Toyota Kata

• Toyota's Kata: The Routines of Thought and Action that Underpin Amazing Performance

• Amazon

• The originator of the so-called "kanban".

• Remove redundancy from preventing failures, and identify areas for improvement by letting them fail more often

• In "kanban work methods," the concept of "visualization of tasks" is easy to grasp, but in "Toyota Kata," the nuance is much different.

  • Kanban (pull system)"
  • The goal of kanban is to eliminate kanban."
  • "It is undesirable to establish buffers or flexibilities for the purpose of achieving a target production number, which does not solve the problem or improve the process."

• A means to be able to discover problems that need to be improved #Problem Discovery

  • cycle time
    • one piece of sink
  • leveling
    • kanban ( pull system )

• To put it crudely, we are cutting down more and more on margins, inventory buffer, freedom of equipment selection, etc.

• Set up a masochistic setting that is so close to the edge that if something goes wrong, the line stops immediately.

• Improvements observed daily in that state.

  • As programmers say, fail-first.
  • Be able to notice strange things right away.

• p.150

  • If the objective is "to achieve the target production volume," a system that avoids problems may seem preferable, but if the objective is "Continue to improve and survive," a system with a high degree of freedom is not acceptable because it makes it difficult to know the cause of problems. A system with a high degree of freedom does not inherently improve the problem.

• I doubt that it can be applied to software development backlogs, since no two backlogs are the same, although cars can be made in any number of the same shape.

• The "kanban work method" commonly practiced today is not a pull system or leveling, but "work visualization.

  • Better to be visible than invisible.
  • It's a common "phenomenon where only the easy part of a difficult concept gets popularized." - It's like saying pomodoro technique is like "work 25 minutes and rest 5 minutes".

This page is auto-translated from /nishio/トヨタのカタ using DeepL. If you looks something interesting but the auto-translated English is not good enough to understand it, feel free to let me know at @nishio_en. I'm very happy to spread my thought to non-Japanese readers.