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Happy Thanksgiving
From your friends at EAC Product Development Solutions

As we enter into this holiday season and time of reflection I’d like to thank our customers for their business. Thank you for trusting EAC to improve the way you design, manufacture, connect to, and service your products. I never take for granted the trust, respect, and friendships that are part of every order, meeting, partnership and engagement.

A good friend and colleague of mine likes to quote Sam Walton, “There’s only one boss – The Customer. The customer can fire everyone from the chairman on down, simply by spending their money somewhere else.” Wise words. So, thank you to the many people and companies that have made us a partner in their success for almost 20 years. Thank you for keeping us on board. I’m excited to see what great things we will achieve together in the future. Have a happy and safe Thanksgiving.

Sincerely,

Thane Hathaway
President & CEO
EAC Product Development Solutions

In the last post we talked about how the tennis doubles team, the leaders of the time box system, create productivity. In this video we’re going to talk about how the development team is naturally predisposed to be increasingly productive.

With the management burden handled by the leadership team, the members of the execution team are freed up to focus on the work itself. A key part of their work is “dialogue.” It’s a process called grooming and the term as well as the activity is borrowed from a software development system called Scrum.

During regularly scheduled periodic “dialogues“ all members of the execution team focus on four attributes of the execution of the requests. One is the work itself. They refine the work, breaking it into smaller and smaller chunks. Eventually the work is a size that can be executed within a single time box. They also focus on an estimation of the effort required. This allows the team do a collective estimation of the work required and is used to match the available capacity of the time box to the work.

Also during this dialogue they talk about quality disciplines and what quality disciplines need to be brought to whatever work they’ll be executing. E.g. whether any work will need a design review or a drawing review, etc. There is general discussion about what quality disciplines to bring to the work.

Finally they discuss possibilities for cross training or mentoring. They discuss whether any work would provide the opportunity to allow a member of the team to be mentored or cross trained during the execution of the work.

In this “dialogue”, the grooming exercise, first you have the goal of the project itself; a shared vision held by the team, but the dialogue provides a shared vision of the execution path to complete the work. The dialogue also leads to an analysis of what work should be done, how much discipline should be brought to it, etc. During this dialogue everyone’s worldview and perception of the work is brought to the surface.

In Peter Senge’s contention everybody’s “mental model” is brought to the surface. The team aligns on how to execute the work as they go through the analysis and dialogue. The alignment of the team to the work is, again in Senge’s context, team learning. The ability to take work not assign it to the person that would normally do that work, but instead turn them into a spontaneous mentor and have someone else execute the work, is a chance for the team members to increase their personal mastery in a particular discipline.

So we have Shared Vision, Mental Models, Team Learning, and Personal Mastery — four of the five disciplines of Senge’s “learning organization.” The only missing discipline of a learning organization is Systems Thinking. Of course Systems Thinking is the dynamic of the operation which all of this series is meant to focus on. So, you have the fifth and final discipline of the learning organization also involved in the organization of time box learning.

The learning organization of this product development team is critical because learning is sighted by the other Peter, Peter Drucker, as one of the 6-Keys for creating high productivity amongst knowledge workers. And it is the focus of EAC to use Systems Thinking and the learning organization context to reform the operation of the American approach to product development.

Contact us to learn more about how Systems Thinking and the application of our Product Development Operating System can help your organization become more efficient, productive, innovative, and competitive.

Follow Bill at http://www.twitter.com/systhinking

The Pareto Principle comes to us from quality guru Joseph Juran. He named it the Pareto Principle in honor of Vilfredo Pareto who was an Italian economist. Pareto himself first developed the concept by recognizing that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the people. This was reinforced when he realized that 80% of the harvest of peas in his garden came from 20% of the pods. This has been generalized in business into the Pareto Principle that states “80% of your sales come from 20% of your customers. And that 80% of your problems come from 20% of your issues.”

In it’s most general sense Pareto says that 80% of gain comes from 20% of the effort. And the last 20% of the potential gain requires 80% of the effort…four times the effort required to reach 80%.

The Pareto principle argues for the lean concept — which is the concept of the interrupted journey. The cost benefit ratio favors limiting your aspirations to 80% or less of your way to the ideal state. When you execute an improvement effort in Lean — when you apply PDCA or the Deming Cycle — you make this targeted state explicit. You look for the balance between your opportunities and your constraints. You get done what is available to get done at manageable expense. This is all done in the effort, not of a complete and total trip to the ideal state, but a trip to a better state and improved situation.

Contact us to learn more about how Systems Thinking and the application of our Product Development Operating System can help your organization become more efficient, productive, innovative, and competitive.

Follow Bill at http://www.twitter.com/systhinking

In the 9 years that I’ve been in some type of a sales or sales support role at EAC I’ve noticed some common themes across the companies that I’ve been exposed to. One of which that continues to intrigue me is a correlation — companies with open minds that are willing to meet with a sales person seem to be doing better than those that don’t.

You may call me out on this but I’ve had exposure to several hundred executive level individuals and those that seem to do well are willing to let a sales person give their pitch. Part of being a sales professional is dealing with rejection. It happens daily and is tough, but you learn from it and get better. My experience has been that companies who reject a 20-minute meeting are those that are struggling to meet goals, have stagnant growth, are over worked, and generally have bad employee morale.

One positive example is an individual that is a VP of a billion dollar company. From our very first call he showed a level of interest and respect for me. It was refreshing to have him demonstrate genuine interest in what I had to offer. It all started with a 20-minute meeting and now EAC is significantly impacting how they bring their products to market. In the 8 months that I’ve worked with him he’s been promoted twice.

Another example that comes to mind is a VP of a 50 million dollar company that will take a call from me even when he is in a meeting. He is excited to hear what I have to say and values my input. What a way to make a sales person feel appreciated and important, and that naturally makes me go out of my way to help him out when he’s in a bind. He is a true pleasure to work with and guess what; his company is growing like crazy!

Now for the counterpoint…there is a company I’ve tried to work with for years. They offer a specialized commodity that is very sensitive to any type of economic decline. During the great recession they let go over 80% of their employees. Surprisingly they are still in business, but are struggling to provide enough work to support their overhead. While a VP was willing to take an initial meeting with me, he is very close minded to any type of change and has no interest in finding new ways to get better. “I’m too busy to make any changes.” And guess what, he’s pretty grumpy.

I often think of the cartoon where a polished sales guy shows up to a meeting with a soldier. He’s carrying a machine gun in his bag but the soldier carrying a sword responds with “No, I don’t have time to see a crazy salesman — I’ve got a battle to fight!”

Our world is changing rapidly, especially as we continue with the economic recovery. Our customers are constantly facing stricter deadlines, increased competition, and more complex requirements that are always changing. “We have to hit the deadline or we risk losing the customer.” Too often I see companies throwing money and resources at fixing a problem because that’s the way they’ve always done it. And then they wonder why they struggle with growth, profitability, and product performance issues. Well I have some good news…there is a better way. And the next sales person to contact you may have a solution to the problem that is keeping you up at night. Give them a chance.

Recently I had an epiphany. It wasn’t the kind of epiphany that changes a life forever and drives someone to become a monk in the Himalayas, but it was an epiphany nonetheless. It had to do with collaboration, data management, reporting, and the way many of our customers inevitably deal with their customers.

For the sake of this blog I’m going to oversimplify the “discrete manufacturing” industry into two categories: Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) and OEM suppliers. Many of our customers supply larger companies. This puts our customers in a unique situation in which they operate their businesses within other people’s timetables. They operate their internal projects within larger projects managed by the end customer. This is where things can get tricky, but I digress…

I was grabbing lunch with a couple friends, colleagues, and long-time engineering veterans when the conversation veered into oncoming traffic. A simple question, “Does anyone have any meetings they need to get back for?” opened up a new line of dialogue. One of the engineers referenced a late afternoon meeting and started talking about the time they waste on redundant meetings with their internal teams and the end customer. Throughout any given week they have status meetings, update meetings, and check-ins on the updates and statuses. Everyone is always trying to stay on top of expectations and progress and it seems like it’s, well, getting in the way of progress!

The other engineer sympathetically chimed in because they both felt the same pain and frustration with the overhead of trying to GSD (Get $#!+ Done!). Throughout the conversation, phrases like “they didn’t hire me to attend meetings” and “I wonder if anyone is adding up how much these meetings cost?” were thrown around. I couldn’t help but think there had to be a better way…in fact, I knew there was a better way. You can dive in and learn more about Knowledge Worker Management and Time Boxing here, but for now I’m going to focus on the tools that can help GSD.

Nowadays the acronyms PDM and PLM have become common terms in the engineering and manufacturing world – Product Data Management and Product Lifecycle Management. These tools can relieve some of the frustration. If a company uses a tool like PTC Windchill to collaborate with customers and internal teams, they can set milestones, see real-time reporting based on work states, and manage changes easily and within clearly defined workflows. They can help provide answers to questions without needing to interrupt the engineering staff.

If you give us a call and a few minutes we can help you understand the return on investment in a legitimate PDM/PLM tool (something other than file folders and shared drives). We can help you figure out how much time and money PTC Windchill can save you – hard numbers that help the bean counters sleep at night. But, it is important to remember there are tangible benefits to improving your collaborative space that go beyond cycle times and promotion requests. Investing in a PDM or PLM tool can free up time for engineers to get back to engineering. An engineer’s lunchtime conversation should focus on the amazing innovations they’re working on. It shouldn’t focus on frustrating meeting-itis. Engineers aren’t cheap. Let’s get them back to work and out of redundant meetings. I think tools like PTC Windchill can help do exactly that.