The International Community for Project Managers (ICPM)

“You see but you do not observe, Watson.” Sherlock Holmes favorite quip to drive home a point may not exactly be Gaelic to most fans of Arthur Conan Doyle. While Holmes’ hoped this would awake the somnolent espionage skills in Watson, Doyle’s protagonist could well have been the inspiration for many Japanese Kaizen gurus.

Masaaki Imai, the noted Kaizen guru, an advocate of the above aphorism when in India for the 8th time, related an anecdote to make his point about the management’s apathy to production related issues.

A French automaker had invited Imai and his team to study the productivity at one of their plants. On going down to the shop floor they found the assembly line was 1500 meters long. It is roughly fifteen times the size of assembly lines in Japanese auto companies. The longer the assembly line the greater will be the number of people, which consequently means more mistakes too.

Imai recommend that managers need to go down to the Gemba (Japanese for shop floor) more often to observe the nitty-gritty of the production processes. Hands-on experience is what triggers off the grey cells he says. “The key is to be inquisitive. If I, as a manager, notice a leak in one of the machines I must be able to track down the problem. I must know that the leak is because of a gap, which has been caused by the vibrating action of the machine. And that the vibration has caused two specific screws to loosen and cause the gap.” After putting forth the case, he continues, “The solution could be in tightening those two screws every morning before the machine is started, thus avoiding the possibility of a leak.” Sounds simple. Well, because it is. That is Gemba Kaizen.

Kaizen is a Japanese word, which means “gradual, orderly and continuous improvement with minimal investment”. Kaizen is an ongoing process focusing on elimination of wastes in all systems of an organization.

“Think about all that you have” to get “all that you need”... Christopher Columbus set out on his first voyage from the Port of Palos (near Huelva) in southern Spain, on August 3, 1492. Three ships, the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa Maria were in his command. Little did Columbus know that he would revolutionize the world by discovering the Bahamas and the United States of America. Accomplishments of great men like Columbus are unquestionable. A clear starting point and an aim is all they had. Every person sets goals that he wishes to accomplish. The irony is that even with clear goals, we end up with other alternatives. Often we desire something but get something else. Why does this happen?

We all talk a lot about improvements in different areas of our professional lives. We implement new cool techniques to make our project management better. We use proven techniques to achieve better products from our software development process. We think how to we can get better quality of our applications. We usually put a lot of effort into improvement process.