The Art of Lean Software Development

Kaizen Workshops

When the term Kaizen is used in the West, people are usually talking about a Kaizen Workshop and not the Kaizen system described in the previous section. The Kaizen Workshop has been used under several other names: Kaizen Blitz, Kaizen Event, Accelerated Improvement Workshop, Rapid Process Improvement Workshop, and even simply Workouts. In this chapter, we will use the term Kaizen Workshop.

A Kaizen Workshop is an intense, focused project to improve a process, where a team or department throws all of its resources into the effort for a short period of time. The intensity and urgency is designed to overcome any institutionalized resistance. The execution is swift, and it is expected that there will be significant results very quickly.

There are two fundamental principles behind a Kaizen Workshop:

• Don’t just plan…act!

• It’s better to get a 50% improvement now than to wait months hoping for perfection.

First, you must identify a specific problem that you want to address. Then you can hold a Kaizen Workshop to find and implement solutions.

A Kaizen Workshop is a structured rapid improvement process that has three phases:

• Plan (4 to 6 weeks)

• Workshop (3 to 5 days)

• Implement (1 to 3 months)

A Kaizen Workshop requires considerable planning because it must bring together all stakeholders into an integrated team. All required information and material must be gathered before the workshop, and the relevant leadership must empower the workshop team to implement the resulting changes. ...