How Nike created a successful lean IT obeya
The first time I realized the power of visual management was when I was visiting our European Distribution Center in Laakdal, Belgium, about five years ago. What I saw there inspired me to try to bring the same kind of principles to Nike's technology organization.
But how could I, as a leader, support the development of an effective obeya room in the department I was managing?
I thought a good way to start would be to ask everyone in the department to read Lean IT, which I had found extremely useful. I was sure it would help us gain the traction and support we needed to get started.
It worked, and lots of great ideas began to surface. Reflection followed, as we pondered what the most important information was that we wanted to share in our obeya room and what effect we wanted it to have on organizational behavior.
Before explaining our journey, however, it is important to note that obeya literally means “big room” and suggests that a team gathers in a large visual room to carry out its work. It can be used for many purposes – product development, software development, project management, workflow management and even party planning. Globally, Nike has used visual, collaborative workspaces successfully for many years – we are a highly visual, collaborative and innovative company. What is special about our obeya room is that we are using it for the strategy deployment of Nike EMEA IT (also known as hoshin kanri), where we visually connect high-level corporate strategy through specific initiatives and kaizen.
However, when we started, mainly for practical reasons, we decided to focus on the Portfolio and Project Management function in Technology, for which we already had a lot of information. Soon after, we expanded to the point where we covered every project we undertook until, eventually, the strategy guiding portfolio decisions was also addressed. Essentially, the obeya rooms just kept growing.
As you know, success breeds success. The more work we put into our obeya room, the more results we began to see. People started coming in and asking questions, and soon the rest of Nike Technology got excited.
When I became senior director of technology, the challenge for me became how to scale our efforts to reach the various departments in the organization. At that time, we were reorganizing our offices, and my entire senior leadership team gave up their private offices in favor of a more open visual workspace. We reorganized the extra space, tripling the size of the IT leadership area, and also added an innovation room next door. This dedication and investment by senior leadership sends a clear message.
TRIAL AND ERROR
People often ask me what it takes to set up a successful obeya room. Although there is no magic formula, what is absolutely necessary is not only inspiration and high levels of creativity, but also perseverance. If you go down this path expecting quick results, don't even start. This is a fundamental cultural change that takes place as people learn new behaviors and ways of interacting.
The development of the Nike Technology IT leadership happened through trial and error. In the beginning, we had a vague idea of what the obeya room would look like, but it took several iterations to get closer to our goal.
We always thought through our decisions to determine whether they were really the best course of action: “Is this the right data to put on the wall?” or ”are we displaying data in the right format?” were some of the questions we commonly asked. More importantly, we always asked ourselves how we could keep the data relevant so that our stakeholders would actually discuss it and learn to see and solve problems and make decisions.
Clear evidence that the obeya room was working began to appear as Nike Technology's key stakeholders started holding their main planning and review sessions there. Before long, we had to start booking the room, because it had become so popular. We also found that decisions were made faster and with more confidence in the obeya room, as people were immersed in the information needed to explore alternatives, ask questions and form hypotheses – the foundation of informed decision making. In this environment, people showed that they could come together, take on tough challenges and move forward together.
What many forget is that people are (or at least should be) the greatest beneficiaries of introducing an obeya room.
In our organization, we want employees to understand how their work contributes to Nike's strategy, the European strategic imperatives and the business goals in technology. But it doesn't stop there: most of them now see a significant improvement in goal clarity and in productivity for achieving focused improvements since lean, strategy deployment and the obeya room were introduced.
It is a slow process, and it is important to persevere and be patient. Almost a year ago, for example, we dedicated one wall of the obeya room to tracking day-to-day operational issues, but only in the last two months have we seen it really driving change and having a positive influence on the way we handle and resolve incidents. Ultimately, we hope to see fewer incidents.
Another difficulty anyone setting up an obeya room should be aware of is finding the right balance between requiring standards in processes and documentation and unleashing people's creativity in building an operational visual environment.
Standards are necessary (at Nike, as at other organizations, there is an expectation that people follow them in accordance with the guidelines), and after a while they become part of an organization's DNA, but we must not forget the importance of allowing our people to come up with creative solutions to problems. In our experience, an obeya room creates a safe zone for making goals and problems visible so that they can be discussed openly, which leads to creative problem solving and innovation.
THE POWER OF EXPERIMENTS
This journey has changed the way I act as a leader: I am now an evangelist and I feel responsible for making sure more people are encouraged to experiment and, occasionally, fail, as long as they learn from those experiences.
That is the great advantage of working at Nike: people are free to experiment and innovate. In other words, if we think something can help the organization improve, we just do it. Pun intended.
