If you have not listened to this podcast with Art Byrne, you should.
Podcast: Lean as your Business Model w Art Byrne Transcript: Lean as a Business Model
I believe an organization should evolve into Hoshin Kanri versus implementing it. As a result, I purposely left this section with the least amount of content. most Hoshin Kanri books are filled with literature about the tools such as SWOT, SOAR and the previous Lean Tools mentioned. They will also fill the pages with understanding strategy, vision, benchmarking and other management tools. My thoughts are that you should take The Path of Least Resistance. Most often your existing process is not all that broken and if you want to introduce change, you need to tweak around with it rather than jump headfirst. The success of the practice of SDCA and PDCA throughout the organization will ultimately determine your success in Hoshin Kanri. Few things can be done on a Macro level that were unsuccessful at the micro level.
David Anderson is a thought leader in managing effective technology development. He leads a consulting, training and publishing business at David J, Anderson & Associates. David may be best known for his book, Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business.
David takes an evolutionary approach to change. An excerpt from a podcast with David:
The whole Kanban thing really came about from the challenge of people resisting change. I was looking for ways of pinpointing root causes of problems. I found that introducing a full system where we’re limiting the work in progress, was a way of addressing quite commonly occurring problems. Problems with committing on something too early, making commitments where there was a great deal of uncertainty.
So under conditions of uncertainty, people were committing too early, and a Kanban system was a way of deferring commitment until much later, Lean people might say, “the last responsible moment.” And also controlling a lot of the variability in the flow of work through the limiting of work in progress, the understanding of different types of work and different classes of service and setting capacity allocations for those, controlling interruptions and disruption.
Eliminating the uncertainty and delaying commitment until later, the net result is much more predictable delivery. Those problems were commonly occurring, so implementing a Kanban system was like a point solution for an incremental improvement. And then, from that, we discovered that Kanban systems catalyze further changes. They provoke conversations about other problems, and we get this evolutionary change emerging.
Kanban has been a lot about perhaps not managing change but trying to avoid biting off too much change. And, in general, I’ve felt that there’s been a problem with organizations, executives particularly, the corporate magpies, they get excited about shiny objects, like new process solutions that promise a nirvana of projects, correctly prioritized and delivered on time, within a very reasonable budget and perhaps ever shrinking budgets.
They go after these exciting sounding results, often trying to achieve too much too soon, and their organization just doesn’t have a capability to absorb and manage all the change that they desire. They really want the outcome, but getting there is beyond their capability.
Podcast: Change is Best when it Evolves EBook: Transitions should Evolve not be Managed
Bonus Material: