lwsp

Eric Ries was kind enough to have lunch with me at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Gave me a ton of interesting stuff to think about. I’m a huge fan of Eric and the way that IMVU developed their customers and product. From Web 2.0 Expo: Eric Ries is the author of the blog Lessons Learned. He was the co-founder and served as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU, his third startup. He is the co-author of several books including The Black Art of Java Game Programming (Waite Group Press, 1996). In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech. He serves on the advisory board of a number of technology startups including pbWiki, Smule, 750i and KaChing

I’ll be posting in the future about our discussion and the real-world effects in Ph03nix New Media. For today, I just wanted to discuss a book that Eric recommends, and that provides some foundation for the concepts he talks about at Lessons Learned.

Taiichi Ohno’s Toyota Production System talks about Present Capacity = Work + Waste.

In the book, his example is that a production line can have 10 workers, and produce 100 products per day. This gives a line capacity of 100 pieces per day, and 10 pieces per worker/day. However, there may be inefficiencies: workers waiting, overproduction, and other unnecessary movements. Say improvements were made, and 8 workers now could produce 100 products/day. This would suggest that the original 10 workers could actually produce 125 pieces a day. Thus, the capacity to make 125 pieces/day existed before, but was being wasted.

100 (present capacity) = 125 + (-25 waste)

“True efficiency improvement comes when we produce zero waste and bring the percentage of work to 100%.” When examining my own life and business, I would think that our % of waste hovers between 25 and 80%. Hopefully our investors won’t read that and take to the hills screaming! I just have a fairly high standard for what is considered waste and productive time. I would argue that most people’s work & time are like an atom: 99% empty space. That might be a little extreme, but you get the point At a bare minimum, I think the pareto principle would apply, with 20% of our work driving 80% of the results!

Ohno identifies several categories of waste:

1) Waste of overproduction

2) Waste of time on hand (waiting)

3) Waste in transportation

4) Waste of processing itself

5) Waste of stock-on-hand (inventory)

6) Waste of movement

7) Waste of making defective products

For games & software development, I might tweak a few of those:

1) Waste of overproduction

2) Waste of time on hand (waiting)

3) Waste in transportation (from Telus capping my upload speed to 76k/s :P)

4) Waste of processing itself

5) Waste of undeployed code (our version of inventory)

6) Waste of repetition (if you have to do anything more than 2x, then automate it)

7) Waste of making defective products

At this point in time, I’d say 1, 6, and 7 are the biggest sources of pain for me I’ll keep you posted on how close we get to 0% waste!