program selection system

Nobuaki Katayama, Chief Engineer of Lexus/SC and IS, talked to software engineers about process, principles, and practices of new car development in Toyota, at Developer’s Summit 2008 in Tokyo on Feb. 13, 2008. In this session, I’ll give his presentation, translated into English in place of him. It starts with CE Katayama’s introduction, explains management principles and practices of a huge car development project, and concludes with people side of the development. I add some episodes about Agile and engineering found during our pannel session of the conference.

I will present examples of process improvement (Kaizen) in factories in Japan, demonstrate how the Toyota Production System (TPS) constantly improves the way things are done to meet changing customer needs, involving wokrplace(Gemaba) people. After presentation of key TPS concepts, small groups will explore commonalities between Agile and TPS by developing Mind Maps, and then exchange the results. Note that this is a re-run of the same program at Agile2007, presented by Mary Poppendieck and Kenji Hiranabe(me). This time, the content is shortened, focusing on the best stories.

How Real Options can help in running your project. Real Options is a decision-making process based on Financial Option Theory and Applied Psychology that can be used to manage risk.

The main challenge of this session is changing people’s mindset and behavior. We found a rational decision-making process based on maths and logic, rather than emotion and intuition. This session demonstrates that Real Options are at the heart of most Agile practices and principles, and are what drives Toyota.

After this session making decisions will never be the same again.