Category Archives: Continuous Improvement

All items related to Continuous Improvement principles.

Defining Value is about vision and specifying smaller chunks up-front

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My 5S approach to initial project planning and contracting

Just as the saying goes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder then I propose that value is in the mind of the beholder.

Does this situation sound familiar to you? You are a service provider contracted by a Customer to design a piece. You initially agree the basic scope, guess the provisions and timescales required and agree on an estimate or quote. You start off with the new project happily enough and it’s not before long when you feel you’ve done the deed and are proud of your achievement. On presenting the piece to the Customer, they decide they want some things changed. Not only that, they now want to add more things into the mix. So once again, being keen and eager to please you accept the feedback and rework the piece. Only to return back to the Customer who now wants even more things changed and added. Repeat this another several times and before long you’ve now spent five times longer on the project than you originally anticipated and now struggle to get the Customer to accept when you ask to increase the price.

In my experience when this happens it can be very draining and it also impacts your ability to work on other commitments. So why does this happen? I have come to the conclusion that once again it all comes down to a question of Value. The Customer does not recognise the value in the effort put into the design work, they have not been particularly involved other than the odd meeting and email here and there. So from their perspective all they’ve done is made a few comments and as if by magic, some time later you reappear back with what they’ve asked for. The other aspect to recognise is that unlike having the ready made product off-the-shelf to sell where it is much easier to set a standard price since all of the work has already been done, the Customer’s expectation is that it’s your job to produce the product they want with the same set price attitude. And how many of you are experts at predicting the future?

Designing with Elise Gustilo by Matt Lai

It takes team work to make the dream work

By contrast I’ve recently completed a web design project which was completely refreshing to the above scenario, enough so that I wanted to share with you some ideas and tips which I hope will help you avoid the dreaded above as much as possible. Teaming up with the multi-talented women’s fashion designer and design professional Elise Gustilo, I was greatly impressed with her creative ideas, her technical appreciation of the task at hand and more importantly at her ability to create a complete Vision up-front. The difference? She knew exactly what she wanted her site to do as well, how it would function and exactly how it would look. Thus not only had she the grand vision, she had also been able to break down her vision into smaller manageable realistic chunks. Quite often a blank sheet of canvas can be overwhelming and it is much easier to have such a “jump-off point” such as this to develop from. From Elise’s mind a detailed specification was drawn up and the scope of activities defined to a much greater depth than a typical project would normally be. Any additional work needed could now be easily identified and discussions taken place before any work was carried out. The result was a mutually agreed completion point and both parties happy with the achievement.

5S Formula to Documenting Value

So to apply my Continuous Improvement approach, here is my 5S equivalent formula to getting any project off to the right start!

  1. Sort – Get your vision up-front! From NLP the term is “end-step” or “evidence procedure”. More traditional business terms include “strategy planning”. Whatever you choose to call it, you want to set the scene as early as possible to avoid the trap of meandering down the wrong path only to find you should have turned way back.
  2. Straighten – This is the next very important part, the conversion of the Vision into tangible activities so that the project can be managed into smaller chunks and pieced together. This is your initial assessment of what would need to be done to achieve the Vision and from this the scope of work can be defined.
  3. Sweep – Go through the definitions, details of scope, design expectations, functions and establish that the definitions are understood in the same way by both parties. Also at this stage establish formal channels for communication, reviews and records.
  4. Standardise – Finalise the contract and formally agree on the documented specification and scope of work. And of course, start working to them!
  5. Sustain – It’s all about good monitoring and communication. Keep a timesheet to record the activities to monitor actual vs planned resource requirements and keep your Customer updated as much as possible within reason or as contracted. As soon as you doubt range of scope, revisiting all formal documentation and discuss with the Customer. You will be better off having five extra meetings to agree on designs before progressing with function work than finding out at the end that you now need to rework the entire product.

So that’s my 5S approach to project definition in a nut shell. I hope you found this useful and if you have any similar experiences or ideas, please add your comments to this blog.

Is the PDCA cycle really the best model? Consider the human touch vs the logical touch.

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The Deming popularised Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) Shewhart Cycle is one of the most highly regarded models of Continuous Improvement thinking of our times. Yet whilst I appreciate its merits, I personally have always had an issue with it. My personal experience of getting things done uses a slightly different tone and the question raised is if so many businesses and managers out there also “follow and believe” in it, why do so many still show signs of Non-Continuous Improvement.

I’ll describe and introduce my own personal CI cycle later but for now lets consider the factors of human emotion vs logical thought. Like the sales and personal success development worlds have known long ago, people react emotionally and through their values, mind-set and life conditioning, not by logic. Taking this into account, I propose you consider what I believe many companies out there actually use within their PDCA cycle:

  • P – Procrastinate
  • D – Deliberate or delegate
  • C – Confusion
  • A – Argue or avoid

    PDCA Cycles - Shewhart and realistic alternative
    PDCA Cycles – The Shewhart Classic and realistic alternative

So lets follow this alternative PDCA cycle and see if you can spot any similarities within your business environment. Somebody has a bright idea or there is a need. It is presented to management who don’t really want to change (human laziness as they may be complacent in their current situation, “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” culture, sales targets are the focus not the bottom line, “by the book” culture, etc) and first procrastinate by finding any excuse or other “more important things” to do. Then in order to not have to worry about it (because in reality they may not know what to do about it – we can talk about “thinking” being too difficult which is why most people don’t do it another time) they hold a meeting to deliberate it and then delegate it to make themselves feel like they’re in control and managing the situation. After a while as events develop, other ideas and other needs of other people wanting not to miss out enter into the mix and everybody starts getting confused about what the real “value-driven” issues were in the first place. Finally everybody argues their own case for reasons why not to do anything about it (job security, change to their responsibilities, etc), and thus the cycle begins back to procrastination.

In general, people are reluctant to change because two core personal values present in our society are comfort and security – the baseline for why jobs are conditioned into our lifes from an early age as the primary reason we go to school to get good grades/scores.

So for those who have kept reading, my original statement regarding PDCA may have stunned you but here’s my thinking. You’ve heard of “ready-aim-fire” but the “success” educators/state inducers and entrepreneurs I’ve been following often use “ready-fire-aim” which thinking about it is much more in line with my working methods which has always given me the focus and results I wanted. Thus, “Plan-Do” seemed problematic. Even when I was younger and training in a kung-fu system I was always told intention is key but I had a hard time buy-into this as well. Plus you can keep “planning” as a method of procrastinating. Thus I realised that no matter what we think, any result first comes from a single decision. Therefore that is the start point!

So are you ready for this? The “Lai CI Cycle” – I designed my personal CI cycle to be D-A-R-E:

  • D – Decide: Make that choice and with confidence. There’s a saying I picked up from a Chris Howard seminar presented by Johnnie Cass which goes something along the lines of “the average person waits to make the right decision whereas the succesful person makes any decision the right decision.” Also Anthony Robbins uses “decide” as his first step of reconditioning in his success seminars.
  • A – Act: Get started, if you don’t you rarely will as your mind-set state isn’t in the right place in the first place – be empowered to do something or hence go back to procrastination cycle instead. There’s another saying I’ve picked up from T Harv Eker which is “how you do anything is how you do everything”.
  • R – Revolutionise: This is where awareness and anticipation is key, perception, due diligence, research, feedback, creativity to adapt, infinite intelligence, innovate, etc.
  • E – Evolve or Evaluate: This is the growth part, the act of adapting to make that decision the right decision – lessons learnt, enjoying the journey, falling 5 times and getting up 6.

Finally DARE is used as a reminder to dare to challenge the status quo, dare to change, dare to think, dare to be creative, dare to think big and to dare to dream.

So good luck in your journey for Continuous Improvement, do you have your own models to share?

The power of planning, even for animation shorts

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When it comes to creating a simple short animation, it is pretty easy to under-estimate the amount of work involved to produce them. I will certainly always give lots of praise to animators everywhere for their patience to create stunning visual experiences and realise the imagery in their own imaginations.

Whilst it is indeed fun to play around with your ideas, when dealing with a working contract time may not be a luxury and planning becomes that much more important.

“If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six hours sharpening my axe!” Robert T Kiyosaki.

Those of you who read my other posts, you may have spotted the trend that I like to break activities into smaller chunks. With this in mind let’s take a look at this short 6 second animation I created for a wedding website.

Step 1: Know the requirements / specification
As this animation was to form part of the complete wedding experience (where guests use a website for RSVP and to share photos and stories), it was important to get the same feel throughout, matching the invitation designs and various other wedding decorations planned. It was this which set the standard of what output I had to create.

Step 2: Conceptual design and selling it
Having been given the graphic and initial design mock up for the invitations by the bride Suzie, that of designer Ian Husbands (who is actually a producer and artist bookings agent), the next stage was to consider how to bring the same imagery to life and animate it.

Here are my brief notes, used to pitch the concept to the bride and groom which secured me the deal.

  • Growth pattern simulating extensions from bottom to top, starting with left side branch and then right side delayed, with flowers blooming open.
  • Two birds fly in and mount on top branch.
  • Titles fade in when animation in final position – timed to be complete as entire composition is complete.

Here it was key that I describe what I had in my imagination and cast the picture in their minds through my descriptions. In some cases for more complex videos I have also drawn it out, comic book style to help with the presentation.

Step 3: Detailed design and design for construction
Now putting on an “engineer thinking cap” (think of it like Lego – you have to build up piece by piece to eventually create your full object), re-watching the animation you may begin to recognise there are only a few unique shapes in the composition.

Suzie and Lee wedding website animation elements

  • Background solid
  • Left bird
  • Right bird
  • Flying bird (i.e. wing flapping)
  • 8 point star
  • 5 point star
  • 3 leaf
  • Branch stems
  • Suzanne and Lee title
  • Secondary title

Using a purchased stock image, separating each element and drawing my own flying motion birds, it was now time to recreate the design matching the invitation. In this instance, I used a low quality scan I had of the proposed invitation design as the reference and recreated it.

Step 4: Animating Process Design
The final part to plan was how to animate it all. Firstly, by numbering the elements in my reconstructed composition, I could determine the order the elements needed to animate and time when.

Suzie & Lee wedding website animation composition breakdown

Then the plan had to cover the exact method to animate the elements:

  • For the branches, I used a simple slide reveal effect which I key framed once in a pre-composition and then duplicated at displaced it on the timeline and used different scaling options.
  • For the flowers, I used a similar pre-comp and duplicate process with a masking size change instead of a slide reveal with a final short scaling key to give the blooming effect.
  • For the flying birds, I had the images swap between each other and use a position key frame to give the impression of movement across the composition. I also applied motion blur to provide more realistic animation and also to hide the fact I can’t draw on a computer very well!

Step 5: Carry out the animating plan and build it!
With my plan in place I was literally able to systematically follow it without further thought. This allowed me to produce complete the actual alignment and keying within a very short space of time, in-fact from getting the original email in the afternoon and having met the bride and groom, by the same evening it was complete.

This is an example of why planning is so powerful – at times like this with limited timescales and when the clients have a very clear idea of what they are looking for, you shouldn’t rely on chance that you may eventually stumble across the final video you want. With a good enough plan, execution of the actions can then be performed without having to worry about what to do next and with video and animations, timing is everything!

I hope you enjoyed this article, please feel free to leave comments below and tell us your experiences.