Why and How Kaizen Fails
General pitfalls and impediments for a Kaizen culture, including the top ten reasons why Kaizen fails. How to manage change: why change fails and how to make change happen. The ten commandments of the Kaizen Agent. A framework for Agile Kaizen—events, peo
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Why and How Kaizen Fails Impediments to a Successful Kaizen Culture
As Michael approached the team’s retrospective room he mentally reviewed several of the retrospectives he had conducted with the team over the last couple of years. At the beginning, the team was so shy and silent—like a rabbit flashed by truck lights in the middle of the night. They didn’t know what to expect from retrospectives, and some of them secretly feared that this was a new management tool to control and audit them, finding all the mistakes they were making and using these mistakes against them at the next performance review. With patience and trust, Michael was able to break the team’s emotional dam—impediments started to be identified, and soon the team was excited with the possibilities of the retrospective. They were also glad to have some secure, private space to speak intimately about the team’s environment and even some personal feelings. Michael was so happy at that time. He was sure that he was playing the Agile game by the book. But several months later he realized that nothing had really changed. The same impediments were listed over and over. Despite the changes made by the team—project boards, sticky notes, daily meetings, new frameworks, and tools—the customer kept complaining about the low quality of the product. Trouble reports were still coming and coming, and there never seemed to be enough time to build quality into the product. Managers kept acting bossy, making all the real decisions, and maintaining the status quo. Teams tried to maintain the spirit of iterations, but priorities kept changing and new stuff kept coming all the time. They were asked to work on several things at the same time—which everyone ´ . Medinilla, Agile Kaizen, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-54991-5_2, A # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014
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Why and How Kaizen Fails
agreed was a bad idea, because it introduced a great deal of waste and context switching—but of course, when things got blocked, which happened constantly, what could anyone do but start working on something else? On the other hand, he did not see team dynamics changing that much. Yes, they talked and interacted more, but when it came to collaboration there was little change. Mostly everyone preferred to work on their own, and design decisions were made in order to divide work more comfortably instead of according to product, quality, or customer best interest. He confronted the team with this uncomfortable truth, and they just complained that it was not their fault if they identified impediments but then the company did nothing about them. Michael tried to remove some of those impediments on his own, and for some time the team was pleased with that. After some more time, Michael came to the conclusion that his attitude was just making the team even more comfortable with the situation—he acted as an overprotective ‘Scrum Mom’, caring for her kids and providing everything they needed, and this was not helping them grow and mature. Michael also tried to engage management in the
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