Robert | 2.11.2006 @ 2:14 PM
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A few weeks ago, I stumbled across the term "Kaizen", while doing research on Poka-yoke (the great idea with the funny name; it means "preventing inadvertent errors"). I immediately became somewhat obsessed with it. And in the middle of my research, I was surprised to see a post on the subject from 37signals. Happily, I'm not the only one who sees the connection between Kaizen and the web. (37signals' Getting Real concepts are more metaphorically related to Kaizen than directly related, but it was interesting to see the post nonetheless.)

Kaizen, directly translated, means "continual change for the better", or in less verbose terms, "continuous improvement". It involves several key components, each of which is aimed at enabling the constant, incremental improvement of the processes used to create a product. Toyota is well known for its practice of Kaizen, which helps the company product high-quality cars that earn them more money and more sales.

Kaizen is part of a larger concept, known as Lean Manufacturing, which also involves Poka-yoke and Kanban, a signaling system used to manage Just In Time production, where goods and such are delivered/prepared when they're needed instead of kept in surplus. All of these principles can be applied to the web, and in fact, this Inc Blot on Just In Time Design discusses the notion of doing design work right when it's needed.

Since discovering Kaizen, it's become core to my approach. Well, actually, it's always been core to my approach, I just didn't know it had a name. It's definitely my kind of solution. It's simple, clean, keeps disruption to a minimum, and involves constant, incremental improvements to whatever process you currently use with the goal of increasing productivity. It's also easy to do and incredibly cheap if done right. Practioners of Kaizen believe that whatever your goal is for the end result of your process (say, a higher-quality car), an improved process will get you there. In companies that practice Kaizen, suggestions are encouraged, and management is open to hearing suggestions and admitting that processes can always be improved. Management not only allows and enables the airing of complaints, but encourages suggestions to improve it. A suggestion box is an important part of the equation. And if one area of a process stagnates for a while without any improvments, a Kaizen Event can be scheduled, during which a singular part of a process is observed and analyzed, and many small improvements are made all at once. (This causes more disruption than typical Kaizen, but is effective nonetheless.)

So how does all this apply to the web? Any way you can make it apply. You can apply Kaizen to the way you write string parsing methods in the programming language of your choice, use it to find a more effective way to create proposals, or improve the way you handle items on your to-do list. Whatever the case, Kaizen is about doing the work of improving things constantly, in little tiny ways that add up to gigantic results. It's the process of improving your process.

Naturally, Kaizen only works to its fullest if you continue to do it, so if you start, keep going. There's always a way to improve a process. Every time you make a small improvement, doors open up for improving the new version. And none of the changes cause any major disruption in your work, so you can keep plugging away at the activity of building sites and software without getting buried in all the improvements you've made.

I'll be talking more about this in the future. For now, I just wanted to open up the discussion.