Does your company have a continuous improvement strategy for your business and technical processes? Do you use metrics to encourage/measure the usage of lean tools like, K-Briefs, Value Stream Mapping, 5S, Gemba, Standard Work, Plan Do Check Act.
The obvious next question is are you seeing the results you expected? I suspect while you may have seen some success at the individual process level you haven’t seen any real improvement to your overall product development process. You still experience:
- Delays and missed milestones, poor time to market
- Rampant firefighting and costly rework
- Budget overruns
- Missed revenue and/or profitability goals
- Quality and customer satisfaction issues
Employees and Leadership are frustrated, meetings are tense and finger pointing is the norm.
We wrote Success is Assured to address these issues. Everyone has heard of Wilbur and Orville Wright’s successful powered manned flight in 1903. They didn’t have the money or resources like others, during the same time, who were trying to accomplish the same thing. Yet they were successful. Why? Because they identified the knowledge they needed to succeed and found innovative ways to close the knowledge gaps. Their first test failed… due to pilot error. A few days later they succeeded. Their peers took a different approach. They depended on expensive testing to find the knowledge gaps; then they redesigned and tested again. It took them longer and more money to achieve what the Wright Brothers did, some of their competition never did achieve manned powered flight.
Success is Assured targets product development organizations; engineers, subject matter experts, project management, middle management, senior leaders and executives. Our focus is how to identify knowledge gaps and innovatively close them in today’s complex product and business environment. Everyone must understand their roles and responsibilities in achieving this transformation.
At LPPDE 2019 in Malmo we are going to explore why the transition to “Success is Assured” has been so difficult. Toyota has been successfully executing their version of “Success is Assured” for several decades. Many companies have tried to copy Toyota with little success. Companies use metrics to drive behavior and get results. A closer look at the metrics will show that the results they measure don’t impact product development at all. Metrics are applied at the executive level and are point based. For example; meet this budget number, meet this staffing number, train X people in lean tool usage, etc. Point based metrics are easy to measure and hard to dispute, making them useful for determining raises and promotions. None of the metrics drive executives to work collaboratively, which is necessary to achieve Wright Brothers type of results. There are ways to improve collaborative behavior without disrupting the “tried and true” single point metrics. We will show you how to create simple visuals to drive collaborative behavior and lead your company and leadership to achieving Success is Assured.