6. History I
• After WW II american forces in Japan
• Lowell Mellen
• W. Edwards Deming
• "Improvement in 4 Steps" (Kaizen eno Yon Dankai).
Continuous Improvement
7. History II
• 1986 Book - Kaizen: The Key to Japan’s Competitive
Success
• Continuous Improvement is built in into XP, Scrum,
Kanban
• Worldwide an important pillar of a long-term competitive
strategy.
Continuous Improvement
8. Definition
“Kaizen, also known as continuous improvement, is a long-
term approach to work that systematically seeks to achieve
small, incremental changes in processes in order to
improve efficiency and quality.”
Continuous Improvement
http://searchmanufacturingerp.techtarget.com/definition/kaizen
16. How did you implement
Continuous
Improvement in your
working environment?
The Active Learning Cycle
17. The Board
● Keep: DoD, DoR, WA
● Tries: agreed rules
temporarily extending
the keep
● Retrospective area:
gather data, generate
insights, agree on
tries
The Active Learning Cycle
18. The Cycle
The Active Learning Cycle
2) Act
● skip
● retry/ adjust
● keep
3) Plan
● find areas to get better
● generate insights
● setup behaviour change
(Try)
● success criteria
● review date
4) Do
● Executing Try
1) Check
● review try
● review success
criteria
DoActCheck Plan
Retrospective Sprint
20. Advantages
• Improvement of artefacts is implicit
• Inspect & adapt implicit
• Commitment of the whole team
• Less resistance
• Easy activity
The Active Learning Cycle
21. Failure Patterns
● Cycle not consequently implemented
● Too much tries at the same time (avoid more than 3)
● Resistance to experiment inside the group
● Success criteria not clear enough or missing
The Active Learning Cycle