Lean Integration Part 9: Deming’s 14 Points

This article is the next installment of the “10 weeks to Lean Integration” series. If you are joining the discussion now, you may want to start by reading the first posting.

The philosophy of W. Edwards Deming is a key contribution to Lean practices. Deming believed that by adopting appropriate principles of management, organizations could increase quality and reduce costs while increasing customer loyalty. The key is to practice continual improvement and think of manufacturing as a system, not as separate steps.

Deming offered 14 key principles for effective business management and they were first presented in his book Out of the Crisis in 1986. The original 14 principles, and an interpretation of how to apply them to the integration discipline, are listed below.

Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive and stay in business, and to provide jobs. Interpretation: Provide for the long-range data integration needs of the enterprise. Don’t focus on just short-term project demands. The goal is to sustain integration as an ongoing discipline. Integration Competency Centers that do so will see their teams grown and provide more, not less, jobs.
Adopt the new philosophy. We are in a new economic age. Western management must awaken to the challenge, must learn their responsibilities, and take on leadership for change. Interpretation: The IT world has changed and integration professionals need to become leaders in the organization both in terms of bringing together functional stove-pipes, and in driving organizational change.
Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place. Interpretation: Build quality into your integrations by a) shifting to a “test first” approach where test scripts are developed before the code is written, b) implementing many small incremental changes rather than large massive changes, and c) using metadata to maintain accurate documentation.
End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag. Instead, minimize total cost. Move towards a single supplier for any one item, on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust.

Interpretation: Stop using hand-coding tools and instead select an integration platform for use across the organization. Reducing variation will minimize total cost and establish long-term relationships with a small number of suppliers.
Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease cost. Interpretation: Invest in reducing time and cost of repeatable integration patterns. As soon as one pattern is effectively automated, look for the next opportunity and repeat indefinitely.
Institute training on the job. Interpretation: Improve the quality of the integration program by developing and coaching staff across the enterprise to build their individual and collective performance. Encourage staff to ask open-ended probing questions to define problems, uncover needs and clarify objectives as part of their day-to-day activities.
Institute leadership. The aim of supervision should be to help people and machines and gadgets to do a better job. Supervision of management is in need of overhaul, as well as supervision of production workers. Interpretation: Continually examine competitor and best in class performers to identify ways to enhance the integration service and value to the enterprise. Proactively connect others to best in class performance to drive enhancement of the integration practice.
Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company. Interpretation: Institute post-project reviews for all projects, capture key lessons, and institutionalize those lessons in the training of new staff. View failures as learning opportunities and not as a “search for the guilty”.
Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team, to foresee problems of production and in use that may be encountered with the product or service.

Interpretation: Collaborate across functional groups to determine impact of implementing new processes and procedures. Integrate efforts across business lines to support strategic priorities. Uncover hidden growth opportunities within market and industry segments to create competitive advantage.
Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force. Interpretation: Focus first on the substance of the integration task. That is, describe the services provided by the integration team/function, develop integrated service request and fulfillment processes, measure the processes, and continuously improve the total cycle time. In other words, view the delivery of integration activities as a “system” that must be optimized.
a. Eliminate work standards (quotas) on the factory floor. Substitute leadership.
b. Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute workmanship.Interpretation: Do capture and measure processes, but for the purposes of gathering data for continuous improvement and not for the purpose of rewarding or punishing staff.
a. Remove barriers that rob the hourly worker of his/her right to pride of workmanship. The responsibility of supervisors must be changed from sheer numbers to quality.
b. Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objective.

Interpretation: Strive to eliminate integration wastes and give staff the tools they need to do their job. Once again, use metrics to manage the “system” and to continuously improve it, not to reward or punish staff.
Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement. Interpretation: Establish a repository of best practices that are taught to all new staff, including temporary consultants. Make it a requirement that all integration contribute to best practices and spend some time each year teaching others.
Put everyone in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is everyone’s work. Interpretation: Establish big-picture end-to-end metrics that engage everyone. Always keep the end customer in mind. Gather necessary data to define the symptoms and root causes (who, what, why and costs) of a problem. Develop alternatives based on facts, available resources, and constraints.