Project kaizen

I have been goaded into participating in this activity, even though I am neither a consultant, nor an accomplished expert in Lean or JIT or other related topics. My interest has been as a student and in the relatively untapped theoretical basis. If anything, i have the unique perspective of coming at this from a (non-finance) service industry point of view.

A while back, one of our groups that doesn't normally do engineering projects got tapped with installing a closed network between themselves and their customer. It was a simple, one-off project. Because of something one of our other engineers said to me about his experiences, I thought that I would get us in the habit of always doing an all-hands engineering review of these projects. I invited everyone, including the mechanical engineer, even though I didn't expect a lot of input. The people doing the project were conscientious, so what could we offer?

After some brief comments from the engineer with the most experience in networking, the single most significant contribution to the project review was from the mechanical engineer. He pointed out that they had probably underestimated a particular series of parts for hanging conduit or unistrut (I don't recall), and that they had underestimated the cost. It was obvious: they had used $1 even for each part, but a quick look on the internet showed that the part was more like $7/each.

It just goes to show what a fresh pair of eyeballs does. Whenever you spend lots of time working on something, you make assumptions, and you assume your assumptions are true. Other people unfamiliar with your procedure either don't assume they are true, or assume they are not true. That may not be out of malice; they simply may not understand, and in trying to understand, they uncover more than anyone expects.

I reject the basic premise of this topic: nobody does a "unique" project. You may never build a house at this address again, or work with these particular people again, but you always follow some similar procedure: design building, hire contractor, hire subcontractors, rough-in plumbing, pour foundation, etc. It's worthwhile trying to plan, to measure your success against the plan, and to try to identify shortfalls to improve upon the next time. Whatever improves any part of the process (planning, measuring, improving) improves your next attempt at a similar process.

The only way you would be doing something completely unique is if you were going to change careers every day. Say I wanted to be a surgeon tomorrow and a pilot the next, etc. In that case, yeah, those would be unique, one-off projects. And guess what? I'd damn sure want to plan ahead and check as I went for those activities!

Here are the other blogs posting on this:

Norman Bodek's Kaikaku blog
Bill Waddell's Evolving Excellence blog on Superfactory
Chuck Frey's Innovation Weblog
Hal Macomber's Reforming Project Management blog
Joe Ely's Learning About Lean blog
John Miller's Panta Rei blog
Mark Graban's Lean Manufacturing blog

and of course Kathleen Fasanella's Fashion Incubator blog