In the previous posts, I have shared with the community some Return of Experience regarding lean management.
Today I would like to focus on one basic concept, Team Work.
In every companies you will read or listen that, Team Work is a “must have”, that it is a priority for management, that big successes are only based on it…
However, what does “Team Work” means in Lean management?
Let’s start with the beginning…
In the late 1890s, Taylor, maybe the first Industry consultant, defined the concept of scientific organization of work as:
• Fragmentation of tasks (horizontal division)
• Specialization of employees
• Separation of design, execution and control tasks (vertical division).
Then in the 1900s, Ford applied this principle to automotive industry with the results we all know.
With the Taylorism and of course the Fordism, everyone knows what to do, everyone is trained to be efficient and everyone contributes to the company global mission. In a way, it is a kind of Team Work, as every member of the team needs to perform his role for a common target…
In many company, the definition of Team Work is indeed a Fordism declination, with the strong division of white colors and blue colors…the ones who thing about, the ones who do.
Lean management is an evolution of past production Systems as Fordism and of course you can find some links in between but you can also see major differences. I will not detailed all aspects of Team work in Lean but I would like to underling a Question who is linked to the previous post and who shows well a difference between Fordism and Lean: How to organize the team work?
To answer I will describe how a Services team could manage a delivery phase in Agile mode (lean in IT world):
The team members:
• A project manager
• An architect
• A Dev Leader
• 4 Developers
Before the Sprint starts, the entire team get a meeting where project manager and Architect explain the User Stories they need to deliver by the end of the 2 weeks and the priorities. Then Dev team ask questions to well understand the different targets and build the global action plan (1 action= 1 post it) under the validation of architect. Project Manager validates the adequacy load/capacity and then Dev Leader dispatches the first actions to the team based on competencies and customer priority.
At the end of the meeting, everyone understands the links between all team activities, understands why these action as to be done first and why that one may be postponed, everyone knows what the others are doing, why, and the consequences on the global target if some of them faces difficulties.
In Lean management there is no the white colors (Project Manager and Architect) who has all the knowledge and expertise and the Blue colors (Dev) who execute a plan.
In Lean management everyone plays its role, the targets are given, but everyone also participate to his own action plan creation.
It is for me the major topic if you really want to initiate Team Work with Lean principle: Trust your people, involve them in actions definition, share information and make it visible to everyone.
Here in Dassault Systèmes we have many tools that can support its approach and 3DLean is surely one of the best for that.
HowTo
