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Like many Kanban trainers, I like to reference POOGI and the Five Focusing Steps when I teach Kanban. I particularly remember one class in which a small company’s entire middle management layer was in attendance. It dawned on us that if the company had a constraint (and surely it must), it had to be represented by one of those managers in the room.
We all know the old idiom: “Talk is cheap.” It is easier to say you will do something than to actually do it. This same applies to Customer Centricity also. Leaders talk about importance of Customer Centricity and Experiences, but then when it is time to put the resources to support that talk, very little happens. So, what do we need to move Customer Centricity from talk to action in any organisation?
This is the second post about adoption barriers, with both being part of my broader series titled Collaboration Insights. Overall, this is the fourth post in a five part series, where I’ve been examining issues and opportunities to help enterprises move forward with collaboration technologies.
In Part 1 of Coaching Retrospectives, I wrote about starting off right. Now in Part 2 I’m going to move onto how you keep it fresh…
I think we must be very cautious about BYOD in education from an access point of view. While employees of companies may well need a device for personal use, and then they bring that device to work, connect it to systems and use their own apps for work-related activities, students don’t need a device. Yes, many children may have a device, but they don’t need one.
Earlier chapters have made it clear that the Kanban Method leaves room for interpretation. This is a strength. It is articulated sufficiently clearly for a community to rally around it, yet it is applied with sufficient diversity that its community continues to learn, to develop lower-level practices, and to share experiences. It is satisfying to observe that the Kanban community itself demonstrates in some measure all five of Senge’s characteristics of the Learning Organization.
Last week I attended Demandware’s XChange Conference in Las Vegas. Two themes struck me coming out of the event: one, the convergence of content and commerce is happening fast, and two, the convergence of eCommerce and point of sale is not happening quite as fast, but it easily promises to be the bigger deal of the two.
Let’s take them one at a time…
I just saw an item from the Washington Post from last December titled: Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace by Lindsey Kaufman. The article outlines her horrible experience at a New York ad agency that moved to an open office: lost productivity, judgement about personal routines and the daily experience of working as a member of a twelve person communal activity.
We have all experienced what I call Inheriting Other People’s Thinking. A stack of files, a directory on a server or some other form of “organized” content is given to us, and we are asked to pick up the work from our predecessor. We have just inherited someone else’s thinking. The way the files are arranged into folders, side notes and annotations, even fully documented processes, seem somehow foreign, even if we generally know the topic, or hold the same position.
Does Kanban in some neutral way just create the conditions for change, or does it come with its own biases? Do the method, its practitioners, and their host organizations need direction—in the form, perhaps, of an external true north (Chapter 14, Lean)—or will they steer themselves? As a community, we’ve considered these questions several times.