John Kotter Leading Change Leading Change is a practical guide to implementing change in a corporate business environment. It is essentially a change process consisting of 8 main stages: Establish a sense of urgency and overcome complacency. Create a strong guiding coalition. Develop an inspiring vision and strategy for achieving it to help employees take actions in the right directions. Communicate the vision in a simple and clear message. Empower employees to experiment with how to make the vision a reality. Generate and celebrate short wins. Consolidate gains and produce more change. Anchor new approaches in the culture.

Today's changing market conditions put pressure on businesses to adjust their operations quickly to the new business environment. Companies unable to implement change quickly fall behind their competition.

I recommend this book to business and technical leaders at all levels of the organization. Whether you are considering a small change on your project, a technology improvement, or a system-wide business transformation initiative, you can apply principles described in this book in your situation. Happy reading!

To order this book from Amazon, click here.

Derek Sivers posted an excellent 3-minute video on leadership, followers, and movement on his blog. Enjoy!

The following five principles are listed in the Harvard Business Review magazine, March 2010, page 24:

1. Keep people informed
2. Listen
3. Set clear objectives
4. Match the person with the job
5. Create meaningful work

An interesting study was mentioned in the March 2010 issue of the Harvard Business Review magazine. The study suggests that while bank online systems improve customer retention rates, they also increase transaction costs to serve each customer.

The conclusion is rather unexpected, isn't it?

Mike Rother, John Shook Learning to See: Value-Stream Mapping to Create Value and Eliminate MUDA Find this book on Amazon A value stream is all the actions required to bring a product or a service to a consumer. Value-stream mapping is a tool used to visualize and analyze the flow of materials and information in a value stream. Value-stream mapping identifies the sources of waste in a value stream and helps you improve the whole system, not just its individual components. In Learning to See, Mike Rother and John Shook highlight the differences between "Push", which produces according to a schedule, and "Pull", which produces only what the next process needs when it needs it. They explain why "Push" results in overproduction and other types of waste and offer their guidelines on how to introduce a lean value stream that generates the shortest lead time, highest quality, and lowest cost:

1. Produce to your takt time. Takt time is the customer demand rate divided by available working time per day.
2. Develop continuous flow wherever possible. Continuous flow produces one piece at a time with each item passed immediately from one process to the next.
3. Use supermarket pull systems to control production where continuous flow does not extend upstream: for example, when a process has too much lead time.
   
   Use a sized FIFO ("first in, first out") lane to maintain the flow when supermarket systems are not practical: for example, when we cannot create an inventory of all parts such as during custom development.
4. Try to send the customer schedule to only one production process. This process is called pacemaker: it sets a pace for all upstream processes and requires all downstream processes to be connected in a continuous flow.
5. Level the production mix: distribute the production of different products evenly over time at the pacemaker process.
6. Level the production volume: create an "initial pull" by releasing and withdrawing small, consistent increments of work at the pacemaker process. Consistent increment of work, aka "pitch" or "management time frame", will help you establish your takt time.
7. Develop the ability to make every part every day or every pitch in processes upstream of the pacemaker process.

The authors also included a list of questions designed to help you create future-state value-stream maps:

1. What is your takt time?
2. Will you build to a finished goods market from which the customer pulls, or directly to shipping?
3. Where can you use continuous flow processing?
4. Where will you use supermarket pull systems?
5. At what single point in the production chain will you schedule production?
6. How will you level the production mix?
7. What increment of work will you consistently release?
8. What process improvements will be necessary?

These questions along with two manufacturing plant examples will help you develop and introduce your own lean value streams in your organizations.

Learning to See is a well-written must-to-read technical workbook on value streams. I recommend it to anybody interested in Lean. Happy reading!

This is a remarkable presentation by Seth Godin on marketing.

Seth gave this talk at the Business of Software conference last year. It is about one hour long, full of interesting examples and ideas. Enjoy!

Patrick Lencioni The Five Dysfunctions of a Team Katheryn Petersen is put in charge of DecisionTech, a young promising 150-people Silicon Valley start-up, experiencing a series of disappointments: slipped deadlines, lost key employees, and deteriorated morale. With no high-tech experience and a limited political capital with the board, she does not seem to fit DecisionTech's corporate culture. After interviewing members of the board and spending time with her executives, Katheryn realizes that they do not function as a cohesive unit. She dedicates her time, energy, and effort to addressing the issues preventing her executive team from reaching its full potential.

Katheryn introduces her executives to a teamwork development model and teaches them how to overcome team dysfunctions:

1. Absence of Trust
2. Fear of Conflict
3. Lack of Commitment
4. Avoidance of Accountability
5. Inattention to Results

Will Katheryn be able to turn things around? Can she meet the revenue goals and dramatically increase the sales? Read this exciting and thought-provoking business novel to find out!

To order this book from Amazon, click here. Happy reading!

This month, we will continue the theme of A3 Thinking started in April with my review of "Managing to Learn" by John Shook.

Durward K. Sobek II and Art Smalley Understanding A3 Thinking. A Critical Component of Toyota's PDCA Management Process. In "Managing to Learn", John Shook described the fundamentals of A3 analysis and explained how to apply A3 thinking to improve problem solving and decision making in the organization. In "Understanding A3 Thinking", Durward and Art expanded the scope of A3 reports to two additional categories: proposal reports and status reviews. All three basic types of A3 reports are listed below: Problem-Solving A3 Report Proposal A3 Report Status A3 Report

This book is a practical and insightful introduction to A3 thinking. The authors illustrated how to create different types of A3 reports and included examples, templates, exercises, and review questions for each report category. Additional topics covered include:

• Form and style of the reports
• Commonly used graph types
• Standard A3 templates
• Hand-written vs. electronic A3 reports
• Storage and retrieval of A3's

Where shall you start if you are interested in learning logical, objective, result-focused A3 thinking process?

1. The authors recommend starting by writing a simple problem-solving report with the scope limited to an area you have control over. This way, you will be able to focus on learning the steps of producing an A3 without the complexity of interdepartmental politics.
2. Ask your co-workers as well as your manager/coach for feedback on your A3 report while it is still in progress. Seeking feedback from multiple sources is likely to be very insightful.
3. Continue using A3 reports to analyze, propose, and summarize your daily work processes and projects.

To order this book from Amazon, click here. Happy reading!

This month, we continue the theme of team self-reflection and retrospectives started last year with my review of "Project Retrospectives" by Norman Kerth.

Esther Derby, Diana Larsen Agile Retrospectives. Making Good Teams Great. This book is an excellent addition to Norman Kerth's guide to project retrospectives. Esther and Diana focus on iteration and release retrospectives which are short and frequent. As such, they provide feedback faster and allow the team to find and fix issues before it is too late for the project. Iteration retrospectives are repetitive, seemingly easier to organize and facilitate, and may not even require a formal facilitator. However, like any other routine executed over and over again, they could sometimes get tiring and even boring. What steps could we take to keep the discussion flow fresh and the team engaged? How could we help the team members apply their creative and unconventional thinking? Esther and Diana outlined a five-step approach to leading retrospectives. For each step, they offered practical advice and a set of activities and techniques to make retrospectives insightful and fun:

1. Set the Stage	2. Gather Data	3. Generate Insights	4. Decide What to Do	5. Close Retrospective
Checkin Focus On / Focus Off Explorer / Shopper / Vacationer / Prisoner Working Agreements Temperature Reading Satisfaction Histogram	Timeline Triple Nickels Color Code Dots Mad Sad Glad Locate Strengths Satisfaction Histogram Team Radar Like to Like	Brainstorming / Filtering Force Field Analysis Five Whys Fishbone Patterns and Shifts Prioritize with Dots Report Out and Synthesis Identify Themes Learning Matrix	Planning Game SMART Goals Circle of Questions Short Subjects Triple Nickels Force Field Analysis	+/Delta Appreciations Temperature Reading Helped, Hindered, Hypothesis Return on Time Invested Satisfaction Histogram Team Radar Learning Matrix Short Subjects

Retrospectives equipped with these activities will become a powerful iterative improvement tool for your team.

Note that I think of iteration, release, and project retrospectives as iterative rather than continuous improvement tools. They will help your team reflect, learn, adapt, and get better together, eventually reaching the performing stage of  Bruce Tuckman's Team Development Model. Performing teams are recommended to implement a continuous improvement tool, such as A3.

Esther's and Diana's book is easy to read, concise, and well organized. If you are doing iterative development, it is likely to serve you as a reference guide for many iterations to come.

To order this book from Amazon, click here. Happy reading!

The Standish Group has released its CHAOS Summary 2009 report. Let the data speak for itself: only 32% of all projects were successful, 44% were challenged, and the rest 24% failed. See more detail in this press release.