I recently led a line stop called by one developer on a custom product team, which recently began managing its flow with Scrum. Only after having made a dog’s breakfast of it, did I realise how illusive a practice stopping the line can be for teams that do not have an understanding of the principles of lean development.
I view stopping the line as illusive because, while it is ostensibly a manifestation of zero-tolerance thinking, it is actually an autonomic behaviour that drives an organisation to engage in practical learning. Moreover, it interconnects with many lean principles; in my opinion, a real understanding of the practice is not possible without some knowledge of Kanban and Jidoka (see
Ohno Taiichi and
Jeffrey Liker respectively.)
The illusive nature, combined with the intentionally disruptive character of a stop, sets the stage for teams to revert to basic practice – those already part of the team culture. A young team may lean towards energetic chaos without result. One new to agile or lean may reach for their old waterfall tools, such as omniscient inspection. Teams without a culture of relentless improvement may not engage, believing that such problems are acceptable if corrected. Those that are not rewarded for failure may seek only to ascribe blame or excuse the problem as inescapable. And so on.
There are two subjects to consider when looking at utilising line stops as a tool. The first, a culture of organisational learning, is outside my ability to cover here. The second, and less important aspect, is the mechanics of performing the stop, which I will look at here.
Stopping the line to consists of:
- Determining that a stop is warranted
- Performing the stop
- Understanding the problem
- Planning preventative measures
- Fixing the problem
- Restarting
- Putting the preventative plan in action
One can further reduce this to be simply “stop, understand and adapt, go.” For an alternate view on this, see Kevin Rutherford’s very helpful
perspective.
In the initial stop, there are two areas of difficulty. The first is the detector of the problem realising that a stop would be beneficial – as opposed to fixing it or noting it for future correction. The second is performing the stop in a manner that both clearly communicates the problem at hand and helps others smoothly transition from their current work – as opposed to just dropping everything in a mess that will make restarting difficult. To do that, people will need to understand the mechanics before calling a stop.
In understanding and adapting, it is focusing on the superficial problem and on improving quality control that leads the team astray. I believe that drilling down to the essence of both the problem and the solutions by asking why is very helpful here. Aggressively mix the ideas of leading with questions and of asking why five times. The goal is to shift the focus onto improving those fundamentals directly related to the problem’s root cause.
When starting back up, the most significant concern is the easiest to avoid, that of the team returning to a partially forgotten mess. This will quickly overwhelm the practice of stopping to fix problems with a slew of new problems. The obvious way to avoid this is to execute the initial stop well, with the impending restart in mind.
What was not obvious to me, until it was far too late, is the amount of leadership that these simple steps require. Given that they constitute the deliberate disruption of running processes, such as authority-on-demand and self-organising teams, it seems blatantly obvious with hindsight that some form of additional leadership will be in demand.
To summarize, the core factors to keep one’s eye on are:
- The illusive, ostensibly simplistic nature can give one a few nasty surprises.
- Without all of lean, especially Kanban and Jidoka, the value of a stop is questionable. At the very least one has to be sure that some achievable goals are in place; stopping will not magically make an organization lean.
- Make sure everyone has a basic understanding of the goals and principles well before the first time someone uses it.
- Provide decisive leadership at the outset, if it makes sense to reduce it later on, do so.
It is important to realise that, like so many lean activities, parroting the motions of stopping the line is wasteful – if it is without a foundation of lean principle. Still, I believe that stopping the line, if done well, can be a lightweight practice that both helps instil lean principles and provides immediate learning opportunities. Whether I can turn that speculation into fact is yet to be determined.