Principle 2 - Limit Work in Progress

Obs.: Please switch Vimeo to HTML5 Player to watch the Videos below.

Once we start to Visualize the Flow of Work (Design) in Progress thru these stages we can then move to the next principle which is to Reduce the Amount of Work in Progress (WIP).

Although it may sound counter intuitive to reduce the Work in Progress when what you really want is to find ways to produce more, it is a very important aspect of the Lean/Agile and the one that will actually allow you to do more with less.

One of the benefits it brings to the table is that it will immediately reduce one the most counterproductive results that arise when you have too much work in progress which is Multitasking.  Although people may seem to be more productive while working on many items at the same time the results are actually the opposite.  Besides, when you have too much Work in Progress there are many problems hidden that don’t come to our attention and will probably appear towards the delivery date.

It seems that the more things we start working on the safer we feel.  It seems that if we are working on more tasks or shots then the job will get done earlier.

But being busy doesn't mean you are building value to the end product.

A great example of this is presented in a amazing way by Henrik Kniberg, an Agile Coach and author.
On the video below he demonstrates how something as simple as writing 5 names can actually take 13x longer depending on how you decide to do it.

Kanban and Scrum - making the most of both - Henrik Kniberg on Vimeo

http://vimeo.com/16918747#t=782

This doesn't mean that we can only work on 1 thing at a time.  It could be 5 projects at a time or 2 shots at a time or 3 shots per Artists at the same time.  We will discover these optimum limits thru experimentation and by using data that is gathered while tracking the flow of work thru the different stages.

Tony Schwartz, CEO of The Energy Project, develops a method of managing energy and instead of time.  He also has several articles on how Multitasking reduces your productivity and energy.

Article:
http://blogs.hbr.org/schwartz/2012/03/the-magic-of-doing-one-thing-a.html

Video - Myth #2: Multitasking
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9duamOz3EKU&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Reducing the Work in Progress allows you to focus on Finishing the work that has been started, while surfacing the problems that are hidden in the WIP as shown on the following slide from one of the great Presentations on Lean by Mary Poppendieck:

"Lean software development: discovering waste" by Mary Poppendieck from Operae Partners

Which will then force you and your team to find and implement solutions asap not later after the problem affects every work in the system, which will then allow you to remove waste created by these problems, which will allow you to deliver often, which will help you in gaining customer trust and will hopefully take you to a level where you start to collaborate with your client instead of negotiate. 

You will then start to gather important data that will allow you to better understand how long it actually takes your team to do something, increasing predictability of your team, allowing you to plan better and keep a constant flow of work thru your Studio.

Cheers!

Francisco Lima
Visual Effecst Supervisor

Principle 1- Visualizing the Work in Progress

Obs.: Please switch Vimeo to HTML5 Player to watch the Videos below.

Several of the links in the previous posts and on this one and on the upcoming ones refer to Lean/Agile in Software Development.

Software Development is knowledge work, which is not repetitive, contains a lot of variability and shares several other similarities with Creative/VFX Projects

Visual Effects is a Risky business, composed of complex projects with high degrees of uncertainty.

Our challenge is to thrive in this Complex Industry, which is very challenging during these uncertain Times with Lower Budgets and Timeframes.

But How?

The current management methodologies simple don't cope with the complexity of Visual Effects Projects.
This means that even though we seem to be doing everything right, or as everyone else is doing, we end up facing several inevitable issues.

There are Studios that are currently doing well but it would also be interesting for them to evaluate other management models that allow them to get better everyday.

Since we work with a Visual medium let's start by using Visualization allied to Lean/Agile principles to deliver high quality imagery, make money and have fun!

I used these principles in several VFX projects achieving strong positive results in quality, productivity and team engagement.

Visualizing the Work in Progress is the first step for Visual Management.

This can be achieved by using Physical Boards or Digital Boards with large screens.

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=kanban+board&hl=en&tbo=d&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=DlbGUOOKIc6XhQfg_YDIAg&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAA&biw=1600&bih=799

As Tom Wujec from Autodesk details below in his TED Presentation on 3 ways the brain creates meaning.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPFA8n7goio&feature=youtube_gdata_player
No wonder they say: "a picture if worth a thousand words."

Of course just Visualizing the Shots on a Wall isn't enough.
And this is where the Lean/Agile principles come into the Game providing great benefits to the Companies that are able to implement and maintain them.  As you will notice these principles and methods are relatively simple, many are actually counter intuitive and the hard part is to stick with them when times are tough in order to benefit from them in the mid to long term.

Successful Companies that apply some of these Principles:
Southwest Airlines - Services
Dell - Manufacturing
Toyota - Product Development
Pixar - Creative Industry

By Visualizing the Flow of Work through the different stages from Arrival to Final delivery, team members (executives, supervisors, producers, artists, project stakeholders, etc..) are able to achieve a level of transparency to the project that promotes several benefits such as stronger collaboration and support for better decision making.

Usually this is hard to do when the work is “hidden” inside Systems, Spreadsheets in the head of specific team members or other places where the work is not easily displayed and is not really constantly irradiating information to the whole team.

Visualizing and analysing the work flowing thru the different stages allows the team to start managing queues resulting from the amount of work in progress in specific stages at any given time, instead of managing timelines as the ones found in Gantt Charts, which are hard to maintain ad keep up to date.  

The more granular these timelines and schedules are the more you will spend time updating them due to unexpected changes that will always happen in projects.  Due to the high variability of work, as found in Visual Effects Projects, these timelines become so hard to keep up to date that you end up ingoring them at some point during the production schedule.  Or you end up creating an overhead on the team only to try and keep these Timelines up to date.

Creating Timelines/Gantt Charts at the start of a project can be useful and most of the clients will require one.

But once the Work enters the Studio we should change our focus from viewing People and Timelines to visualizing the Flow of Work thru the different stages, the bottlenecks that are forming and the impediments that need to be removed until the work is approved and delivered.

Once we start Visualizing the Flow of Work (Design) in Progress thru these stages we can then move to the next principle which is to Reduce the Amount of Work in Progress (WIP). 

This will be covered on the next Post - Limit Work in Progress.

Best Rgds!

Francisco Lima
Visual Effects Supervisor.

Lean/Agile and how it Relates to VFX

Since the 1990s a revolution in the Management of Software Development projects started to emerge.

This was a reaction to the current management methodologies that were not able to cope with the nature, requirement and complexity of software development and were actually degrading the business value that the companies were delivering to their customers and putting them at risk.

This revolution resulted in the creation of new project management methodologies for the software development community such as XP Programming and Scrum to name a few.

In 2001, several members that helped build these different project management methods decided it was time for them to meet.  Even though they were considered to be “competitors” their objective was to talk about their experiences, values, share a vision of where the software development was heading and how they could work together in making it a better place to be.

From this meeting the Agile Manifesto and Agile Alliance were borne.

http://agilemanifesto.org/

So this is a bit about Agile.  Now lets talk about Lean and how Agile maps to Lean, etc..etc..

Lean Principles had been successfully applied by manufacturing companies in Japan since the 1950s.  These companies were outperforming competing companies around the world in quality, speed, price and overall effectiveness.

Of these companies Toyota is the most famous.  It completely changed the product development market and created a revolution not only in its industry but also in the history of Management as a hole.  It did this by applying Lean Thinking at its core.

By applying Lean Principles Toyota was able to achieve a culture of Continuous improvement which turned it into a system that is constantly innovating in every aspect of its business making it practically impossible for its competitors to copy its products and outperform them.

This led several western professionals, companies, educational institutes, to travel to Japan and learn from them.  Several papers and books resulted from these trips and studies.  One of the most famous books is called :

The Machine That Changed the World : The Story of Lean Production

By James P. Womack (Author), Daniel T. Jones (Author), Daniel Roos (Author)

http://www.amazon.com/Machine-That-Changed-World-Production/dp/0060974176

Scrum is one of the most popular Agile methods and its principles can be traced to Lean Thinking.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(development)#History

Boris Gloger a respected member of the Agile Community posted a page were it maps Scrum Practices to Toyota´s 14 Management Principles:

http://www.scrumalliance.org/articles/22-scrum-delivers

For more info on the 14 Management Principles:

The Toyota Way - Jeffrey Liker (Author)

http://www.amazon.com/Toyota-Way-Jeffrey-Liker/dp/0071392319

Scrum has been successfully implemented in other markets such as Game Development, Marketing and it was also the first method I learned about and that made me enthusiastic in experimenting this kind of methodology in the creation/production of Visual Effects for a TV Series.

Let´s look at some of the facts that led the Software Development professionals to search for management solutions outside their industry in order to find a solution that would better attend their specific projects requirements.

• projects kept increasing in complexity and scale,
• which led to a significant increase in the amount of professionals required to develop and maintain these products,
• tighter delivery time frames,
• projects going over budget,
• schedules constantly slipping,
• delivery dates in constant risk of being missed,
• professionals paying the bill by working very long hours and weekends,
• which led to the burn out and lack of engagement of professionals,
• which led to reduction in quality of the resulting products,
• which led to the delivered products not attending Client expectation,
• which led to reduced Client satisfaction and lack of trust in the Software Development Companies,
• which led to Software Development companies in Chaos,
• which led to Companies accepting low budgets and unrealistic time frames just so they could try to stay in business,
• which led Companies to look at emerging countries to add more professionals at a lower cost,
• which led to problems in managing more people not only locally but also abroad,
• which led the local Professionals to work even longer hours in fear of loosing their job to emerging countries,
• which led to reduction in enthusiasm on the professionals and drop in productivity,
• which led to ….
• a vicious cycle that doesn´t seem to end nor have a happy ending.

Does this sound similar? Are these some of the issues we are facing today in the VFX industry?

Many industries have gone or are going thru the similar situations and crisis:

American Auto Manufacturers in the 1950s, Software Development Companies in the 1990s and most recently Game Developing and now the Visual Effects industry.

There needs to be a change that will lead us to a more mature business and to develop a different and healthier relationship with our clients (Studios).  We need to change from constant negotiation to greater collaboration.

It´s a great time to learn and implement new Management principles and methods that have greater synergy in dealing and handling complex projects as the ones involved in creative and knowledge work such as Visual Effects, Games and Software development markets.   As mentioned on the previous Post, the current Management methods used in most of the VFX facilities today were inherited from Mass Production and they just don’t work with the kind of complexity and scale that Visual Effects projects have today.

That is the reason why I keep talking about Lean/Agile Principles and Kanban.

These principles focus on: quality, make the work transparent by allowing everyone to visualize the work that is being made and clearly see how it is progressing, eliminate activities that generate waste, focus on the work that adds real value to the client, empower the professionals doing the work, increase the team commitment and engagement, add significant gains in productivity, deliver projects on time and on budget, add quality to the product and increase customer satisfaction.  Increasing customer satisfaction will generate trust between you and the client that is crucial in developing a relationship based on collaboration rather than constant negotiation.

Lean/Agile Principles are fundamental in making companies achieve a culture of continuous improvement and innovation.  This is what will differentiate the best from the competition and will make the clients want to work with them.

Kanban is a great methodology that supports these companies to achieve the qualities and benefits above by making the work Flow from “concept to cash” like Mary Poppendieck – one of the Pioneers in implementing Lean/Agile in Product and Software development - says.

A very large percent of the current Lean/Agile content available is related to Software Development but while reading it is possible to understand how these principles can be implemented on Visual Effects projects.

Here is a video from Steve Denning on Radical Management.  He describes how Agile principles developed by the Software Development community can offer significan benefits in other industries.

http://www.stevedenning.com/Books/radical-management.aspx

Lean principles can fit into any organization and by using methods such as Kanban it is possible to create a culture of continuous improvement and innovation and develop Agile companies.

Here is a link to Personal Kanban website which has texts and documents that provide a good introduction of Kanban and how it is also helping people be more effective:

http://www.personalkanban.com/pk/

Here is a link to the Kanban University with a lot of high quality content and free:

http://leankanbanuniversity.com/

There is a lot of free content accessible to everyone!

Have fun going thru the content!  More soon :)

Francisco Lima

Visual Effects Supervisor