David Anderson graciously invited us to speak once more at The Lean Software and Systems Conference. This time it’s in Long Beach California from May 3rd to 6th. Volcanoes permitting, here’s the abstract for our talk:
Getting Better
A systems approach to continuous improvement
Most organizations strive to steadily improve their performance. Some have become adept firefighters. Others have developed sophisticated capabilities. Continuous improvement aims to improve how the work actually works so that it achieves its purpose more effectively. Sometimes the fix to a problem seems obvious. Often a quick fix only addresses the symptoms of a problem. Preventing problems recurring requires root causes to be identified and dealt with. Popular approaches to continuous improvement have been successful at finding better ways to do work. But arguably they do not ask whether that work is the right work to be doing, in which case we can end up “doing the wrong things righter” [Seddon]. Without understanding the work as a system, changing how the work is done is unlikely to bring about lasting improvement and increase our knowledge.
We have participated in improvement efforts in a variety of organizations, including our own. Some improvements were achieved through trial-and-error; some just didn’t stick. Over the past year, we’ve been trying to improve at improving. We realized that we needed to devise a structured approach to problem-solving, one that was out in the open and part of our workspace. This session talks about our experiments, what we learned and goes into detail about some of the tools we found useful, such as the A3 technique and capability charts.
The Lean Software and Systems Conference
Long Beach California
May 3-6, 2011
Register now. We have a few discount codes available. If you want one please get in touch.
