All Hands On Deck

 

Have you ever been involved in a crisis situation – perhaps a major outage or production issue – when someone says something like “all hands on deck”? You know what was meant. Drop everything else and everyone focus on this one thing. Regardless of what else you were doing. Regardless of whether or not any particular set of skills was immediately relevant or not.

Did it work? Did you solve it?

What if you made this practice, where the whole team works together to finish a single item, a regular tool in your team’s toolbox? To use in calmer times, not just when there is a crisis?

Why you should consider it

This practice is recommended for new teams, or teams with new members who are going thru the stages of group development. It is great for team building and establishing a common vocabulary. Following it demands communication, so communication becomes a habit.

It is also recommended for established teams beginning or already on their continuous improvement journey. It is useful when the team is doing something new, or when there are questions about how the team should operate.

It can be used whenever a team wants to baseline their standard practices. It is a good way to compare theory (the “process” we tell ourselves we follow) and what we actually do in reality. It allows the identification and sharing of best practices, tips and tricks. It uncovers conflicting assumptions and miscommunications. It is a great way to transfer knowledge – to learn by doing. All members of the team get exposure to all the skills needed to get work done.

With a single work item focus, the flow of work is paramount, and any impediments become immediately obvious: bottlenecks and delays cannot be ignored, and waste is glaringly visible. There is no need to have status meetings as everyone has been right there. And there is no need to worry about WIP (Work in Progress), as we are only doing this.

How is it done?

Have the whole team participate in every aspect of each item, from beginning to end, from refinement to retrospective. Make sure everyone is “keeping up” with the state of the solution. Take time to insure everyone’s understanding. Rotate “who’s driving” so everyone gets a hands-on opportunity.

Have everyone take notes: mental notes, written notes, typed notes, sticky notes. As issues or concerns are raised, add them to your kaizen backlog. If there are areas for further exploration or training, add them as well. Track cycle time, and also how long each step or stage takes. Think about where the boundaries of those steps are, what constitutes “done” for each or what is needed before a step can start.

Be sure all of these become part of the team’s knowledge base.

Since you are paying close attention to all the aspects of the work, use that information to help create the categories for your types of work. Use this to help fill our you periodic table of work.

Conduct a retrospective on each work item immediately upon completion. Review everything that was done. Should it be accepted as standard practice? Was it a “best” practice?

Things will not be perfect, and there will be lots of areas you will want to improve. Have everyone participate in the continuous improvement process and make sure everyone is included in all experiments. Everyone should be encouraged to add items to the team’s kaizen backlog.

Be sure and reflect your lessons learned in your visualmanagement system.

Going Forward

Some teams find they prefer working this way. Some shift to more of a swarming arrangement for part of the work once everyone is familiar and comfortable with the entire flow.

Take the energy of a crisis call of "all hands on deck" and make it part of your everyday toolkit.