LEAN Exchange — LPPDE Conference
Just attended the LPPDE conference as a speaker and as an attendee in San Jose. It was a great conference and I want to highlight some take a ways:
The big take away from the LPPDE conference was that everyone didn’t called it LEAN anymore we all called it innovation and another highlight was the importance of voice of the customer [VoC]. The challenge in innovation is the sharing the concepts (also the ones that doesn’t make it) with customer early in the process and test out feedback — will the customer buy your product and most important will they pay with their own money (you want the truth and if a customer will spend money you have a good design. You also need make sure the distribution channel is scalable to the concept otherwise you will face other bottle necks later when you execute.
Passion
Jose Pires talked about the importance of hiring the right people into your organization — how you should look for people who can inspire and provide passion. You need to hire self-motivated individuals and I love his model of showing self-motivated with modern smiles — take a look and you will even start to smiling just by looking at it:
Jose Pires also talked about that you can’t brainstorm you out of a problem — the solution is to look at the problem from a different perspective. I can only agree with Jose Pires and I can reflect this on how I solve my tasks. I had experience challenges where I needed to communicate a new definitions of new processes (I needed to be clear that the organization understood to use the right process and therefore we need to update the definitions). In this case I used duct tape and made a sub-way map — a red and a green line which both ended with their definition of the process. I solved the communications problem my looking at it from a different perspective or you can say I looked outside the box.
Communication
Communication is a big piece of the puzzle or the secret sauce as many also refer it too. What is the most efficient way to communicate when you have team in different locations, how do you maintain and share core knowledge. We all have a need to adapting to a virtual world where we have cross functional engagement throughout the teams. The key speakers presented different tools from simple google sheet to advanced video conference meeting with virtual LEAN/agile boards.
Innovation
Jim Euchner from Goodyear address that there are two types of innovation:
Innovation is a learning process where the importance is to perform experiment — Jim shared different examples of experiments which failed and this was so trustful to see an big organization sharing the ‘dark’ side of innovation. Normally you will always share the success stories and I know from my experience that you have initiatives or projects that are ‘up hill’ and you are really ‘pushing’ the car up hill and sometime you give up and start on a new project. The take away from Jim Euchner was sharing concepts with customers also the ones that might not work and if possible also do experiments with technology partners (be sure to include Legal,IP, Sales, marketing and procurement before you start running wit it).
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Originally published at Sannah Vinding.
