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The responses to these questions will cross every boundary of the project, from manage-
ment interaction to documentation, to interpersonal communications, seating arrange-
ments, and the makeup of the team itself. Just like poor teams, even the best teams make
mistakes and must be open to criticism; the best teams learn more quickly from their mistakes
than do poor teams. The best teams avoid repeating mistakes again and again.
Process improvements can make future design and development projects better, easier,
and faster, eliminating errors, and fostering consistency, increased velocity, and cost
reduction. Real costs can be reduced through the avoidance of waste and defective devel-
opment processes, though simply finding out of control points in the process and removing
them is only putting the process back where it was in the first place. It should be noted
that putting out fires is not improvement. Similarly, finding an out-of-control step in the
process, finding the special cause, and removing it is also only putting the process back
where it was in the first place. It is not improvement of the process.
Process improvement serves not only to correct past mistakes, but also to incorporate
new strategies or technologies that can make things better. New technologies especially
are always coming on the market. Effective process improvement strives toward efficient
technology transfer from outside the organization to processes within it. Product teams
should compare, that is, benchmark, themselves to performance goals, other teams within
the firm, and, if possible, other teams at other firms. Effective teams are constantly looking
for new ideas that can help the next time around, wherever they can be found.
As you might imagine, team members can pick up more ideas during their work,
rather than at the end of the stage. Weeks after the fact, people tend to forget valuable
observations and insights. We recommend team members keep a process improvement
notebook, where they can each write down ideas or concerns as they arise. Further, each
team member should summarize their perspectives in a lessons-learned page after each
loop, for review at the stage-end reflection meeting. This midstream reflection will lead
to successful process improvement meetings.
Prior to the meeting, the team leader can collect each member ’ s notebook and prepare
a list of discussion items. By the end of the meeting, after reviewing all ideas and concerns,
the team should arrive at a consensus on which new ideas for improvement can be tried
out. After developing several systems using the same framework of abstraction, development
teams can organize and catalog repeating patterns and best practices. A catalog of best
practices can form the basis for process improvement.
The team leader ’ s role in reflection is critical. The leader must focus the team ’ s atten-
tion on honest and open criticism of processes and other members. A good team leader
will make each member contribute constructive ideas on how to improve problems.
Successful leaders are people who say it like it really is. Leadership and teamwork is
about communicating what each team member is doing and then pushing toward a com-
mon goal. Honest and open communication and feedback ensures this will happen.
Open communication must not be personal; every communication must be under-
stood to be for the benefit of the team, not to insult one team member. Open and honest
communication means that each team member knows what each other member thinks.
Communication cannot be effective if team members are lying to each other, even if the
lies are told to protect someone ’ s feelings.
Honest, open reflection and criticism will speed process benchmarking. Robert Camp
has defined a formal, four phase benchmarking process:
● Phase 1: Planning. Identify which processes and which people to benchmark, and
gather data on alternative practices.
● Phase 2: Analysis. Examine the gap between true performance and best practices.24.1. P R O C E S S IMPROVEMENT AND BENCHMARKING