Kaveh Kalantar's Blog

The most powerful tool of any agile or lean methodology is continuous improvement. And continues improvement happens only by observing, evaluating, learning and experimenting in a safe to fail environment. Although every change is not improvement, but every improvement is a change. Therefore, changing is the only thing that doesn’t change in an environment that embraces a culture of continues improvement. Because change is inevitable, Therefore it is crucial for everyone to be aware of the fundamentals and essentials of proven change management processes. At this short article we will review these fundamentals. Change and The Goal Of the System Every change initiative must have a reason. The reason must justify the change, the justification is only valid when it is related to the goal of the system or the organisation or the team. As there are always limited resources (e.g. time, money, manpower), therefore it is wise to focus only on things that are obstacles between you and...

What is the Goal of a business? This is the first question to answer in order to establish a process of on going improvement (POOGI). The goal must be clear, simple and measurable, and it must be understood by all players in the organization, who are involve somehow in improving the system.  A general goal could be something like this  " To make money by increasing net profit, while simultaneously increasing return on investment, and simultaneously increasing cash flow."   as told by Alex to his team members in The Goal novel written by Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt. (in short making money now and in the future.) Therefore, any action that moves the organization toward this goal is productive and any action that takes the organization away from it is non-productive. (this is not the same as efficiency, forget efficiency for now, this is about productivity and effectiveness, I deal with efficiency later). Actually, such a goal can be applied to many for profit organizat...

System Improvement results from three equally important and mutually dependent factors: Effective methods the potential to apply them the self-discipline to act using the methods Two of these three factors in turn, depend on: Our knowledge about our system Authority (including resources) to do something about it Motivation to improve Willingness to accept accountability for action Ref Book:  H. William Dettme r, 2007, The Logical Thinking Process : A system approach to complex problem solving, 2nd Edition, Amer Society for Quality

During organization/system improvement you may face a dilemma of Resource Utilization. Common understanding of Resource utilization is that you should use resources to their fullest capacity, some managers set special policy such as 100% Utilization across organization for every single resource. Before I go ahead and say how stupid is such decision, I would like to first define Resource Utilization and Resource Activation. These two terminology are not synonym. 100% Capacity(or maybe this is 90%) - Regardless of the street all are full. Same will happen if you go to 100% Activation without knowing the resource state (Constraint vs non-constraint) Utilizing a resource, as Dr. Goldratt defines, means making use of a resource in a way that moves the system toward the goal. ( Check this Blog ) Activating a resource is like pressing the ON switch of a machine, it starts no matter if there is any benefit that can be gained from the work it is doing. For example, activating a non-bottle...

At the first part of Implementing POOGI  , I described that in order to balance a system, market demand should not be matched to resource capacity because of the relationship of two phenomenons: Dependent Events and Statistical Fluctuation. However, you should balance the capacity of the production "flow" to market demand. In this case, some resources may have idle time and some may turn into system constraint. In fact, the capacity of the flow should be little bit less than the demand, so if demand goes down you do not loose money. In balancing the flow, you may realize that some resource have less capacity than market demand and are impacting the entire flow. These resources are bottlenecks or to put it in a better term,system constraints. So, bottleneck is a resource whose capacity is equal to or less than demand placed upon it. And a non-bottleneck is any resource whose capacity is greater than the demand placed on it. Here are couple of facts on bottleneck / Constrai...

What is the Goal of the business? This is the first question to answer in order to establish a process of on going improvement (POOGI). The goal must be clear, simple and measurable, and it must be understood by all players in the organization, who are involve somehow in improving the system. A general goal could be something like this " To make money by increasing net profit, while simultaneously increasing return on investment, and simultaneously increasing cash flow. " as told by Alex to his team members in The Goal novel written by Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt. Therefore, any action that moves the organization toward this goal is productive and any action that takes the organization away from it is non-productive. Actually, such a goal can be applied to many for profit organizations. Let's take an Advertising Agency as an example. For such an agency Customer Satisfaction is critical but it can not be the main goal. In fact, main goal (similar to the goal above) is depe...

Dr. Taiichi Ohno identified seven category of waste in manufacturing and production that can be applied to project management, to make project environment Leaner. Overproduction, Waiting, Transportation, excess inventory, excess motion, non-value-added processing and defects are the seven categories of waste in Lean manufacturing. Here is a brief translation of  7 categories of waste in project management environment, especially in multi-project environment or/and project management system of systems: 1- Overproduction in project environment happens: when a task is assigned to a resource before the task is available! or when a task is assigned to a resource because the resource is available and not because the task needs to be performed. or doing a task as part of the project, but in fact it is not part of delivering the value of the project. 2- Waiting in project environment is one of those killers; when a task is half way through, and a resource is pulled away to work ...