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Step out of the conference room and solve problems

9/6/2016

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Leaders, it is time to step out of the conference room and help your people solve their real problems and obstacles. Not by telling them what to do, but by helping them to think. That is how you create great products. Remember, your products are made by the people in your organization. Helping them to think outperforms all the improvement activities you can possibly think of. But how do you do that?

Start with telling your people that improvements will never lay off people. And say it again. Also mean it. If people think that improving production would result in less people to do the work, then improvements will risk their job and then they will resist to improve. If improvements would result in fewer people doing the work, then it is up to you as a manager to figure out what the people should do instead, but lay offs should be forbidden or you get stuck in status quo.

You also need to take walks in the production, daily. Power points and meetings does not solve problems. Removing impediments do. Look for bottlenecks and abnormalities in production with your people and help them find ways to fix it. Reward those who find problems. Problems are good, it is like your own gold mine. Do you have the visualisation showing your standard flow and abnormalities? 

Build habits around improvements and make experiments to find solutions. Make experiments until you have solved the problem completely and then standardize. Make it fun to solve problems and ask questions to make the people think. 

Educate people at the place they work, and train them by you. No external training, the training has to be made in the context of work, otherwise it is useless and they get knowledge they do not need. With external training they also have to translate trainings to their context which is hard. It is better to train in context by letting the people figure out by themselves and correct them when their thinking is not sufficient.

By following these advices you will have much more fun at work, less power pointing and a huge gain in motivation and production. 

The hard part is to build this habit. Do you have what it takes?

Znsei specializes in Kaizen, Lean startup, Genba, Agile, Kanban, Scrum, SAFe, Continuous Delivery, DevOps, and Toyota Kata.


Written by Martin Hollstrand - Founder of Zensei. 
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Is your business like a rugby game with 10 goals?

2/26/2016

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In my experience I see business running in to many different directions. Specially when it comes to the internal development of the business. It seems like all ideas of improvements are treated as good ideas. But what happens when you improve something but it is not the bottleneck nor aligned with the goal? Well in that case you waste your time and money!
When you improve your business it is super important to understand where you need to go. What is the goal, the vision and what challenges are pointing to those goals. Imagine a rugby game where you have 10 goals. How would you play that game, and how do you cooperate. If someone in the team aims for one goal and another for another goal, then you will be opponents instead of team members. 

This is what is happening in many organizations. Teams and people have different goals in different directions, and the people then are improving in different directions. You will then not be able to reach your internal goals for improvement.

What you need to do is decide, what is THE GOAL for your team. In what direction are you improving. Do you need to cut your lead times in half, or do you need to make the quality so high so you have zero defects, or do you want to make money off your product or service. Which is the goal, make that decision, communicate it and understand where you are as an organization in relation to that goal. Then you can start removing impediments and make experiments to start the journey towards the goal. Try it and see what happens. Make one goal and your team will take you there.

We at Znsei help you create the improvement habits. Contact us and we will tell you more about our method. 
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We believe all software teams have the potential to become world class performers. The difference between high performers and low performers lays in the ability to challenge one self to improve and to know exactly where you fall short!

The problem is that teams do not generally know where they fall short since they use the wrong methods to look at their work. This results in investing time and money on improvement activities which do not gain any substantial result.

Znsei specialises in helping teams to see their bottlenecks and through deliberate practice improve in small but most valuable steps. The methods and tools we use are based on proven science and track records to become high performing software teams. 
We offer scientific survey assessments, trainings, coaching, mentoring and our accelerator program.

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hello@znsei.com
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