Author: Mark

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Eliminating Key Points

TWI Job Instruction is a structured process for breaking a job or task into teachable elements, and a 4 step process for teaching that job to someone.

I am not going to try to explain everything about breaking down a job here, this post is primarily for people who use job breakdowns and job instruction already.

The process of breaking down a job involves:

  • Identifying the Important Steps – the sub-tasks that materially advance the work.
  • Then identifying Key Points within important steps. These are things which the team member must pay special attention to, or perform a specific way. The guideline is that a key point is something which:
    • Is a safety issue – could injure the worker, or someone else.
    • Would “make or break the job” – critical to quality or the outcome of the work.
    • Is a “knack” or special technique that an experienced team member would use to make the job easier to do.

Breaking down a job this way takes practice, but it is a great way to identify the elements that are critical to safely getting a quality job done, and ensuring that the team member understands them.

But I want to propose this is only the first step.

Every key point is something the team member must remember in order to to not get hurt (or hurt others); to avoid scrapping or damaging something; to perform at the level you need.

Take it to the next level.

Think of these key points and the training that they drive as temporary countermeasures.  They are stop gaps you have in place until you can do something more robust.

Take one key point at a time. Why is it necessary? Why is it possible to do this step any way but the best way?

Can you alter the work environment – the product, the process, the equipment, the visual controls to reduce the things the team member has to remember (and you have to remember to teach)?

Can you make it impossible to perform that step in any way other than the way it should be done?

If you can’t, can you make it impossible to proceed until the error is corrected, before any harm is done?

If you can’t, can you make it so obvious that it is impossible to miss?

If you can’t, can you put in a robust reminder? (Signs and placards generally DON’T WORK for this unless they are especially “sticky.”

Every key point is something you have identified as critical to doing the job directly. Therefore every key point should drive a focused effort to mistake-proof the work.

You want to have as few as possible… but no fewer.

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Mike Rother Overview of Toyota Kata

This is a 5 minute edit of the presentation Mike Rother made at the UK Lean summit.

It is a succinct summary of interaction between a coach (leader) and learner (someone working on improving a process).

My thoughts are below the video…

OK – here are some things I have learned with these methods “in the wild.”

Most organizations I have been working with can’t take on 1-3 year challenges and stay the course for that duration. The horizons are too far for them to see what is possible within that kind of time frame and stay the course.

I have been trying 3-4 month time horizons for initial challenges in organizations where everyone is learning the basics at all levels. That gives them an opportunity to practice with a horizon that is less likely to be derailed by a sudden change in direction during that time. Eventually, as they develop capability, they can extend the time horizon and morph these practice challenges into something more formal, linked to the business plan.

Middle managers like to leap onto the coaching questions much too early – before they are capable of actually coaching. The coaching questions are seductive because they are written down and structured.

The PDCA process is much more nuanced, but it must be mastered before attempting to coach. Why? Because the coaching process is application of PDCA toward the learner’s development.

While it is OK to round-robin coaching and actual process improvement, everyone has to work together to reflect and learn.

In addition, those middle managers tend to try to leap into coaching before they have an internally set non-negotiable sense of “True North” – driving toward better and better flow.

When a middle manager is taking on the role of the “learner” there is a great temptation for him to delegate tasks to others, and get reports. This is status quo, and does nothing at all to develop capability.

Like everything else we do in the West, or at least in the USA, we try to get there fast by skipping the basics.

Make no mistake – you don’t “implement Toyota Kata.”

You use it as a structure to build foundational capability and new thinking patterns.

Those patterns are only developed through practice, and deliberate reflection on the management process itself.

I have also seen an organization that is “getting it” pretty quickly. The difference is that they are all overtly in “we are just learning this” mode, and willing to make mistakes and learn from them vs. trying to appear to be competent from the get-go.

Mike Rother has other videos on YouTube as 734Mike.

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The Value of Mistake Proofing

Most companies use some version of the words “respect for people” in their HR mantras. But how is that respect demonstrated?

A team member made a mistake today. He is building a sub-assembly on a mixed model line. He picked a part from a small blue bin with a divider in it.

On one side of that divider is the part he should have picked and installed.

On the other side of the divider is a very similar part.

Guess which one ended up in his hand?

The issue wasn’t caught until a couple of positions down line. When it was caught, it was quickly reworked and corrected.

This particular team member is coming up on the end of his 90 day probationary employment period.

He has seen co-workers who “didn’t make it” (not cut out for assembly work). But he is a smart guy, hard worker, has participated in a lot of improvements for the work he is doing.

Nevertheless, he is worried about the consequences of making this mistake so close to his 90 day evaluation. He just wrote, it seems, what he hopes is his last COBRA check* that will cover him and his wife until his health insurance kicks in at the end of the month.

What is the value of mistake-proofing this operation?

Actually, the consequences of this error are minor. It is easily caught and quickly corrected in a subsequent operation. It is very, very rare. You could make the argument that there are better returns spending the limited problem solving time on bigger issues, and you’d be right… to a point.

But what if this team member’s experience was to see attention focused, not on him, but on what it was about the layout of the work area, about the presentation of parts, about the structure of the work, made it possible to make this error.

What if they acknowledged, overtly, that this kind of mistake is a consequence of being a human being, and that it was only that he happened to be the one standing there when the random chance generator came up?

What if he saw the team leader and supervisor engage him in conversation about what might be done to at least eliminate some of those possibilities? (We don’t really know what happened, though there are some likely guesses.)

What if he was also asked to look for other similar error opportunities, even in his co-worker’s areas, and help eliminate those as well?

What would be the return?

Might this team member work just a little harder to make things even better in the future?

Maybe he would help turn around a cynical or skeptical co-worker.

Maybe he would feel a bit appreciated for what he is contributing instead of losing sleep about his job.

Maybe, at some point in the future, when he is a shop steward, he might remember that “they” are all to human as well.

Who knows.

Before you say “it isn’t worth it” remember what Deming pointed out – “Management’s real job is to manage the unmeasurable.”

Good news – in this (real life) case, they are, for sure, eliminating the split bin and separating the two similar parts from one another; plus likely separating two other bins holding similar bolts. Maybe more, there are some ideas being kicked around.

In the end, though, consider if you will the ROI on team members knowing you will support them in their quest to succeed every day.

*For my non-US readers: COBRA is a program where someone can continue employer-provided health care after termination of employment for up to 18 months by paying the cost yourself. This is sometimes cheaper than purchasing private health insurance.

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I came across this old fable again recently.

So much of it applies to the improvement culture – especially if you run your equipment all the time to “maximize your output”

Once upon a time, a very strong woodcutter asked for a job in a timber merchant and he got it. The pay was really good and so was the work condition. For those reasons, the woodcutter was determined to do his best.

His boss gave him an axe and showed him the area where he supposed to work.

The first day, the woodcutter brought 18 trees.

“Congratulations,” the boss said. “Go on that way!”

Very motivated by the boss words, the woodcutter tried harder the next day, but he could only bring 15 trees. The third day he tried even harder, but he could only bring 10 trees. Day after day he was bringing less and less trees.

“I must be losing my strength”, the woodcutter thought. He went to the boss and apologized, saying that he could not understand what was going on.

“When was the last time you sharpened your axe?” the boss asked.

“Sharpen? I had no time to sharpen my axe. I have been very busy trying to cut trees…”

In the real world, this kind of decline happens much more slowly.

And it happens well beyond the context of equipment and maintenance.

If you don’t work to continuously improve your processes, they are degrading. You can’t just “standardize” your way to stability.

 

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“True North” – Explicit or Intrinsic?

compassOne of the factors common to organizations that maintain a continuous improvement culture is leadership alignment on an overall direction for improvement – a “True North” – that defines the perfection you are striving for.

Steve Spear describes Toyota’s “Ideal” as:

An activity or a system of activities is IDEAL if it always produces and delivers:

(a) defect-free responses (those that meet the customer’s expectations),

(b) on-demand (only when triggered by the customer’s request),

(c) in batches of one,

(d) with immediate response times,

(e) without waste, and

(f) with physical, emotional, and professional safety for the supplier.

(From The Toyota Production System: An Example of Managing Complex Social / Technical Systems, Steven Spear’s PhD dissertation, 1999, Harvard University)

You (and I) can quibble about some of the semantics, but overall, this is a pretty good list.

Mike Rother (not coincidently, I am sure) puts up something quite similar in Toyota Kata:

…Toyota has for several decades been pursuing a long-term vision that consists of:

  • Zero defects
  • 100% value added
  • One-piece-flow, in sequence, on demand
  • Security for people

Toyota sees this particular ideal-state condition – if it were achieved through an entire value stream – as the way of manufacturing with the highest quality, at the lowest cost, with the shortest lead time. In recent years, Toyota began referring to this as its “true north” for production.

As I have tried to emphasize the importance of a leadership team having a clear sense of “True North” I have noticed that many of them get bogged down in trying to develop and articulate a concrete statement. (This is partly my fault, and I am revising my training materials to reflect what I am writing here.)

What I am realizing is that this is more of an “attractor” than a rule set. Let me explain through a bit of digression.

When we see something, we have an immediate emotional response. Generally it is attraction toward something we see as good (or are curious about); or avoidance of something we see as fearful or dangerous.

We construct a logical reason for that emotional reaction several tenths of a second after that emotional reaction is firmly anchored. Thus, our logic follows, rather than driving, our responses to things. This happens so fast that we are not usually aware, but two people seeing the same thing can respond very differently based on their individual background and experience. I don’t want to dive too deeply into psychology here, so I’ll pull back out of this.

“True North” sets the direction of process improvement because there is high alignment on what kinds of process changes are attractive vs. those which should be avoided. When I say “attractive” I mean “we want to actively move toward them” meaning the organization will expend energy, ingenuity, and resources to do so. This is how continuous improvement is driven.

If I am right, then “True North” is more of an “I know it when I see it” kind of thing than it is a carefully articulated statement.

If I look at other businesses who are (or have been) pretty well aligned with their efforts, I can see the same kind of thing.

For example, though I doubt that it is articulated internally in this way, it has been pretty clear to me “Windows Everywhere” has been something that sets (or set) overall direction within Microsoft. (I’ll admit I don’t have as strong a sense of this as I did in the late 1990’s when my social circles included a number of people who worked there.)

A local hospital does articulate theirs, but it also makes sense: “No wait, no harm.”

Most organizations I have dealt with, though, don’t have a good sense of long-range perfection. They are mired in the details of today, tomorrow, this quarter.

They might have some kind of “vision” or “mission” statement, but often those are paragraphs that are carefully constructed to address constituencies (“Satisfying our customers while delivering maximum shareholder value and being a great place to work, blah, blah”)

Those “visions” though are rarely actively used to guide conversations or decisions, much less continuous improvement.

Since I believe this is a gap these teams need to close if they are to shift toward a continuous improvement culture, I need to improve how I am getting this across to them.

So… the next thing I am going to try is to rework my “True North” instruction and do a better job of framing it as something to actively move toward rather than something to try to logically articulate.

“True North” may be more of a feeling rather than a logical test.

This means that the job of the teacher / practitioner / change agent is to hold on to that “True North” during your coaching until the leaner “gets it” and starts actively seeking solutions that move in that direction.

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Constraints Push Innovation

This Ted Talk by Amos Winter is about a fantastic project to develop an inexpensive, rugged, rough-terrain wheelchair for people in countries with much less infrastructure than we take for granted in the U.S. and Europe.

Though they didn’t follow the traditional “3P” approach, their project did reveal a few key elements. More below the video.

What Winter talks about as constraints:

  • Cost < $200
  • Parts readily available
  • Repairable by local trades (bicycle shops)

we could also talk about as a “target condition.”

Winter describes an iterative design process where the first two attempts failed once they got them into the hands of actual users. A valuable lesson – the only true “voice of the customer” is the customer!

The “Marshmallow Challenge” (in the link back above) describes the power of an iterative process within a constrained design space as well – though the most rapid learning occurs in a group that may surprise you.

A company I worked for got a challenge from Mr. Nakao of Shingijutsu: “Make your next year of aggressive growth with:

  • No more people.
  • No more space.
  • No more money (capital).

In other words, squeeze it out of the waste that is all around you. That was a year of intense learning for all of us, but even today that company has one of the highest value-add per unit of area I have seen in any plant, with operations reaching inventory turns in mid-to-high double digits.

The experience of “constraints driving innovation” also plays out in a client project I have been involved with. They set out a challenge for themselves that was very aggressive – an order of magnitude difference from their current baseline. Then they set out to meet that challenge.

Past history (they tell me) has been to routinely break the “constraints” in these projects, but this time around they are sticking to their own rules.

What has emerged a large wall covered with major sub-goals, each with its criteria (the target condition), the current level of performance, the gap, the next trial they expect to run, the expected result.

They have been working hard to try to reduce the cycle time of those experiments: What can we do with what we have; What can we do for free or cheap rather than waiting until everything is here?

The key point here is that a well focused challenge can align people’s efforts and keep them focused on the objective.

The best challenges are the ones that come from within.

What are you striving for?

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One-By-One; On Demand; As Requested

Once again we see another data point on the trend.

Why is “batching more efficient?”

Simple – you haven’t solved the problems yet.

Here is an ice cream shop that has no ice cream… until you order it.

Does this shop surface the next layer of issues to solve? Certainly. But by thinking it is possible and they trying it, she is learning fast.

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Finding Patterns

“What is your target condition?”

“One-by-one flow, meeting an 11 minute planned cycle time, with two people.”

“What is your current condition now?”

“We are making rate, but our lowest repeatable times add up to 28 minutes, and with that and the 32% variation we are seeing, we need 3 people on the line to do it consistently.”

“Where is all of that variation coming from? What are people struggling with?”

“All of the assemblies are different!”

And this was kind of true. We had five different larger assemblies firing in a repeating cycle:

A, B, C, A, D, E, A, B, C, A, D, E

And to make the discussion more interesting, each of these items has four sub-assemblies, of different types, that go into it. This line was building those sub-assemblies in a sequence that matched the need. So it is easy to see why all of that variation seemed overwhelming.

But there was commonality, a lot of it. The operations were very similar, with the differences being things like:

  • A left-hand or right-hand difference.
  • An operation is included, or excluded from a particular sub-assembly.
  • Differences in geometry that had little or no bearing on the actual operations being conducted.

My goal was to lead them to doing more detailed observations, seeing the blind assembly operations, chaotic layout on the bench, the occasional hunt for information, and at this point, the learning curve the assemblers are still coming down as we identify key points.

We are hard-wired to see differences in things – that blade of grass is bent, is there a tiger there? Sometimes it is more challenging to seek out and become aware of the underlying patterns. In other words, what these items have in common.

Rather than looking at obstacles to build the parts, we want to look at the obstacles to smoothly carrying out the operations. It is a subtle difference, but an important one. Sometimes you have to search through the noise to find the signal.

As of this writing, the bench is getting better organized, tools are getting homes, and some assembly aids and tools are being developed to avoid having large fingers trying to get things done in small places.

The work is starting to stabilize enough that the patterns are becoming more visible, which allows capturing the work breakdown in a rational way that can be taught – first the base industrial skills, then the common operations, then the sequence of those operations for specific parts.

We’ll get there.

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TSA Kata

Robert Heinlein observed (through the HOLMES IV computer character in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress) that “humor” often centers around the misfortune of others. I’ll make this little story topical by hypothetically applying the “coaching kata”…

This wasn’t me, just something I witnessed. If only people would apply PDCA to real life… If I were coaching this guy, it might go something like this:

“What is your target condition?”

“To get to the gate for my flight.”

“What is your current condition now?

“In the TSA security checkpoint.”

“What obstacle are you addressing?

“The TSA wants to do a secondary screen on me, delaying my passage through the checkpoint.”

“What was your last experiment?”

“I raised my voice and became indignant, accusing them of not knowing what they were doing.”

“What result did you expect?”

“That they would understand they were wrong, and let me pass.”

“What actually happened?”

“A lot more TSA agents showed up, along with a police officer.”

“What did you learn?”

I think the trajectory is pretty clear from this point…