Toyota Kata: Putting your Improvement efforts on steroids
Sprint retrospectives have helped many teams improve their processes. That was a very good first step but many companies are now realizing that retrospectives are not enough to bring them the strategic advantage they are looking for or even just keep up with their competitors. Looking back 6 months, it is often hard to single out improvements that had a real effect on the bottom line and teams feel less and less engaged in improvement efforts.
Toyota Kata represents a very different approach to continuous improvement and is a systematic way to set ambitious process goals and reach them. With Toyota Kata improvement efforts are continuous, measurable and engaging, allowing for iterative experimentation towards both local goals and your company’s strategic initiatives. With Toyota Kata, improvement work is no longer something you “wake up” to once every sprint but part of the daily work where teams and managers set challenging goals for themselves and perform daily experiments to reach them.
In this 1-day training you will learn what Toyota Kata is and how to apply it in your own context. Through exercise and cases, you will work through the challenging aspects of defining goals, obstacles and experiments and update the Improvement Score board as you progress. You will learn to separate lagging outcome indicators from leading process indicators and why improvement work is much more fun and effective when you can measure progress. Toyota Kata is much like skiing and riding a bi-cycle - you can read all the books in the world but the only way to truly learn is to practice.
You can get great results from applying Toyota Kata at the team level, but the true potential is realized when you implement it across all layers in the organization.
