism from Chinese medicine that says, “There is only one disease; congestion. There is only one cure; circulation.” The circulation in product development is the flow systems. The Continuous Improvement subsystem is the system for increasing the overall health of those flows, of the system, and the effectiveness and productivity of the product development system.
The Continuous Improvement subsystem of the product development system has three constituent parts. Each one aligns with a different tier of the organization. There is Strategy. This aligns with the executive tier. The executive tier looks to build a shared vision; a vision of the future of the organization that, collectively, we’re all working to realize. Another element of the continuous improvement subsystem centers on subject mater experts and the increasing their expertise, their development, and the deepening of their expertise and the expansion of competency within the organization. The third element in the continuous improvement subsystem is the importation and development of a root cause problem-solving methodology, specifically one that is appropriate for knowledge workers — the workers that populate product development.
If you bring improvement energies to your product development system, you need to bring a certain threshold of energy just to maintain your current state. If you will, to counter balance the destructive work of entropy. To make significant and continuous improvement you need to invest more energy into the subsystem. You need to invest significant energies into a continuous improvement subsystem that will eventually lead to increased productivity and increased effectiveness of your overall product development operating system.
Contact us to learn more about how Systems Thinking and the application of our Product Development Operating System can help your organization become more efficient, productive, innovative, and competitive.
Follow Bill at http://www.twitter.com/systhinking
Today’s post is a blog entry we swiped from Bettina Giemsa and the PTC Community blog. Not only is it a great topic, she also references our good friend and customer Doug Hippe from Extreme Tool and Engineering.
—–
“Vacation? No, thanks. I am too busy.”
Sounds familiar?
Certainly not. Nobody would EVER voluntarily drop their vacation.
But let’s not talk about your next trip to a sunny beach, but about training. Following my most recent blog Training? No thanks. I am too busy., our customer Doug Hippe sent me a private message here on PTC Community with his comments and this conversation is the reason I am writing a follow-up post now…
Doug wrote: “I’d like to add to your post on training. I too hear this same response from people when I suggest training. I routinely respond that we find time to remake or re-do something and we find time for employees to go on vacation, how is it we are too busy to train? While this doesn’t work with everybody, it makes them pause and think.”
I absolutely like this comparison! I sometimes find it hard to find time for training myself (yes, Marketers have busy schedules, too) and I am under massive pressure every time I go on vacation – delegate things, finish up open projects, etc. Then, when I come back I am facing a flood of emails to work through and that immediately throws me back to real life…
Despite the mess before and after, however, nobody would ever say “no, I won’t go on vacation because I need to focus on my work”.
Vacation is immediate personal benefit — you need to recharge your batteries and nobody would doubt the necessity. The issue with training is that people do not see it as a personal benefit right away – for most, it is “just” work-related. People see it rather as an additional task than a merit and this is where I believe we need to change our thinking.
For us as employees, an official training course is also a personal benefit in many ways:
- It is an opportunity to grow and become a more valuable employee for the current or even future employers.
- It will allow us to do our work more easily and make it more enjoyable. Most of you will agree that being able to do something well and getting recognized for this is really a great feeling.
- Last but not least, by being able to complete your work in a more efficient way and without re-work, workarounds or error-fixing, you can save yourself many fire-drills and have an overall more relaxed work atmosphere.
I have had employers in the past who didn’t offer much training — and thus no real growth perspectives. It ended with me quitting the job and looking for new perspectives. This changed when starting with ITEDO where workforce development was taken very seriously and when we were acquired by PTC in 2006, I got access to even more development options that I am still enjoying today. So basically, I have seen both sides and absolutely see the personal benefit of being trained on a regular basis.
I would even be willing to complement a good training opportunity with some of my spare time — such as travel early on a Sunday afternoon to a seminar or do some homework for a class in the evening when the kids are in bed. Would you agree?
Why don’t you talk to a Training Advisor to get an overview of the training options that are available from PTC University today. We look forward to hearing from you!
Bettina
PS: I also like going on vacation, but haven’t finalized plans for this summer yet — simply had no time — yet.
“I’m just too busy.” I hear this phrase every single week from my customers and prospects. That followed by, “There’s no time for another meeting, we’re up to our neck in new design projects, it’s our busy season so we can’t even think about implementing another system, and we’re way too busy for training.”
For so long, I’ve equated success with being busy until I read this quote by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, “A man who is very busy seldom changes his opinions.” I’d like to think there is a parallel between being busy and product development. Professionals in Product Development are paid to change things, to push the envelope, and to challenge the cadence of our weekly schedules.
EAC offers LEAN Product Development seminars in different cities throughout the year. These seminars are packed with executives eager to learn the latest and greatest in LEAN theory. The executives in the room listen attentively as they begin to imagine how their organization can operate as a learning organization.
I often wonder what would happen if our keynote speaker (our fearless LEAN evangelist) stood up in the front of the room and told the audience to focus on learning for the remainder of the week. He would order VPs, Directors, and CEO’s to take their teams offsite while putting their backlog of projects, design review meetings, and production schedules on hold. Of course, that’s neither reasonable nor realistic. But what if?
According to Michael Kennedy, “the greatest waste in the enterprise is the absence of sustained, real-time organizational learning, and very little effort is being applied for resolution.” Why aren’t we all working towards becoming a learning organization? By definition, a learning organization is one that has a heightened capability to learn, adapt, and change. Isn’t that what product development should embody?
I see mission statements that claim a commitment to continuous improvement yet haven’t invested in a class in years. We find the money for new tools, but we can’t take time to learn how to use them. We invest in new product development, yet we don’t educate our people on the fundamental process behind it. Most importantly, we don’t take time to learn from our own mistakes. Why? I think the answer is our own perceived success, our busyness!
As we begin the lazy days of summer, I encourage you to start small and embrace each day. Focus on one area of your work or personal life and take some time to learn how to improve. Invest in yourself, because you are your own most powerful tool. As Dr. Seuss taught us so well, “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places
you’ll go.”
As summer finally inches closer, I can’t help but daydream about the rolling greens on a sunny golf course. I typically see golf as a chance to take a break from everyday thinking and recharge my batteries. However, on my last trip to the sand trap I realized that the process of golf is really quite complex.
Consider the process of a golf swing. First, you look at where the ball lies and Look where it needs to go. Then you Ask yourself what club might be best for the shot. Since most people don’t golf alone, you often discuss challenging parts of the course with other players or ask for tips for the best swing. After you determine your club, you will then visualize or Model what type of swing to use. Then, you Discuss (internally or with others) what you’ve learned and take a few practice swings. Finally you take Action and swing.
Although this process is usually subconscious and happens in just moments, it still is quite complicated. And guess what folks? This is problem solving at its greatest. This is LAMDA.
L: Look
A: Ask
M: Model
D: Discuss
A: Act
Although I use golf as a way to stop thinking about process, it turns out that it is truly inherent in nearly every part of my life. With the exception an occasional water hazard on the 9th hole, I consider myself a decent player and the LAMDA process promotes my continuous improvement. I’ll bet that you can also identify with this process. So, other than golf, what are processes in your life that model the LAMDA problem solving process?
As we visit companies performing assessments and providing consulting services, we commonly experience some level of resistance to change. That is to be expected. First it is well understood that change is difficult to embrace. Moreover, we are often working with active or former engineers for whom skepticism is a recognized strength. And although there is often a shared perception among our clients’ employees that things need to change, there is usually significantly differing perceptions on the specifics of what must change and how it should change.
It is interesting to us that when we encounter similar individuals in other environments there is a distinct shift in their receptiveness to change. One other environment is at seminar events that EAC sponsors a dozen or so times per year. At the seminars, we are consistently engaged by thoughtful product development leaders and contributors who are looking to discover insights that can be used to improve their systems.
A part of the cause of this change is clearly that the work environment is consumed by practicality, while the seminar environment balances both theory and practice; good theory is after all the basis for good practice. The engagement with theory creates an openness to learn, and an attendant openness to change.
Our hypothesis is that within the political structure of their own companies, individuals invest a significant amount of their energies defensively blocking efforts to create change until they can be sure that the proposed change is not ‘yet another dunderheaded idea that will actually make things worse’. In the seminars’ external, neutral environment they are free to drop their committed defensiveness and to engage with less defensive positioning and more open-mindedness. We should add that our seminar events are presented as learning events and not selling events in an attempt to create an environment that supports open-mindedness.
In our internal discussions on this idea, a collaborator shared the story of his experience with counseling. After his divorce, he participated in a group therapy with a dozen other men who were all still married but having severe problems in their relationship with their spouses. Our colleague was attending group therapy to work through the similar issues that led to the dissolution of his marriage. Every week, he said, he would leave the session and spend the next day reflecting on the discussions and shared insights. His twelve fellow group members would return to their difficult environments of a hostile relationship and relapse into habitual behaviors. After a short period of time, feeling he had worked through his issues, our colleague made his goodbyes and graduated from the therapy sessions. As he left, he felt that none of the other individuals had made any significant progress towards a better way of managing their situations.
In reflecting on this, we become concerned that the enthusiasm and commitment to improvement that we see at the end of our seminar events dissipates quickly when the attendees return to their less neutral environments. To help extend the half-life of the positive bias carried out of our seminars, we are exploring additional services that can provide a buffer for post-seminar improvement advocates. We have discussed delivering more seminars directly within companies rather than in public venues, to create an internal network of mutually supportive thinkers. We have discussed organizing peer learning and discussion groups in our served regions where individuals from different companies can serve as an advisory board to one another. As we explore our role in extending the half-life of enthusiasm and commitment, we would love to hear from you on how you think we could better serve this market need.
