Toyota and the A3 Process: Where Agile meets Lean (and lessons for IPD in the AEC)

Over last several months we’ve begun the process of selectively adopting “parts” of the Agile software development methodology at Knowledge Architecture. Agile, if you are not aware, is based on iterative development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams. Agile contrasts directly with the traditional method of Software Development Lifecycle, also called the “Waterfall” approach.

For the AEC folks following along at home, replace “Agile” with “IPD” and “Design-Bid-Build” with “Waterfall” in the above description and you’ll understand most of what you need to know about Agile. For someone that is passionate about knowledge management and business process (and straddles the AEC and software development) this is fascinating to participate in. Two industries re-inventing themselves using a similar paradigm and similar language.

CPMC – Cathedral Hill Rendering

I’ve been to two very interesting presentations on Integrated Project Delivery lately. Interesting, because after spending the last eight years attending essentially the same presentation about 100 times, there are actually real-life examples of IPD in action.  The first was hosted by the Sutter Health / SmithGroup / Herrero / Boldt  integrated team working on the Cathedral Hill Hospital in San Francisco. The owner, architect, engineers, builders, trades, and all consultants are actually co-located in an office in SoMa. Yesterday, I attended a breakfast presentation on design process optimization hosted by John Haymaker of Stanford’s Center for Integrated Facilities Engineering. I brought up the intersection between Agile and IPD and we had a brief discussion regarding how it would be interesting to dive deeper into the the lessons learned from software firms applying Agile to see if there were lessons for AEC firms applying IPD and/or Lean Construction methods.

Sample A3

In both presentations we ended up talking about the book “The Toyota Way” and more specifically, their A3 process. In essence the A3 process is a method of developing knowledge and solving problems through asking high-level questions that must be able to fit on an A3 international sized-piece of paper. (Hence the name. ) For more on A3, please visit John Shook’s article in the MIT Sloan Management Review.

The kicker

This morning, I was going through my daily review of my RSS feeds on Google Reader and was blown away by what came in. There was a post by the folks at Rally Software (we use their product management suite for Agile development) on their implementation of the A3 process. Come on. Just yesterday we were discussing this.  Here’s their post.: Learning from Toyota’s Secret – The A3 Process.

So it turns out that both industries are coming together independently of each other around a very simple, paper-based tool to fundamentally re-invent their industries. Wow.

There is clearly something to the A3 process. We’re going to start testing it in our Knowledge Architecture work as an alignment, learning, and potentially even marketing tool. We’ll keep you posted.