InfoQ Homepage Toyota Production System Content on InfoQ
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Adding Agile to Lean at Toyota Connected
Adding agility to Lean Product Development enabled Toyota Connected to deliver faster, with higher quality, and reduced costs. Nigel Thurlow presented “Lean is NOT enough” at Lean Digital Summit 2018 where he showed how they embraced agile for colocated teams and outsourcing, and how portfolio planning evolved to an executive prioritization model to increase business agility.
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What Can We Learn from the Digital Natives Using Lean
Fabrice Bernhard, co-founder and CEO of Theodo UK, presented "what lean can learn from digital natives" at Lean Digital Summit 2018. Digital natives are familiar with the lean startup and agile practices. They go further by combining Agile with the Toyota Production System which enables them to experiment with ideas, spread innovations, and scale fast.
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Doubling Delivery Without Multiplying Staff, Using Lean Principles
Lean tools can help to improve productivity and fulfil customer commitments. At Keepeek, techniques like pull flow, PDCA, and Red Bin are used to analyse discrepancies. Improvements are prioritised on customer impact. As a result, their throughput increased significantly, customer satisfaction went up, and their NPS improved.
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The Toyota Way at Codeweavers
Codeweavers combines the Toyota way with extreme programming and continuous delivery in development and support to do small, frequent releases. The advice to apply the Toyota way is to start with the books, understand the philosophy, and begin teaching it to others.
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Applying Hoshin Kanri at Toyota
Toyota uses Hoshin Kanri to give direction on where they want to improve using Lean IT. Employees at various levels can exchange ideas about Hoshin items, and potentially get them approved by higher management. This approach makes results stronger and increases buy- in from the employees who contribute upfront.
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Applying Supply Chain Management to Deliver Faster with Higher Quality
Supply chain management can raise the bar with continuous development, argues Joshua Corman, Director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative and co-founder of Rugged Software. Our dependence on IT and software is growing faster than our ability to secure it, and applying supply chain approaches to software development helps to address complexity which reduces risks and increases quality.
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Toyota Using Waterfall?
Lean software development has been inspired by lean manufacturing and specifically the work that Toyota pioneered in the field. It is then very surprising to find out that the software development arm of Toyota has been working with waterfall and is in it's infancy in lean software development.
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Lean 'Standard Work' Applied to Software Development
One component of the Toyota Production System is the concept of standard (or standardized) work. A recent post on the Kanban Development list asked if this concept carries over when TPS and lean are applied to software projects. Despite the fact that software development is not manufacturing, respondents did find value in applying the 'standard work' concept to development.
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Questioning Servant Leadership
Is the role of an agile manager only that of servant leader? Should they ever use traditional command and control tools? Should the agile manager ever wield authority and make demands of the team? Should they ever make changes in the membership?
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Fowler: Agile Vs. Lean Misses the Point
In a recent blog post, Martin Fowler explains how the question "Should I use Lean software development instead of Agile?" is based on a false premise. Agile and lean are so deeply interwoven that if you are doing agile you are doing lean, and vice-versa. Those considering process change will likely find the description of the interrelatedness interesting and enlightening.
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Presentation: The Development of a New Car at Toyota
In this presentation made during Agile 2008, Kenji Hiranabe talks about Toyota's development process of a new car. Kenji shares his experience meeting Nobuaki Katayama, Chief Engineer at Toyota, and the lessons he learned from him.
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Death of Hybrid Camry Chief Engineer is Ruled Overwork
Last month the Japanese labor board ruled that the death of the Chief Engineer on the Camry Hybrid project was ‘karoshi’ (death by over work). This story raised a number of interesting issues about what we can learn from Toyota, sustainable effort and why we develop software.
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Agile Kanban: Visual Tracking Beyond the Team Room
In the beginning Agile was largely a developer-driven initiative, sometimes improving development processes only to find the real bottlenecks lay outside developer control. In his latest InfoQ article, Kenji Hiranabe analyses Lean manufacturing's "Kanban" visual tracking tool, how it differs from the Agile taskboard, and how it helps identify more far-reaching improvements.
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Leadership is not Obsolete for Self-Organizing Teams!
In this talk, software thought leader Mary Poppendieck reviewed 20th century management theories, including Toyota and Deming, and went on to talk about "the matrix problem", alignment, waste cutting, planning, standards and other topics including the role of measurement: "cash flow thinking" over "balance sheet thinking". InfoQ presents video of this popular talk from the Agile2007 conference.
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Without a Defined Process, How Will We Know Who To Blame?
"A fundamental premise of the 'train-wreck' approach to management is that the primary cause of problems is 'dereliction of duty'" said Peter Scholtes in his 2003 book on leadership. Mary Poppendieck's recent article on process, people and systems asked: "Which is more important - process or people?" and showed how Lean is an alternative to certified process improvement programs like ISO 9000.