Kumar:
That tune always gets me. It's catchy.
Mike:
You like that tune? Yeah.
Kumar:
What was that, Mike?
Mike:
You like the tune, that was it. It's good.
Kumar:
I actually need to come up with another tune. Even though it is nice, it's getting kind of old. Anyway.
Mike:
Keep it fresh, right?
Kumar:
Yeah, exactly. Welcome everyone to another episode of Agile Shorts. And in this episode, we're going to be talking about agile in manufacturing. And our resident, well, one of our partners, Mike, who's here with us is going to be talking about what that means. One of our clients at Agile Meridian is a manufacturer, of course, we won't dive all true, but we will talk a little bit about what does it mean, agile in manufacturing. Aren't they la lean already? Why do they need Agile? And so what about that? To you, Mike, what's... Oh, actually before we go there, maybe you can introduce yourself. I'm jumping ahead of myself.
Mike:
Hi everybody. Again, Mike Jebber, a partner here at Agile Meridian. I've been a coach and a consultant in helping individuals deliver amazing, as we say around here, right? We want to be able to help people enjoy their work, helping folks improve their work environments one person at a time, one product at a time and one and one deliverable at a time, but really helping people realize that what it is to have that deliver amazing feeling inside their organization all the time.
Kumar:
Yeah. I love that. Going back to our topic, agile in manufacturing, what makes this engagement different?
Mike:
In different, I guess you're meaning different from agile and technology, right, agile in the software world.
Kumar:
Yeah.
Mike:
Okay. Well, it's interesting because with it being a manufacturer the folks that I'm working with now, and this is the second engagement I've had with this group. I had an engagement a year prior where we were working to build a strategic initiatives leadership team, really a strategy team to do strategic initiatives and kind of help chart and guide what are the next things that we're going to do as an organization as a whole? This engagement, I happen to be working with a physical facility, one facility, that's actually come together that used to be, for many years, two to three different facilities at its height.
Mike:
And they condensed during COVID to a new building. There's a lot of change involved in that, there's a lot of newness going on and you've got an environment that's exacerbated by a pandemic, but it's also, in a sense, it's not your classic Agile. And I'll use that in terms of an agile software or technology play, because what we're really doing is we're going back to the roots of Agile itself, not the frameworks or the tool sets that we have, but that idea around Agile helping people interact better with people. Helping people become really effective interacting with each other, with that focus on alignment, consensus, and value delivery.
Mike:
And looking at that, when we were looking at the group a year ago, their delivery and what they were looking to do is slightly different from what we're doing now, but we've got a physical facility and it's really about getting this group of leaders within the organization that represent different parts of that building and what they do and the different aspects of what they do, all really together and going in the direction that they would like to go in and what they would like to see happen in terms of meeting the strategic goals and initiatives of the organization, but also achieving things that they want to do as professionals within their space and within their company.
Kumar:
Interesting. Again, how is it different? Because as you mentioned, in most Agile engagements where that involves software and software delivery teams sort of working in better proximity to their business counterparts, ideally as part of the same team, similar types of things, similar types of challenges, maybe not a physical plant especially since because of the pandemic, a lot of the software teams are remote. They don't have to be there.
Mike:
They weren't as impacted as this, yeah.
Kumar:
They're not as yeah, exactly. With a physical plant, I would imagine that, well, I mean, if you're building things or manufacturing things, you have to be there, right.
Mike:
You have to be there. Yeah.
Kumar:
Yeah.
Mike:
It happens at the plant, not at home. That's right.
Kumar:
Besides that, as a difference, what else do you see as a difference in this engagement with... Because I'm thinking about engagements that I'm in right now, and it's a lot of the same things, right. Change, dealing with the pandemic, change in how teams operate, improvement in how people that are sort of leading the work, interact with people that are doing the work, right, the leaders and the doers. And of course those roles, they're always shifting. A leader is a doer for some things too, right.
Mike:
Right.
Kumar:
And a doer can be a leader as well. Anyway, go back to the question. How is this engagement different for you?
Mike:
Well, this is... Actually, we're doing this without a framework.
Kumar:
Interesting.
Mike:
And we actually did that as well last year and it worked really, really well. It was a framework-less adaptation and application of true lean and agile values and principles. A lot of systems thinking methodology comes into this as well. And a lot of those values and principles and it's really techniques. There are a lot of techniques you would recognize that are familiar, that you and I both use in different places for different reasons, but those techniques work well because they're techniques focused on people. And they're focused on getting and aligning and building knowledge around those people, building visibility, building alignment, building the ability to have consensus, building participation and building psychological safety and those things that help humans really have the beginnings of an environment where they can be the best version of themselves, both individually and as teams.
Mike:
It's really a mostly tool-less, it's somewhat tools, more tools last year when there was more COVID stuff. The strategic team, they're all over the country anyway, so we were doing a lot more stuff remote. This group, we started out, it was my first engagement after COVID. Well, not after, but as COVID has lightened up this summer that I was actually physically on site and putting it back together and using some of those old big and visual versions of things that we did. Very, very light on the tools, but very, very, still focused on techniques. First, again, with humans and that human focus and building that psychological safety, the bonding, getting participation and visibility up to allow alignment consensus to start to build, and we did pick a few things that we wanted to focus on. We had something that was relative to them that they knew and that they all wanted to achieve or improve as kind of the canvas, I would say, that we were working against to do this.
Kumar:
In a typical Agile engagement, you come in with a framework, and this is framework-less. You come in with scrum or if it's a larger organization, they've been doing scrum for a while, you may in with some kind of a scaling framework. And typically there's some role changes in how people perceive their roles. Forget the titles, it's just the roles that they play, right. In scrum, you've got the product owner and you've got the scrum master and you've got the team and as you scale up, then maybe you have the uber product owner for sort of a big product area and things like that. With a frameless approach, how did you help them rationalize the roles that they need to play, not the titles, but the roles that they need to play to be supportive, collaborative, innovative, all the outcomes that we expect from agile teams?
Mike:
Right. Right. At first, it was about building this group of individuals as a team. They did not exist as a team prior to starting this engagement. And the first thing we wanted to do was really focus and hone in on the people first. Let's not worry about the organization, the operation, the facility, or even the individual spaces that everybody works in, we're going to bring that in a little bit later. Let's focus in on the people first, let's get the people the ability to discover a little bit about themselves, a little bit about each other, to gain visibility around the human aspect of the members sitting around physically, literally sitting around the room with us in their new conference room, which was very nice, and functioning as a unit to figure out who are these individuals in the room and how do they work?
Mike:
Because they knew of each other and some of them had some relationships, but there weren't a lot of existing relationships that were heavy built up in some of these areas. And some of them were maybe even a little bit challenged based on some of the historical aspects. We had some members there that had been there well over two decades and some members that have only been there for eight months or 10 months. There's a 10 year difference, right, and when you've got organizations that have been around for a while, there's a whole lot of, we've done things this way for a long time, and then there's new ideas. And so we had to get all that kind of up invisible. And we had to get everybody understanding where everybody was coming from.
Mike:
We were fortunate enough to have the group that had did this last year have a lot of success with leveraging that time period that we spent together, so that when we got into the work, it just started to fly, really started to move quickly.
Kumar:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Mike:
And some of those folks also came in and I kind of brought some of those folks in and talked to this group and they have relationships with some of the members of this group. They were able to apply and give them, "Hey, this feels a little different. I know we've gone through process improvement before," and there was a lot of, "We've done this before, we've done value stream maps, we've done personality assessments, we've done..." It's never helped. And instead of asking them why and trying to figure out why it didn't work, I went back and grabbed these other folks and said, "Hey, let's give them some examples, let's show them some real things going on." We focused on the people first without those roles, without any roles at all at this point.
Kumar:
That's awesome. You mentioned personality assessments, so at first when you were saying get them to know each other, I thought you just had them go out and happy hour and...
Mike:
No. We said "Hey, I'm Mike and I'm Kumar and these are my interests," and so on and so forth, but no, it wasn't that. It was something more, something like a disk assessment or something where they really got to know themselves, right. Self-aware before they also know others.
Kumar:
There's an organization that we partner with that we've done a couple of engagements with that really focuses and hones in, on this type of stuff, purpose HQ. And they're very good at understanding multiple different types of things in terms of assessments, but really about not just taking that information, which they had said, "Hey, we've taken these before," but taking it and talking back about what does it mean and what does it mean as a team? What does it mean as a unit? Where are your core strengths as a group? Where are the deficiencies of the wholes that you should be aware of that we're going to have to compensate for in one way or another. Taking those in and working on that and in a structured way, but still, it's not a framework of any sort that we utilized. It's techniques and a few different tools, but really it was the application of that and then turning that around and having them do some introspective collaborative work around where their strengths, opportunities, risks, and impediments were.
Mike:
Okay.
Kumar:
And that gave us the basis to start thinking about and start transitioning from where we are as a team and as human beings, as individuals and where our starting point is as a team, knowing where our strengths and our holes are. And then starting to move in towards the subject matter, which is going to be our canvas that we're going to start applying this new relationship that we're starting to build and taking our subject matter expertise from assembly, supply, quality, HR, engineering, all of these different components and these different members that are there and bringing them together.
Mike:
Yeah. That's really cool. Really have the team sort of gel, understand each other, understand themselves and each other a bit better, and then apply that team to the value stream, if you will, the value chain of how they manufacture whatever it is that they manufacture.
Kumar:
Right. We started the question with the role. What roles did you see emerge?
Mike:
It's interesting. Because there's very little overlay in terms of the different members of the group in terms of what they do for the organization. They interact with each other, but they don't, they don't lay on top of each other. There's not a lot of cohesiveness there, plus you've got three physical facilities moving into one. The idea is that we wanted to get together and have everybody participate, right? One of the things that we talked about, and it wasn't until after we'd gotten some of the people stuff moved through that, and kind of moved into some of the opportunities on strengths and risks and things, that we introduced the concept of a DRI structure. If there's one thing that we did that was kind of a framework, if you want to call it, or a lightweight structure, it was really around directly responsible individuals, DRI. Because they are all directly responsible for those areas of that facility, right?
Mike:
It was a very natural thing for them, they're kind of like, "Yeah, well, of course. I'm a directly responsible individual for quality or for whatever." It was very easy for them to consume and to reutilize. And it was really about just putting a little bit of structure around it and for myself to kind of be that facilitator and that lead role for a little while, until we had the ability for smaller groups to break out and do that for themselves on different sub-projects or things they wanted to work on.
Kumar:
That's really cool. DRI structure is often paired wit leadership as a service structure, and so the idea being that DRIs may debate a topic, and if they cannot reach consensus on a decision on the topic, the leader in the room, facilitator, leader, their job is to decide the decider or decide who is closest to the decision to make a decision, right. And so, say we're debating a decision and you happen to be the DRI for that, and the group can't reach consensus, then I might say something like "Mike, you're closest to it, which way should we go?" And that's the way we go, right? That's the protocol.
Mike:
And that's a very natural way for this group to operate because you've got subject matter experts in different areas, very, very different areas across the entire value stream of a physical plant and the operations within that plant. It really fit well, and we really didn't have to go into the whole kind of psychology or the structure around DRIs because it just felt very natural to them. They just went right into it. Again, didn't introduce it in the beginning, we wanted to wait until we had bonding and a better collaborative environment, had that chance for them to gel and cohere before we started to introduce things like this. And the interesting thing is while it's been pretty framework-less, in terms of we haven't defined roles outside of what their jobs are, their spaces, people, similar to what you would consider in some roles like a scrum master or something, they take on a lot of those things that they do.
Mike:
What I've also seen with the organization is a little bit, as you and I have been learning about tight, loose, tight, I've seen that start to almost kind of bubble up, not really intentionally, almost as a natural byproduct of the way that we're operating. I would say that the leadership at this organization very much likes that mode of operability with that, and we actually worked on kind of the first tight last year with the last year's group and a little bit of the leadership. That's kind of moving itself well towards this, but they want to see that middle be loose at this facility. They like that idea because I think it's going to be much more adaptable and produce quicker returns and quicker results with better quality. They're a very customer focused company, incredibly customer focused. They see the value in this and being able to be responsive to customers.
Kumar:
Interesting.
Mike:
And so I think that's something that we may get into talking about once we've kind of done some actual work and say "Now, guess what? This kind of represents, right." And kind of bring that up as a follow up.
Kumar:
I love the way this engagement is moving for you. It seems very sort of grassroots, however, also it's sort of a middle out and a top down, right? Every layer, it seems at least from what you're saying, that every rep area, if you will, in the company is represented in some way. And for reference, tight, loose, tight, TLT, is a leadership pattern that was, I don't know who created it, many creators of it and it's been around for probably 15, 17 years now and is being used by several organizations, mostly in Europe and Scandinavia. Telhanorte, the Royal Bank of Australia, I believe, is using it. There's a bank in Australia has been using it for a while and it describes this pattern of tight on goals, outcomes, and purpose, right?
Kumar:
Loose on execution, meaning how the teams go about delivering on those outcomes and tight again on the measures and the feedback cycle to ensure that everyone is aligned and staying on a path on the same course. Actually we have a video in our YouTube channel where we talk about this, so please do check that out. And we also host a meetup on tight, loose, tight. I'll put the links down in the comments below later on to both the meet up and the video, the YouTube videos that are out there. But what's interesting to me and really exciting is that this is just emerging organically.
Mike:
Well, when you think about a manufacturing plant, it is a microcosm of a company, right? It's its own little subcontinent of a company, right? This company has plants and or locations in many different places, but this is one physical representation of almost a complete end to end imprint or a carbon copy, a smaller version, a mini me, if you want to say, of the organization that you get to work with. And the great thing is, is through example, you can exemplify and show real provable improvement opportunities and the improvements real visible and tangible improvements in the collaboration of the people across those different skill sets inside of that facility. That physical nature of it kind of gives you that ability to kind of think about it in a more traditional way.
Kumar:
Yeah.
Mike:
How has leadership responded? I mean, I know they brought you in, but how are they responding to this? I mean, because undoubtedly there's change for them too, right? They're not making all the decisions if DRIs are responsible for certain things, and DRIs, I think, I liken to, in a way, product owners, right? I mean, it's not a direct relationship certainly or direct analogous relationship, but they're similar to product owners. Their product owners are responsible directly for the backlog of value that is being prioritized and DRIs are similar in terms of making decisions about the work that they are responsible for. Back to my question, how has leadership responded to this change?
Kumar:
Very well. The key here that I think that we worked on last year as well with the first group, but with this group is how can we show measurable movement? How can we show real measurable movement? How can we get the aha's going enough that people are talking about this when I'm not there, right. When we're not there helping them, when they're outside of sessions sitting down and talking about, "Oh my gosh, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah," right? I mean, getting some of that going as well as, not as much in terms of we haven't made drastic changes yet at the organization, but they're starting to build up what those might look like. And it was interesting because when you're talking about forming a new group that never existed, there's a lot less stress and anxiety around that from a leadership thing, because this is new, we're adding it.
Kumar:
We're impacting something that it's existing that has current needs. Obviously the people have their jobs, but it was new. This is something that is been functioning and operating, right. I think that it takes a lot of courage as a leader to do this because now you're cutting into day to day operations, right? You're looking at this and you're saying these are people that help me run this plant and I want to make sure that we do this in a responsible way, but we don't take 18 year years to get any improvement. We've got to show improvement quickly, it doesn't have to be drastic, but we got to show that improvement. They've been very, very supportive, I think, when I looked at the way that the leadership was operating, when we did the group a year ago, I said when they mentioned and brought me into this second thing, I thought we can absolutely do this because I know how you operate, I know how well you're going to support the maturation of the environment we're trying to build there for these people to have this amazing experience and to become really innovative at the plant level.
Mike:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), mm-hmm (affirmative).
Kumar:
I think that they've been great. They have not tried to direct or drive any of this, they've been very open and candid about things that they need to be able to show, which is real, right. We need to be able to show these improvements, we need to show we're making progress. And we've been very collaborative in working in that way. And there's a few things that I've done a little out of order to help them out in certain ways and there's things that they've helped me in terms of getting the team to the right point in time to do something or show something. The collaboration, I think, makes all the difference when you're dealing with these things, and just like everything else that you and I have experienced, Kumar, without leadership not just buy in or support, they have to be engaged.
Mike:
Involved, yeah.
Kumar:
And what's interesting is they're engaged in a way that is loose. They're tightly coupled to the outcomes and they're tightly coupled to the direction that we want to go to, but they are not getting in the middle of the team and directing them in terms of what they need to do. They really want to see that growth of those humans and in their spaces.
Mike:
That's very mature behavior. And I wonder how much of that is because of their manufacturing background, lean manufacturing. And I don't know, I think you know this about me, Mike, I used to run restaurants and that's a manufacturing operation.
Kumar:
It is.
Mike:
And we had to be very lean and agile and nimble about the way we operated that enterprise. I mean, it was an entire company within the four walls. When I was running restaurants, I had up to 150, 200 people that worked there, not all at one time, but the staff was that big. And things had to run like clockwork in order to serve the product to the customer. And the product lifecycle in a restaurant is minutes, not months or years, right, as it is with software or manufacturing, not many years, but it's still a much longer logistical pipeline value stream with manufacturing, something like a phone as opposed to a meal at a restaurant.
Kumar:
Right. Right.
Mike:
And so I wonder, getting back to my long winded question. This is just not an agile short, this one, this is just so interesting.
Kumar:
This is an agile long, I think.
Mike:
Yeah.
Kumar:
For sure. Yeah. It's a good topic, though.
Mike:
Yeah. I just wonder how much of your success is attributable to their existing culture in lean and experience with lean and in their experience.
Mike:
I think that has a lot to do with it. I think that being in manufacturing, the concept of lean, there was a lot of lean knowledge around the building in different spaces. Not everybody on the team, though, has that. I mean, you've got folks coming from HR and from finance that while lean does exist in those spaces, it hasn't been there as long. And there's some of the newer members to the organization as well. When you look at that, I think the lean in the systems, thinking things, just makes sense because they're in a flow environment, right. When we started talking about this, identifying the ability to start bringing this all back to flow helps people grasp onto it faster. What can you do to help a group get their aha about I get how this is going to work for me, for us.
Mike:
If you can do that, that's where I think the lean played in. And frankly, you and I both do this, the agile portion is as much for the people as it for the process or the flow. The lean side is really about people being able to see and then interact with that flow of work. We always use the two in combination when we're working with different groups. This tends to be, I think, little more lean... Well, it was agile first because it was the people first, but then when we got into moving into the specific area that we were going to focus on, lean just jumps right in, right. It jumps right into this, but we had established good psychological safety and good participation with visibility on the individuals there. Then it was comfortable to start moving into that and the lean concept were pretty simple to grasp on to and create.
Kumar:
That's awesome. What would you say are the two biggest things that you've, two or three biggest things, that you've learned from this?
Mike:
Well, I know this is called agile manufacturing, and I think this is a case study, in a way, for Agile outside of IT, right, if you want to say. Because I've worked with other service organizations in healthcare and things like that, that don't have a lot of the technology stuff that we deal with in software development or technology development, but I would say that you don't have to have frameworks and tools to get the value out of lean and agile. I know people talk about that, but it's hard to get examples of that. Well, where did you do this? Well, where did you do something where you got that?
Mike:
You got somebody to actually show the values and principles without the framework, without the roles or the ceremonies, the artifacts. I will say this, I do substitute ceremonies with cadence in everything that I do. And if anybody that I've ever worked with, they'll tell you one thing. He says, he's very flexible with a lot of things, but not around cadence. Cadence is absolutely key. You get on a pattern of activity, a pattern of commitment to each other, to the team, to the deliverable and the mission and the value and the customers are serving, that's as important as the work you do. And I can't stress that enough with everyone that I work with. If you're adding cadence as a real key focus and you're working on and leveraging tools and techniques to focus on the humans and to focus on the work, you can get the benefits of lean agile, even systems thinking, without frameworks and without tools, without roles, without those existing things. You just need some of these other little elements that we've plugged in and used in different ways, in different structures contextually and situationally, to help them get going quickly and to show that value quickly. Because that will give you more runway to take off and build bigger planes.
Kumar:
Yeah. And I sort of equate cadence to iterating, right? [crosstalk 00:30:17].
Mike:
Very similar.
Kumar:
Even Conn bond, you're, you're still going through a continuous improvement cycle where at frequent intervals, you're looking at your metrics, your flow, your wait times, your cycle times, things like that to look at improvements that you can make. And that cycle of cadence, that cadence of accountability really can be as frequent or infrequent as the team decides that it needs to be. And so I think you're right, cadence is such an important key to any sort of a lean and agile approach for continuous improvement. Awesome.
Mike:
Yep. And those frameworks do a nice job of giving you a taste of what cadence might look like, right.
Kumar:
Yeah.
Mike:
If you're not disciplined or haven't been exposed to the importance of cadence, I think, but you don't need it... You need the cadence part, you don't necessarily need the framework if you have another way to help them realize the value of that cadence.
Kumar:
Yeah. The other thing I heard you say quite often during the course of this call was this idea of alignment with autonomy.
Mike:
Yes.
Kumar:
The teams, the loose part, right? Tight on outcomes and goals and tight on measures and feedback, which leads to alignment of the people that are doing the work where you don't have to micromanage them. You have alignment, people are aligned, they know where to go, they know which direction to head, and they can be largely autonomous and left alone to do what they need to do, because there's plenty of trust built up in the system to allow that to happen. And that's...
Mike:
Yeah. We're on a pattern of reporting up of what we're doing and where we're going and what we're doing next and what we've achieved. The autonomy's there, but there's still that tight to the responsibility of the mission and the goal and having the measurables, right, and keeping people informed, but that's really a part of a greater alignment activity. And it's really another cadence, right, a monthly update of leadership and of stakeholders and of other parties, as well as the strategic initiatives group that we started last year. If the strategic initiatives group comes up with something they want to do, there's got to be space to do it somewhere. Well, you've got a plant that can be very adaptable. Now you've got a much more arrangeable situation that you can really take advantage of an opportunity if it presents itself.
Kumar:
Very, very good point. All right. Well, this is definitely not a short, it's a very entertaining medium, Agile Medium.
Mike:
Definitely.
Kumar:
I really appreciate you taking the extra time to talk about this engagement. I mean, we've talked about it before in passing and actually I learned a lot today in this call about this client and I'm so jealous and envious that you actually get to go work at the client location and work with real whiteboards and stickies and markers.
Mike:
Yeah. Yeah. The winner will probably curtail that a little bit, but it was wonderful to do that. And I have to tell you, as good as all of these tools are and everything else, the amount of work we got done in the weeks that we had over the summer, we were twice as fast with getting the improvements and the getting folks to where they needed to be by having that room approach. I do miss it as well. This is good, it's not bad, but it is nice to get back and see real humans every once in a while.
Kumar:
Yeah. Yeah. I envy, like I said, I envy you and I'm just waiting for this pandemic, the latest Delta variant, to subside and so that people can get back to as normal a life as possible. I know it's never going to be like it was before, but at least some more face to face interaction is what I'm looking for.
Mike:
It is nice.
Kumar:
Thank you so much.
Mike:
Absolutely.
Kumar:
And thanks for watching this episode. As I mentioned, we'll have some links down below to some of the things we talked about. The meetup on tight, loose, tight, links to our YouTube channel, to the video where we talk about tight, tight, loose, tight. And I think that's all I mentioned, so we'll leave it at that. Again, thank you, Mike, for staying on longer.
Mike:
Thank you everybody, have a good one.
Kumar:
All right. Take care.
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