By Penny Cloft & Michael Kennedy
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.
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 (11-14 June) 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.
