Related Information:
Quallaboration Podcast with Personal Kanban Founder
Jim Benson talks about quallaboration – YouTube
Successful Lean teams are iTeams
Teamwork Is an Individual Skill.

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It is even more special for a limited time, if you visit the Business901 website and wait 30 Seconds!

Lean Marketing House (More Info): A starting point for creating true iterative marketing cycles based on not only Lean principles but more importantly Customer Value. Recommended 1st reading of series.

Marketing with PDCA (More Info): Targeting what your Customer Values at each stage of the cycle will increase your ability to deliver quicker, more accurately and with better value than your competitor. It is a moving target and the principles of Lean and PDCA facilitates the journey to Customer Value. Recommended 2nd reading of series.

Lean Engagement Team(More Info): The ability to share and create knowledge with your customer is the strongest marketing tool possible. Recommended 3rd reading of series.

Marketing with A3(More Info): Enables sales and marketing to use the Lean tool of A3 as a structured approach for their problem solving, strategies and tactics. Recommended 4th reading of series.

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This series of books are about developing a continuous improvement culture in your sales and marketing and re-positioning your customer as the center of your organization. The further we are from our customers’ knowledge base the more effort has to be made to create a larger and larger supply of prospects. The ability to share and create knowledge with your customer is the strongest marketing tool possible. Successful Sales and Marketing are no longer trying to get their message out but developing strategies to get the message in.

Disclaimer: There is no silver bullet introduced in these books.

Related Information:
Lean Marketing House
Marketing with PDCA
Lean Engagement Team
Marketing with A3

Lean is the future of marketing and one of the main reasons is the development of Agile under the Lean umbrella. Using the Agile Manifesto as a basis for Agile marketing or Lean marketing is a good start. In summary they are based on these principles:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Content-rich material over elaborate promotion
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Response to changing customer needs over following a plan

The further we are from our customers’ knowledge base the more effort has to be made to create a larger and larger supply of prospects. The ability to share and create knowledge with your customer is the strongest marketing tool possible. Successful Sales and Marketing Teams are no longer trying to get their message out but developing strategies to get the message in.

Table of Contents

• The Path
• Positioning your organization from your customer’s viewpoint
• Only the Customer Determine Value
• PDCA from the Outside-In
• The iCustomer and iTeam
• New Lean Thinking
• Lean Engagement Tools
• Lean Engagement Team
• Marketing Gateway of EDCA, PDCA, SDCA

The book is available as a PDF download on the Business901.com website or on Amazon:

Lean Engagement Team (Marketing with Lean, Volume 2) [Ring-bound]

Lean Engagement Team (Marketing with Lean, Volume 2) [CD-ROM]

Related Information:
SALES PDCA Framework for Lean Sales and Marketing
Profound knowledge for Lean Marketing
If all of us need to be marketers, what’s the framework?
The 7 step Lean Process of Marketing to Toyota

Graham Hill former head of CRM at Toyota Financial Services states that:

Marketing in highly competitive markets is about exploring new propositions on the innovation fitness landscape. The environment determines where to start and complex marketing environments need EDCA. EDCA = Explore, PDCA = Plan, SDCA = Standardize, marketing operations are all about moving along the EDCA>PDCA>SDCA pathway.

Standard Work should only encompass part of your time. In fact, knowledge workers should have a a fair amount of slack time built into their process, i.e. Google, 3M. On the other hand, just about every person wants some form of standard work. Most enjoy doing tasks that they are comfortable with and gives them a sense of accomplishment in completion. The amount of Standard Work that you decide for your teams will differ from organization to organization and from team to team. The bigger picture is that Standard Work is what provides line of sight for your team. It enables support and provides opportunity for managers to serve you.

More information is available in my posts, Lean Canvas for Lean EDCA-PDCA-SDCA, The PDCA Cycle Description for a Lean Engagement Team and The EDCA Cycle Description for a Lean Engagement Team.

Have we reached the end of the pathway? We have actually just started. Standardizing your work provides opportunity to spread it within your organization and will make it easier for customers to go deeper into your organization for knowledge sharing. As a result, it will provide a flood of new ideas for innovation and co-creation opportunities. But even more importantly it secures a vendor-customer relationship or partnership that is difficult for others to replicate. More on this in the blog post, Positioning your organization to learn from your customers.

Standard Work does not need to be boring: Is Zappos the Next Toyota?

Related Information:
Servant Leadership in the Toyota Culture
What will your workplace be like in 2020?
Reducing Muda for Others with Kaizen

Graham Hill former head of CRM at Toyota Financial Services states that:

Marketing in highly competitive markets is about exploring new propositions on the innovation fitness landscape. The environment determines where to start and complex marketing environments need EDCA. EDCA = Explore, PDCA = Plan, SDCA = Standardize, marketing operations are all about moving along the EDCA>PDCA>SDCA pathway.

Lean Sales and Marketing is essentially a knowledge transfer system  and PDCA is an incredibly powerful tool for defining and closing knowledge gaps. Starting with the unknown,  we start with EDCA. As we move along the marketing pathway we arrive at a known problem/knowledge gap and PDCA is utilized. Viewing sales and marketing from a knowledge versus a performance gap perspective, can make things a little fuzzy. Refining the Marketing pathway into three separate distinctive cycles of SALES EDCA, SALES PDCA, SALES SDCA allows team roles to be defined and provides clarity to the process. In the blog post Practical Approach to Innovation used by Disney, a video demonstrates an approach developed by Walt Disney and based on the roles of Dreamer, Realist and Critic. However, instead of thinking of the Dreamer think EDCA, Realist think PDCA and Critic think SDCA. This serves as a great analogy on when to use the three disciplines and how they interact with each other.

More information is available in my posts, Lean Canvas for Lean EDCA-PDCA-SDCA and The EDCA Cycle Description for a Lean Engagement Team.

Related Information:
How effective does your Sales and Marketing team work together?
A Look at Innovation from a Different Angle
The use of Hansei in Lean Sales and Marketing
The Resilience of PDCA

The paper covers the development of PDCA from the introduction to the scientific method (you could argue between Aristotle or Galileo) to the latest development covered by the paper with the addition of the Model for Improvement published and described in The Improvement Guide. This book was published in 2009.

In reading the research paper, I discovered that somewhere along the line when the Japanese executives recast the Deming wheel at the 1950 JUSE seminar into the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle till now, we lost that all important external outlook of PDCA to one of an internally focused improvement methodology. In the book, Kaizen: The Key To Japan’s Competitive Success, Masaaki Imai shows the correlation between the Deming wheel and the PDCA cycle in Figure 5 developed at the seminar.

1. Design – Plan:  Product design corresponds to the planning phase of management
2. Production – Do:  Production corresponds to doing-making, or working on the
   product that was designed
3. Sales – Check: Sales figures confirm whether the customer is satisfied
4. Research – Action:  In case of a complaint being filed, it has to be incorporated into the planning phase, and action taken for the next round of efforts

In the paper, Evolution of the PDCA Cycle, it goes on to state:

By the 1960’s the PDCA cycle in Japan had evolved into an improvement cycle and a
management tool. Lilrank and Kano state the 7 basic tools (check sheet, histograms,
Pareto chart, fishbone diagram, graphs, scatter diagrams, and stratification) highlight the
central principle of Japanese quality.

I believe that somewhere between these two points the Check stage of PDCA due to the introduction of the 7 Quality Tools became internally focused and developed along that path during the years of process improvement.

In the last decade we have evolved from the processed driven culture of the 90’s through the Customer Centric to the new culture of User Centric. The scientific method and PDCA works. As a result it adapts and evolves with time. A measure of that is the popularity of Eric Ries and the Lean Startup with the use of Build – Measure – Learn. Also the latest evolvement of Design Thinking and more specifically the Service Design field highlighted in my post, Can Service Design increase Customer demand? has established a basis for EDCA (Explore-Do-Check_Act).

In addition to our thinking, we must change our toolset. We need a complimentary toolset which was outlined in a previous post, Continuous Improvement Sales and Marketing Toolset.  I am not saying that we throw away the 7 Quality Tools but we do not use them before their time. They have become more useful in the Standardization process and therefore the SDCA cycle. This is a list of the 7 basic Quality Tools to be used in SDCA:

1. Cause-and-effect diagram
2. Check sheet
3. Control charts
4. Histogram
5. Pareto chart
6. Scatter diagram
7. Stratification

In 1976, the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) saw the need for tools to promote innovation, communicate information and successfully plan major projects. A team researched and developed the seven new quality control tools, often called the seven management and planning (MP) tools, or simply the seven management tools. This is the set that I propose to be used in PDCA:

1. Affinity diagram
2. Relations diagram
3. Tree diagram
4. Matrix diagram:
5. Matrix data analysis
6. Arrow diagram
7. Process decision program chart (PDPC)

Today’s world has introduced more and more uncertainty. As a result it has forced us to get closer and closer to our customers. This reduces are reaction time and allows us to make better informed decisions. This methodology has been introduced to us through the concepts of Design Thinking. This is the set that I propose to be used in EDCA:

1. Visualization
2. Journey Mapping
3. Value Chain Analysis
4. Mind Mapping
5. Brainstorming
6. Concept Development
7. Assumption Testing
8. Rapid Prototyping
9. Customer Co-Creation
10. Learning Launch

I am not saying that tools cannot cross over into other cycles. Tools must be used as and only when needed. But through the process of defining your toolset it will assist you in understanding the cycles of continuous improvement in Lean Sales and Marketing.

So, like the possum that has adapted and survived where others have become extinct, the scientific method and PDCA will continue to evolve and live.