Rottie Consulting LLC was founded in April 2013 with the intent to provide consulting services to a variety of industries specializing in IT Project Management & Delivery, Technology Leadership, Organizational Change Management, Leadership Coaching, and International (South American) Relations. My podcast guest tomorrow is the founder of Rottie, Gabriela (Gabi) Vandermark.
An excerpt from the podcast:
Joe: I had the pleasure of previewing your slides before your presentation and you discuss something that popped out of me that was different. When you talk about waste in Lean Product Development, you mention Reusable Knowledge. Is that a major waste? Reusable, what does that really mean?
Gabi: Reusable Knowledge is actually the focus that you should have in Product Development. Lean Manufacturing, the focus is on removing waste, but in Lean Manufacturing, you already have a product developed, and a product identified. You’re really just finding a way to produce that and deliver that to your customer in the fastest, cheapest, quickest and most quality manner. For Lean Product Development, you’re discovering. You go from an idea all the way to market launch and to do that, you need to reuse knowledge because it’s a set of experiments. It’s that iterative process where you need to learn as you go so that you can ultimately come up with a product that is ideal for the market. In Lean Product Development, the focus is really on Reusable Knowledge. How do you share the knowledge that you gain through your iterations of that product with your entire team so that everybody can benefit from that, and even more important is how can you share that knowledge that it can be validated and complimented by other people’s ideas.
Joe: So reusable isn’t something that is stale; the existing knowledge over in a file cabinet that you’re reusing. It’s something that you’re creating.
Gabi: Correct and the key here is collaboration. One of the important things in Lean Product Development and Agile, in general, is how do you collaborate with your team? If you’re all collocated, it becomes not easy but it becomes a little bit more natural. You can implement visual management systems where you expose your information on boards and stickies and make it very visible to the people that are there. In my case, when I work with international projects, it becomes a little bit more challenging because we’re not physically together, but collaboration and communication are the keys to that reusable knowledge, so it doesn’t become stale.
The way I do it typically, I find ways of translating the visual management that you would think of – whiteboards and stickies to an online version. Not to plug anything but Trello is one of the tools that I use. It’s very easy to use; anybody can jump in there and there’s a lot of flexibility to build the boards that you need. So for my projects, when I’m working with people in South America where communication and collaboration is key to making sure that that knowledge that is gained, one, is spread out to the team, and two, it doesn’t become stale as you mentioned.