Kaizen is a Japanese term that means “change to better”. In the corporate world, it is a practice that was established by the Lean Manufacturing model as an action driven by employees motivation and creativity, that use common sense and a set of inexpensive solutions to eliminate waste and improve daily practices of their jobs.

According to the twelfth principle of the Agile Manifesto, “at regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly”. In Scrum, the team must run a retrospective at the end of each Sprint to determine what went well or not in that cycle, and what can be improved for the next Sprints. In Lean, the team must continually investigate new ways to eliminate waste, improve their quality and capacity. However, few are the agile teams that really dominate a problem-solving technique and use it effectively in their software projects.

Café Kaizen is a group dynamic that can be adopted by Agile teams to:

• Quickly and effectively analyze possible causes of observed problems in specific products, processes or software projects;
• Define improvement initiatives consistent with the causes and effects of the problems, getting full support from team members.

Café Kaizen is a short duration event (90 minutes), held under the coordination of a skilled professional with knowledge and experience about Agile principles and practices (a basis belief system). He/She uses team members (maximum of 30 participants) as sources of knowledge and experiences to investigate limiting beliefs and capabilities that hinder the development of the team. These beliefs are challenged in a structured way, with the use of precision questions and an analysis tool based on NLP techniques, which exploit the analytical power of team members to design a future scenario in the short term both desired and believed by all participants.

Developed in 2009 by Luiz Parzianello, the Café Kaizen technique has already been applied dozens of times to beginner and experienced teams (see the file in attachment). In all events, this technique has been complimented by all participants because it really conducts the team to a consensus about their observations and decisions to execute changes necessary to improve people, methods and tools.

This tutorial aims to present the concepts and practices behind the Café Kaizen, demonstrating its benefits by a real problem simulation performed by volunteers from the audience (using a predefined problem and solution). We will give advices to those interested in applying this dynamic in his/her team and present sources of references about the related techniques.

Agenda:

• Introduction to Kaizen – 5’
• NLP as a Strategy for Change – 10’
• The Café Kaizen as a Systematic Self-Reflection Dynamic – 10’
• The Problem Analysis and Resolution Diagram – 15’
• Simulating a Problem-Solving Dynamic – 40’
• Discussions about its Use in Agile Projects – 10’

We will use a projector (slide show), post-its and a banner of 1.20 m x 1.40 m containing the Problem Analysis and Resolution Diagram (see the model in attachment), to be fixed in a wall or door banner.