Apply Toyota Business Practice (TBP)on new services (2)
In my previous article, I have a brief introduction of Toyota Business Practice (TBP) which is a very powerful methodology to shape your logic and a great way to solve the problem you encounter. In this article, I will be starting with the target, as we are working to achieving the target no matter what kind of tasks we are taking.
Root cause finding
As we can use the SMART principle to set our target, we can have an achievable, measurable, and very clear goal over there. The next step is that we need to understand what leads to the problem we are facing. For instance, in our case, the sales team has no instant information on sales results, and we list all the possible reasons such as the system problem, working process problem, or data issue lead to the problem.
We evaluate each reason and to see which one is the key, for example, there may be 3 to 4 reasons and all of them are leading the problem. However, we need to give the impact score and prioritize them, and we only focus on the most important reason, leveraging the limited resource to solve the key issue. And it is extremely important to align with your team with the most important root cause, to let your team understand what you are fighting with.
The countermeasure toward the root cause
Let’s say the key root cause is that there is no centralized data storage to receive the sales numbers from each region, we need to think about how can we solve it. We may come out many solutions, but to remember one principle that we need to solve the root, not the extending impact.
We also need to put the cost/benefits concept into consideration, to make sure the cost we spend is not higher than the values of problem-solving. Many times we see people digging into the solution/countermeasure itself but ignore the sunk cost or the extending cost, the result is that we bring a negative growth on our output especially the revenue side.
Don’t forget to get high-level supports based on the cost/ benefit analysis, talking into the high level, and have their promise and support on the countermeasure.
Countermeasure details
Once we complete the evaluation of the investment and the output, we can move to the detail of the solution. To set a detailed plan including who is leading the project, what stages or tasks involved in the project, where are we plan to execute the project (is there a pilot department or other concerns), when is the delivery time (is there any milestone).
In this step, it is essential that we have the whole team get involved in the plan, as we need some important checkpoints of tasks to be remarked. An agile method applied is quite a good way to push the project.
Summary
We will leave the rest two steps of TBP in the next article. To give a summary of this article, we raise all the possible root causes toward the problem encountering and select the most important reason leading to the problem after evaluation and have a high-level understanding and supports. Then we plan the details and get the whole team involved. Though TBP is not a new way to solve a problem, we still can leverage any new methodology or concept such as agile, scrum in different steps of TBP to improve the efficiency of solving problems.
