DailyKaizen

The readers and fellow LEAN bloggers always emphasize that LEAN is not about applying tools, it’s about philosophy. I enjoy seeing tools used as part of the work, rather than the focus of it.

This past weekend, in snowy Seattle, our team did an entire nervous system transplant of one of our core I.T. systems. It went very well. I woke up early on Sunday to visit the team and help out.

One of my colleagues showed me the visual system they had created as part of the work. It listed each task required to complete the night-long event, with projected times and outcomes. A red marker was used to write the actual time the task was completed.

As Edward Tufte might say, the visual had many dimensions of information contained within it. I could tell, at a glance:

• If the project was on schedule
• What percent of the project was complete

Which is what one would expect from such a display - things about the technical task. However, I could also learn things about the people and the process:

• The anxiety/excitement level of the staff, by the way they marked off each task - for example, several of the items were completed ahead of schedule. The red marker sometimes was used to cross out the projected time and replace it with the actual time. In other places, an exclamation mark was added for emphasis
• The fatigue level of staff members, by noticing how many hours they had been on duty, from the number of tasks crossed off and at which time(s) they started

This view of the work coupled with my watching and listening of those doing it, definitely made an impact on how I supported the group. They did a great job doing the work, and a great job leveraging tools we’ve observed to make it happen better.