RSSPracticing crisis
Perhaps you need a crisis every once in a while to practice your crisis management skills.
Toyota has been admired and revered in the manufacturing and production world for so long, and their vehicles paraded as paragons of quality and innovation, for so long that it seems they have neglected to improve on the one important skill that is rarely tested: crisis management.
I spend a lot of time touting "The Toyota Way" as an adjunct to my pet theories about agile operations management in IT departments. Few executives with any sort of business education at all are not familiar with Toyota's famed lean manufacturing principles; the application of those principles to software development, agile development, is still in the process of taking off in corporate America, and their use in IT operations is still mostly theoretical. When Toyota itself stumbles, it's a natural question as to what extent their own principles may be culpable in the incident. An interesting observation in this Wall Street Journal article calls into question Toyota's own adherence to the "Toyota Way."
The absence of a structure to quickly get accurate information to top management hampers an accurate and adequate response. That leaves management unprepared to deal with media questioning and conveys an image of stonewalling and indifference.
What ever happened to principle, "Go and see?" If Toyota's management is so poorly informed even in the midst of a major manufacturing problem, how well can their managers possibly be following along with the vast amount of normal, every-day operational detail happening out on the factory floors? Being familiar with the details of what is happening on the ground floor, where the real business of the company is done, is supposed to be a key part of the Toyota success story. Was it actually ever happening, or was it simply brushed on, a paper principle that sounded good as long as it was never tested?
In IT, the complexity of the ground level business has always made it difficult for executives to keep a handle on what is actually happening, a fact that has caused no few of the significant IT project failures we are all familiar with. But on the other hand, those failures have provided something that Toyota has had little of: practice failing. IT, and particularly agile IT, is in no small part a response to the fact of failure in our industry. Reducing the costs, structuring projects so that failure is, if you'll pardon the expression, designed in, managing the complexity… these are all basics that are common with lean manufacturing systems. The difference may be that the roots of lean, distant failures in Toyota projects, have become too distant. Managers may have simply started to apply the principles by rote, forgetting the impetus behind them. CIOs shouldn't have that problem; the failures in technology are all too fresh.
