Toyota Kata for improving Continuous Delivery Maturity

leena

January 24, 2014

Everyone knows that making small improvements everyday is good and everyone wants to do that. But the following question arises:* What to improve?

How to improve?
How will I know am improving?

Recently I stumbled upon Toyota Kata, a simple and structured way of cultivating Continuous Improvement culture. As the name suggests, its Toyota’s systematic approach for Continuous Improvement. The Kata has 2 parts:

Coaching Kata – coach by asking 5 questions
Improvement Kata – The scientific PDCA cycle [Plan, Do, Check, Act cycle**] for making measurable progress

Coaching Kata

Coaching Kata is the systematic way to coach Improvement Kata. Kata contains the following 5 questions, to help the coachee(s) to identify the area for improvement or make him/her measure the same. :

Courtesy: http://www.lean.org/images/5Qcard.jpg

Improvement Kata

This is the process of actual improvement by following the scientific Plan, Do Check Act or PDCA cycle which is also known as Deming Cycle.

Courtesy: http://goo.gl/q6i5ow

Its obvious that the Coaching Kata helps to set a clear goal and the Improvement Kata helps us to measure the improvement.

At Multunus we’ve started using this to improve our Continuous Delivery Maturity. The process we follow is as follows:

Every week the team assess the maturity by doing a retrospective of the previous week. The data we use helps us to focus mainly on the following:
Number of bugs in production
Cycle time
We grade the maturity in Red, Orange, Yellow and Green using a formulae
The above helps the team to identify Current Condition
Team defines the target condition that they need to reach by a certain timeframe which is usually within one or two weeks
Writes the obstacles for reaching the target condition and take the top most obstacle
Defines the next step or experiment the team wants to do for removing the obstacle
The above step (i.e. the PDCA cycle) is followed on a daily basis

Main things to keep in mind are:

While coming up with the target condition or goal, keep in mind the Goldilocks Principle i.e. it should not be Not too hard, nor too easy Just Right.
50% of the experiments fail. Its ok to fail. Keep the duration of the experiment short, a day to a week is suggested, so that we can learn faster.
Each PDCA cycle should be a learning from the previous PDCA cycle.

This is a sample metrics sheet we use for our Toyota Kata. It still does not contain the following even though its suggested in Toyota Kata:

Recoding each PDCA cycle
Keeping the List of Obstacles

Myself, and the team as well, are thrilled that its indeed working. Needless to say its not the perfect way, there is lot of scope for improvement, and we can use Toyota Kata itself for improving the same :). I will write more about our experience with Toyota Kata in coming weeks.

Apart from the book, which I’ve started reading, I found the following references useful as well: