Tag Archives: Teamwork

Hoshin Kanri for agile: align Squad backlog with mission and purpose

Hoshin Kanri for Agile – Toyota’s lean policy deployment translated to Agile – is also an excellent tool to align Squad backlog with their Tribe’s purpose in an Agile organization. In my previous post on Hoshin Kanri for Agile, I introduced an innovative way to apply Hoshin Kanri to align the mission of squads with the purpose of their tribe. But the effect carries on even further: the entire backlog of the squads will remain in line with the mission and purpose. Again, this requires a slightly different use of the principles of Hoshin Kanri.

Agile squads work in sprints. At the end of each sprint, they deliver fully functional solutions for their customers. These solutions should be in line with their mission. And this mission should be in line with their tribe’s purpose. Innovative companies like Spotify use this Agile way of working to continuously deliver improved user experiences. Their product range is relatively simple, and their services are fully digital. But how will this work when traditional companies, banks for instance, transform into digital agile companies? Hoshin Kanri is the right tool for the job.

Hoshin Kanri Policy Deployment starts at a strategic level:

  1. Formulate break-through goals for 3 to 5 years ahead. These are the goals that will make a real impact on the purpose of the tribe.
  2. Translate these break-through goals into one-year goals. This is the annual plan for the tribe, with challenging but achievable goals.
  3. Translate these goals to Squad Missions. These missions describe the processes that need to be improved.
  4. Determine which metrics will show the progress of the improvement.

Then, the squad gets to work. But not by creating a backlog directly from their mission. The mission should be used as a starting point for improvements. The squad has a set of proven Lean improvement techniques at their disposal. From large scale to small scale (and from low to high frequency):

  1. (Re)design, e.g. Value Stream Mapping, Design for Six Sigma or Washing Lanes
  2. DMAIC projects, executed by green- and blackbelts
  3. KAIZEN improvements, team improvement sessions
  4. Kata improvement, weekly improvement as a habit
Hoshin Kanri for Agile
Hoshin Kanri for Agile

 

Finally, the backlog is filled from each of these improvements. As each of the improvements are focused on the same strategic priorities, the backlog will be completely in line with mission and purpose.

 

Menno R. van Dijk

Hoshin Kanri Policy Deployment to align Agile Squad missions and Tribe purpose

Hoshin Kanri – Toyota’s Lean take on policy deployment – is an excellent tool to align Squad missions and Tribe purpose in an Agile organization. When traditional organizations in Financial Services transform into Agile organizations, new challenges will arise. One of these challenges could well be: how to keep the improvement efforts of all the autonomous Squads aligned with the Tribe’s purpose?

Hoshin Kanri Policy Deployment starts with formulating break-through goals for 3 to 5 years ahead. These are the goals that will make a real impact on the purpose of the tribe. Second step is to translate these break-through goals into one-year goals. This is the annual plan for the tribe, with challenging but achievable goals. Third step is to translate these goals to Squad Missions. These missions describe the processes that need to be improved. Final step is to determine which metrics will show the progress of the improvement. Translating the squad’s improvement goals into KPI’s and targets makes it possible to steer on output and still make sure things are moving in the right direction. The picture below illustrates this.

Hoshin Kanri aligns squads with the tribe purpose

Hoshin Kanri aligns squads with the tribe purpose

The outcome of the Hoshin Kanri Policy Deploycement gets a prominent place on the “Plan” wall in the Obeya Room of the tribe, and the improvement can start within the squads. Squads can be autonomous, because alignment is ensured through the Hoshin Kanri.

Each squad will get to work improving what needs to be improved. They can use their Improvement Kata for small, incremental improvements. Larger improvements require a Kaizen approach. For problems where the solution isn’t clear, DMAIC projects can be started. And the biggest changes require redesign or innovation. But whatever the approach is, the overall progress can be monitored in the KPI’s. This is show in the second picture.

Hoshin Kanri aligns the improvement efforts of squads

Hoshin Kanri aligns the improvement efforts of squads

All these elements together ensure that the squads start improving in the right direction. Of course, it wouldn’t be Agile if there wouldn’t be room to make changes along the way. But this shouldn’t be needed too often. All in all, I’m very excited about using Hoshin Kanri Policy Deployment to align autonomous agile squads with their tribe’s purpose.

Menno R. van Dijk.

Gamification helps Super7 teams to become successful

Recently, I attended a presentation on how Gamification can help Super7 teams to become successful. A talented graduate student had designed a method where super7 teams manage not their actual performance, but instead manage a virtual company.

First, a Super7 team got to choose their virtual business. For instance, a team would choose to become a virtual coffee bar or tea parlor. Their operational results as a Super7 were translated into virtual sales figures and profits. When quality or timeliness would fall behind slightly, this would show up in customers staying away from their virtual company. Excellent service in their real work would boost their virtual popularity and sales. And, the amount of capacity needed to process their real work would determine the costs side of their business.

I can only imagine the fun the teams must have had with this approach. And, the results where great, from what I heard. I hope to share more about the exciting possibilities of applying gamification for Super7’s in the near future. And, could this be a whole new way of engaging scrum teams or agile squads as well?

Menno R. van Dijk.

Principles of Agile and Super7 compared

Many companies are adopting the principles of agile, nowadays. And they often find that their operations departments are ahead in this field. This is because of their experience with Lean and autonomous teams – their experience with Super7 Operations.

So, how do the principles of agile compare to the princples of Super7 Operations?

The agile principles (source: www.agilemanifesto.org):

  1. Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
  2. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change or the customer’s competitive advantage.
  3. Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
  4. Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
  5. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
  6. The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation
  7. Working software is the primary measure of progress.
  8. Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
  9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
  10. Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential.
  11. The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
  12. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

The principles of Super7 Operations:

  1. The Super7 team has a goal that is relevant for the customer. The Super 7 team can help each other in achieving this goal. The goal is translated daily to a goal for that day. The Super7 team is committed to achieving the daily goal. When problems arise during the day and the daily goal can’t be met, the Super 7 team responses by doing what they can to come as close as possible to the goal. When that isn’t enough to reach the goal, they ask for help from their team manager.
  2. All Super 7 team members have the skills for all types of work. The Super7 Skills-Matrix shows who can do what, and at what skill level. The Super 7 team members are sufficiently flexible in working hours to be able to meet customer demand on busy days.
  3. Team manager steers on output. Manager stimulates the Super 7 team to come up with solutions. Manager is available and helpful when the Super7 asks for help.
  4. The daily rhythm is tuned to the rhythm of the customer requests. There is a fixed schedule for Super 7 team stand-up meetings, focused on achieving the daily goal.
  5. Super 7 team is autonomous in work distribution and who does what. There is a standard way of working. The team can deviate from this standard, as part of an improvement experiment.
  6. The Super 7 team is stimulated to continuously make the daily goals more challenging. Standard norm times are improved and planning is made tighter. This is done though Improvement Kata and Kaizen. As an Improvement Kata habit, a Super7 conducts small experiments, aimed at achieving the next target condition. For larger improvements, they plan a Kaizen event. There is a constructive performance dialogue, based on facts and figures, on all level of the organization.
  7. The Super 7 uses visual management. Daily goal and progress towards this is visible on the Super7 team board. Performance of last period is visible, as is the trend. Running and planned experiments and improvements are visible on the Super7 team board.                                                                                

The similarities are clear:

  • Delivering value to the customer is the main priority
  • Teamwork is key
  • Self-organization
  • Flexibility over planning
  • Face-to-face is the best way
  • Continuous improvement based on reflection on performance

Because of these similarities, experience with Super7 Operations will facilitate the transition towards agility.

Menno R. van Dijk.

 

Transformation to Agile benefits from LeanSixSigma experience

When traditional organizations transform into Agile, they can benefit from their LeanSixSigma experience.

Many traditional companies are looking with great interest at how innovative tech companies are organized. Even in banking, an industry that is known for being conservative, experiments are taking place with Agile Organization:

  • multidisciplinary squads instead of functional teams,
  • tribes instead of departments
  • IT development and business management in close cooperation
  • Continuous delivery of small changes (sprints) instead of big projects

LSS
Lean Six Sigma has been applied in banking for more than a decade. Many banks have their own pool of Lean Experts or LeanSixSigma Blackbelts. As Agile is based on similar principles as Lean and the Toyota Production System, this experience may be very valuable in this transition.

 

Agile organizations use Agile Coaches, to help the team in the use of the Agile and Lean principles. LeanSixSigma could add to that. For instance:

  • Put focus on the Voice of the Customer. Challenge the Squads to determine and measure the customer impact of their work.
  • Make sure the quantitative results of every sprint are visible
  • Achieve alignment between squad missions, tribe purpose and company vision. This can be done through Hoshin Kanri – a method for policy deployment developed by Toyota and an important Lean method
  • Accelerate problem solving by applying the Coaching Kata to the squads Improvement Kata, and by applying Analytical Problem Solving techniques from LeanSixSigma

 

The transformation of classical Back-Offices to Lean Super7 Operations has been an exciting journey so far. The transformation from a top-down functional organization to an Agile organization promises to be even more so.

Menno R. van Dijk.

Similarities and differences between Agile Squads and Super7 teams

What are the similarities and differences between Agile Squads and Super7 teams?

Many traditional companies are adopting an Agile way of working, inspired by innovative companies like Spotify, Zappos or Google. In financial services there is also inspiration from within: the transition from classical operational management towards Super7 Operations.

 Similarities Agile Squads and Super7 teams

  • Small team of 5 to 9 members
  • High degree of autonomy
  • Steered on output
  • Team has one mission, one common goal
  • Workload and progress is made visual
  • High degree of flexibility in skills and capacity

Differences Agile Squads and Super7 teams

  • Super7 Operations for ‘customer requests’: operational work, at least in part repetitive
  • Agile Squads for ‘customer missions’: customer services or enablers involving any combination of product development, marketing, product management, data management and IT
  • Super7’s have daily goals (e.g. TITO): daily processing of all customer requests for that day
  • Agile Squads work in weekly sprints, weekly releases of customer-ready solutions or improvements

My conclusion is that both Super7 teams and Agile Squad are manifestations of the same Lean principles. For example, both apply visual management, flexible resources (capacity and skills) and customer centricity.  I expect that the Agile trend delivers the same break-through results in product development and product management as the Super7 trend has delivered in operations.

Menno R. van Dijk

Super7 teams benefit from Lean Operational Management

Super7 teams benefit from having the standard processing times and performance dashboards in place. These elements from Operational Management help a Super7 team in steering itself. When these basic elements from Operational Management are missing, implementation projects tend to take more time. It takes longer before the Super7 teams become autonomous.

Super7 Operations claims to be the next step for Lean in financial services. But how much does it owe to the previous Lean wave in financial Services? Which elements from Lean Operational Management are essential for the success of Super7 Operations?

The Next Step for Lean builds on the previous step

The way I see it, Super7 Operations is the logical next step for Lean in financial services. The first lean waves in financial services were often aimed at introducing standardized work,  standard processing times, and making performance visible in performance dashboards.

Standard processing times make the work plannable. In Lean Operational Management, managers use them to plan the work for their teams. And afterwards, actual production is compared with planned production to calculate performance*. The manager then retains control through performance dashboards.

As I explain in my book, Super7 teams are steered on output. And, in Super7 Operations, the teams get the freedom and responsibility to plan their own work. However, both output steering and planning your own work becomes much easier when standard working times and dashboards are in place.

In Super7 Operations, the customer determines what needs to be done: the workload is based on the actual demand from that day. The manager sets the boundary conditions: that all requests are processed the same day (Today In, Today Out, or TITO). Work is often planned on forecast. But, to make planning decisions, the team needs to be able to match the forecasted workload to their planned capacity. And this can only be done when the forecasted number of customer requests can be translated into hours of work with the help of standard processing times.

Dashboards are equally important in Super7 Operations, but primarily for the teams themselves. They need to be able to see if all their Continuous Improvement efforts are paying off. And dashboards can be used to constantly raise the bar, both by the team itself and by the manager. Too many green lights become a red light, as the saying goes. This means that when the daily targets are met every day, this should lead to a more challenging target. More service in the same time for instance, or doing the same work with less capacity.

When standard processing times and performance dashboards, two basic elements from Lean Operational Management, are missing, implementation projects tend to take more time. It takes longer before the Super7 teams can make the decisions that make them truly autonomous.

Menno R. van Dijk

*Performance in Financial Services is often expressed in Total Team Effectiveness, a derivative of Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) which is the standard within manufacturing.

 

Creating the right culture for Super7 Operations

How to create the right culture for Super7 teams?

Creativity and autonomy florishes within a culture of trust, support, stretch and discipline. Traditional companies often rely on constraints, compliance, control and binding through contracts. This is explained excellenty by Prof. Sumantra Ghosha.

Recently, I was given a tip to watch a short clip form Prof. Sumantra Ghoshal, called “the smell of the place”. To my opinion, this clip is very relevant for autonomous teams, scrum, agile and Super7 Opertions. Below, you’ll find his brilliant speech from the World Economic Forum about corporate environments and the faults of management in creating a positive work place.

The smell in which creativity and autonomy – and therefore Super7 Operations – will florish

  • Stretch (environment in which everybody wants to take that extra step)
  • Discipline (self-discipline, be on time, agree to disagree and committ to decisions)
  • Support (managers change from exercisers of control to coaching, guidance, support)
  • Trust (act on the presumption that people act in the best intrest of their company)

 In contrast, the smell traditional companies often create:

  • Constraints in stead of stretch,
  • Compliance in stead of dicipline,
  • Control in stead of support,
  • Contracts in stead of trust.

Important lesson from this video is that the smell can be changed. You can convert the smell of the place from “downtown Calcutta in the summer” to “a forest in spring”. It has been done before. And, you can use the smell metaphor in explaining and visualizing this change.

One department I recently visited had a brown paper on their Scrum-wall, on which all teammembers rate the smell they are smelling on a scale from 1 (Calcutta) to 10 (Forest). This way, they can monitor the culture, and address issues that cause ‘bad smells’.

Menno R. van Dijk.

Making Agile Squads work

To make Agile Squads work, you can make specialists multi-skilled to enable the Squad to prioritize across all disciplines within their squad – an important lesson from our Super7 experience.

Many companies are trying to emulate the success that Spotify has had with their Agile engineering culture (see YouTube: part1, part2). Traditional companies are now considering reorganizing into Squads, Tribes and Chapters. Let’s recap first:

A Squad is a small, multi-disciplinary team, much like a Super7 team, but more focused on developing and managing a product or product feature rather than processing customer requests.

A Tribe is more-or-less what we used to call a department, but again, focused on a related group of products or services.

A chapter is the ‘matrix-layer’, a group of similar specialism from different tribes.

As Spotify explains in their second video, strong growth has made the Squad & Tribe organization more complex. So how do you get this type of organization to work?

My observation is that the matrix of Chapters running crisscross through Tribes creates 2 potential problems.

1. Less autonomous problem solving power for the Squads because different specialists can’t help each other.

– Squad members are all specialists in their own field
– Each specialist will have their own list of priorities
– When one specialist’s highest priority is really critical, the risk is that his/her squad members can’t help this specialist, simply because they don’t know enough of the subject.
– Instead, they can only focus on their own priorities, sub optimizing the squad results

2. Requirement of more management because of complexity

– In the situation as described above, the specialist in need of help will turn to his/her chapter-members.
– This requires cross-squad or even cross-tribe prioritizing
– And this will require a lot of talk, compromising, decision making.
– In short, this will increase the need of management.

For these 2 problems, our experience with Super7 could hold the solution:

Use multi-skilled specialists, and enable the Squad to prioritize across all disciplines within their squad. A graduation study has shown that Super7’s that can rely on help from within their own Super7 are more effective and have better team-spirit than teams that need to lend a hand to other Super7’s on a regular basis. This emphasizes the importance of multi-skilled specialists.

How would this work for Squads?

  • Super7 shows us that specialists need to be able to help at least 2 other members of their Super7.
  • Translated to Squads: every squad-member needs to be a specialist in at least 2, but preferably 3 specialisms that are needed within the squad.

This will demand a lot of the people involved. They need to be trained. But as Toyota puts it: “we build people before we build cars”.

Menno R. van Dijk.

Do’s and don’ts of managing autonomous teams (or Super7’s) – part V

Managing autonomous teams, or Super7 teams, requires a different management style than managing regular teams. Here’s the last part the key do’s and don’ts from my practice as a Lean Super7 consultant. And, in my opinion, this one is the most important.

Perhaps most importantly, Do: Use your own strengths and talents.
Don’t: Put all your efforts on improving your weaknesses.

The best advice I can give any manager is: be the best person that you can be. Use your talents as much as you can. If you only focus on improving your weaknesses, you won’t be able to perform at your best. You will be most effective when you do the things you like to do and use your own unique talents while doing them. When faced with a transition from a more traditional organization towards autonomous teams or Super7’s, you might at first only see those elements that are difficult for you, that you don’t like and where you can’t use your talents. But if you give it a chance, if you start experimenting, you might find that there is a way to use your strengths in the new way of working. In my experience, most managers will find a way that fits them. Of course, managing autonomous teams or Super7’s will not be the perfect job for everybody. It is important for your happiness and for your chances to success that you keep searching for an environment where you can do the things you like and use your talents at the same time. And in some cases, this may mean a change of career. But, there isn’t just one way or one perfect style of managing autonomous teams. Take a chance, experiment, and you might just find the style that works for you and for your teams.

Menno R. van Dijk.