Kaizen: a story about continuous improvement
By: Agustin Pequeno
Tags: It, Continuous Improvement, Lean, Learning

Knowing how to do your job is important, but knowing how to improve your daily work is even more.

Continuous improvement is the never ending quest for possible improvements in the work place, otherwise known as Kaizen.

In the next sections, I will illustrate how it was possible for me to make improvements on my daily work throughout a data creation issue I had at work.

At the end I will explain the ideas behind it and give some suggestions on how you can start on your continuous improvement path.

The test data issue

Every day in order to test different scenarios on our application I have to create test data, for example users, sometimes I will need to create 50 or more of them.

Creating test data through the UI was long and tedious, taking up to 45 minutes per day on just data creation and setup.

It’s important to put this 45 minutes in context, I work 37 hour weeks, so if we assume I spent 45 minutes per day, on a 5 day week, that is almost 4 hours per week just creating data and setting up environments, which is a 10 percent of my productive hours, yes, as you read, 10 percent on my working hours just creating data, what a waste!

After a while of this, I decided something had to change, so the first thing I did was ideating a plan and an experiment, that’s how the API experiment begun.

The API experiment

I knew there had to be a better way to create this data, so my first step was to ask my colleagues for access to the API, the documentation and a little bit of a heads up on how it worked.

The second step was to use Postman to create and save my requests, now I didn’t need to go through forms in the UI but just to send a simple requests with everything I needed.

In comparison to the UI approach, that spent 10 percent of my time, using the API took create all the data I needed took me 10 minutes, which translates at 2.7 percent of my total weekly time, much better isn’t it?

However, it wasn’t all happiness and roses, this was still a bit of a manual process too, so I decided to talk with my manager and ask for sometime to find a better solution.

Without a doubt my manager, not only supported me but encourage me to improve this, noticing the time I was wasting on manual this manual process.

To be honest, I was a little bit lost in which direction to go, until one of my colleagues suggested to just write scripts for the data creation, so I wouldn’t have to do anything manually, and this is how we moved to the next experiment.

The script experiment

We kept our conversation going with my colleague, and we decided that the best implementation was to not only have the scripts but commands trigger them at will, so for example if we needed 50 users we could just write create_users(50), and that will be all.

It took me a couple of days to get this scripts right, I committed multiple mistakes, sometimes I needed help from my colleagues or needed to adjust my implementation because it wasn’t optimal, but at the end it worked.

Now to create all the data I needed, I spent 1 minute per day, so instead of 2.7 percent of my total time per week, now I spent 0.6 percent of that time.

I noticed some of our support colleagues struggling with the same issue of data creation, so I shared my scripts with them, now not only improving my productivity time, but others too.

My manager was delighted by this, and this started a conversation in our team, which led the team to agree that whenever we saw a process or a task creating waste, we will stop, talk about it and try to improve it and if we could help others with our experiments, we were encourage to do so.

Now creating data it’s more a pleasure than a pain, and I have more room to do more significant and fun tasks.

Continuous Experimentation

The two previous subtitles contains the word experimentation on them, and multiple times I use the word experiment on the previous sections.

This is because the first step to continuous improvement its continuous experimentation.

When you are facing a situation you want to improve these are the steps you can follow:

Identify your problem

Make a hypothesis about how to solve it

Implement your solution

Test your solution

Iterate

Allow yourself and other to experiment in the work place, because without experimentation there is no innovation.

Phycological safety

With experimentation comes trial an error, and nothing kills experimentation and thus innovation as an environment where mistakes are not allowed.

On the script experiment section, I wrote how my colleagues supported me when I couldn’t implement a solution or when the scripts didn’t work, my manager encourage me to keep trying instead of demotivate me, or punish me for “wasting time”.

Without an environment were people feel they can’t speak, propose changes, make mistakes and improve, there is no room for innovation and continuous improvement.

Sharing is caring

On the script experiment section, I also mention how my support colleagues were facing challenges similar to mine, I could have keep this improvements for myself, however I decided to share them because improving others workflows increases the overall productivity.

As an example, if my support team spends less time creating test data, they can spend more time going through tickets for customers, which the developers can fix faster, and then we can give more value to our customer faster.

So be open and share, it’s difficult to foster a continuous improvement culture if everybody keeps their improvements for themselves, and this can even cause two people working to solve the same problem separately or even worse multiple times without knowing that another colleague is working on it or they already solve it.

Now it’s your turn

I hope this article helps you or make you think about those dull tasks or boring obstacles you have at work and how to foster a culture of continuous improvement.

Remember, don’t be afraid to experiment, encourage others to do it, and create a safe space for it, while you also share your improvements and findings with your colleagues.

Good luck and have fun with your experiments!