Dave's random mumblings…

“Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot masturbate” – Dave Barry

I spend a significant portion of my day in meetings and often come out wondering what was accomplished.

I consistently see the following problems with meetings at work:

• No agenda, or even worse a vague agenda with little direction
• Someone in the room will have nothing of value to add and insist on adding it
• The full scheduled time will be used
• They breed; one meeting usually leads to another
• Typically about an abstract concept, not a concrete product or decisison
• They take preparation time
• End up totally off course
• The information transfer is typically minimal

Today I spent two hours in a room with 9 other people preparing a presentation. That’s not a two-hour meeting, it’s 20 hours of time. I work for a company that does internal quotes and business plans in hours. This meeting was a considerable expense.

A considerable amount of the time was caught up in arguing the nuances of language and listening to people who had nothing to contribute, but an existence to maintain. As with all big companies there are people who justify by filling up their calendar and adding nothing of value.

A meeting is not the place to create a pitch, it’s a place to get the team together to approve the changes they’ve previously submitted are correctly incorporated by the content owner. This was a couple of hours of my time and 20 hours of the companies time wasted.

A previous employer used to have gathering areas on the production floor, no meeting rooms. The philosophy was we were coming together to share the resolution, not rehash the problem. These meetings rarely lasted more than a few minutes and were as effective as 10 people sitting around a conference table hashing out a pitch.

There are some great tools, email, sharepoint and other online communication or colaberation tools, this allows me to manage my own time. When we meeting face to face at work the group seems to automatically assume they have an hour of my time, which seems to be the standard meeting length, and will take all of that time.

In an email I might grasp their concept within 2 minutes and be ready with a reply. Other times I need to think about their message overnight. All of this is impossible in face to face meetings where an immediate reaction and 100% dedication is demanded of the participants.

If you can’t avoid it and actually have to call a meeting: First is that it takes a leader to keep the group focused, and know that just because Outlook can’t easily handle bookings of less than 30 minutes, you don’t have to use every second. Make a very clear agenda and let people know what they need to come with. The meeting is a place to make decisions, not inform and create content.

Keep the numbers down and make the meeting for those that really need to be involved, the oxygen wasters who need meetings to validate their existence really don’t need to be there

The final, and to my mind the most important part of a meeting is when everyone walks away and the decision that’s made. Know who is responsible for recording, sharing and finally implementing the results.

I sat down for coffee with a couple of friends who facilitators workshops internally (AIW and 3P for those who speak LEAN+) and discussed project close out. A lot of projects seem the just trail off after the item or process is delivered and eventually vanish into the ether when the SharePoint site is closed and archived.

Closeout is the final phase of the project and is the first time we can really judge the success of all the work put into chartering, change management, the begging for resources and execution of the plan. I think it’s an important part of the project and determine the completeness of the project against the objectives we agreed upon up front.

One issue that seems to happen again and again is people leaving the project after their deliverable is completed, often prior to the closure of the project. While the customer primarily cares about the deliverable, the PM organization and project team members miss out on a post-project review and sharing the understanding of what worked and what did not.

Conducting a post-project review and capturing best practices to share with the PM community should be an essential part of the closeout phase. By not having a formal lesson learned or project review archive a significant amount of experience is not available for and important material is lost.

The PM community at work has an informal lesson learnt database and monthly lunch time “brown bag” meetings to share as a group, but there is not a formal process to manage the close out process and archiving.

I’m interested in seeing how other organizations handle this close out, recording and sharing lessons learned with their PM community.

Experimentation is a significant part of TPS and is one of the ways in which Toyota achieves the rather impressive targets it sets for itself. Organizations are encourage to test, learn from the results and out of the groups comfort zone.

Using an iterative design and test philosophy it allows the company to meet the significant goals that Toyota sets itself through a series of small steps in a very straightforward and pragmatic way. With in Toyota this is known as Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) and is the cornerstone of the development cycle.

One very well documented product development cycle was the Prius hybrid model.

The goal set was to design a production ready environmentally friendly car that increased efficiency 100% over the benchmark.

The team went off tested, researched, modelled and tested some more. They researched  advanced petrol, direct injection diesel, turbocharged small engines technology even cutting edge fuel cell technology and nothing could deliver much more than a 50% efficiency improvement.

The team was sent back to do some more work. They ended up going to another division and looking at hybrid technology that was largely theoretical and a long way from production ready.

The first experimental drive train did not work. Then second started, but was not enough. With each round of testing something new was leaned and these results were used to modify the engineering test articles for the next round of testing.

The same series of small steps and testing was being repeated in battery design, again in chassis development and once more in production processes.

There were significant issues that were over come. Batteries would not hold a charge if they were too hot or cold. The stressed small engines failed prematurely. The constanly variable gearbox drained too much power. The first running prototype broke after 120 meters on it’s first run.

One by one these were over come, sep by step the team had created a production ready hybrid in less than 3 years from concept to production ready.

One of the aspects of the TPS that allows the experimentation to carry on at a comparatively frenetic pace is the open communication (it keeps coming back to the open communication). Mistakes are acknowledged, problems are re-examined all ideas are considered and a decision is made using all date and considering all viewpoints. This means the system is tolerant of failures, the open communications makes it a learning experience for all involved.

As with any company, large or small, employees are the companies biggest asset and the Toyota Production System relies on them to link the components that together make the system work.

Employees are grouped according to specialization and year of entry. Through teaching relationships and a formal mentoring program Toyota creates vertical relationships cutting across conventional “entry level-mid career-senior” hierarchies.

I get that this is contrary to what I stated in a previous piece, where solving big issues puts a premium on crossing conventional boundaries to provide solutions. This has led to a culture with of horizontal links between organisations. People in power train are expected to know who to talk to in supplier management.

This has led to a complex web of informal and semi-formal social networks where “everyone knows everyone”. These links extend across functional and geographical boundaries. Toyota sponsors numerous employee organisations and clubs based on hobbies, sports and other interests that are designed enhance these social networks.

Communication across the multiple languages, time zones and cultures is another aspect that Toyota has put significant effort into.

The company insists internal communication is kept simple with little jargon and very straightforward language

For example when making a presentation the background summary, action plan and the outcome is expected to be on a single sheet of paper or slide. Groups are taught to think in simple terms that anyone across the company can understand.

It is a combination of standardization (both language and content) and relationship building that allows a company with a global footprint be so efficient in problem solving. Toyota puts a lot of effort, some of which it’s very difficult to measure any return on investment.

Most team principles have engineering backgrounds, which works for supervising building a car and staying in the F1 technical arms race. However watching Adrian Newey take on John Barnard and Ross Brawn does not put bums on seats, people want to see Schumacher and Hill (Senna/Prost, Mansell/Piquet and so on) battle over a season.

Flav Briatore understood better than anyone that the money coming into the sport did not depend on the technical side of things. Flav was different, he did not understand the technical side, he employed people for that. He got that it was the product on the track and the personalities that led to the fans and TV contracts that gave the teams fat bank accounts.

Flav understood that having one of those drivers led to the backing to produce the best equipment. After his debut at Spa in ’91 it was clear the Michael Schumacher was going to be one of those drivers, and Flav wanted him in a Benneton no matter who he had to screw over to get him.

Michael Schumacher was poached from Jordan on the eve of the Italian GP. This came up in a conversation I was having with racing friends a couple of weeks ago in the UK. Flav replaced Roberto Moreno with Michael, with out actually mentioning it to his current driver.

The first Roberto knew about it was when a journalist called his hotel room in Italy to ask him what he thought about this. Roberto ended up driving a Jordan that weekend as he was about the only person available at such short notice that could do the job.

When people outside hear some of what goes on (industrial espionage, trying to fix races, tampering with drivers and so on) and while it’s been going on for a long time the sport does not look good. But now, as an outsider, it’s fun to watch.