Sysco LABS Innovation, Technology & Agility

Tell us about a unique principle, habit or ritual that differentiates your approach to engineering. When did you start doing this?

When I got back from working in Japan, I joined a startup and began looking into quality and governance methodologies like CMM, Carnegie Mellon, Sarbanes Oxley and Six Sigma, of which Six Sigma immediately stood apart as tapped into deep wisdom.

Six Sigma led me to Toyota governance methods, where I learned the pillars of organizational success: continuous improvement and respect for people. When planning long-term, “Is this respectful of our co-workers?” is never a misplaced question. It is essential. And Toyota will get you started on the principle, practice and discipline of flow. 

Not all aspects of work are equally useful to focus on, but some yield far-reaching benefits, and by making flow the focus of visualizing, measuring and improving your system, you find traction.

When all options bring problems to solve, choose the one that best promotes flow. It is not a workaround for doing the hard work of growth, but it is a direction to work towards.

What differences did you notice after you adopted a flow mindset?

To quote one of the Toyotas, “The constant struggle is to see.” 

We can be blinded by the edifice of the system, so we constantly fail to question and improve it. The system of our work is the water we’re immersed in — everything, yet transparent to us, though we feel its invisible currents. To see clearly, it is necessary to drop instruments into those currents, like limiting work in progress.

“If we try to do everything, we’ll accomplish nothing” sounds obvious, but limiting work in progress often proves unintuitive, and brings up challenging ideas like Slack: that systems process the same body of work faster when run below capacity.

When my team constrained the number of open items and worked strictly from right to left on their board, they began to see the bigger picture more clearly. When we own each work item collectively, the minimum viable product statistic becomes the standard, creating an informed enthusiasm for breaking work into smaller pieces that can be picked up and closed by the next available person.

When we embraced rightsizing —  we  stopped estimating the size of work and started controlling it — each member stopped digging their own well and the team became a bucket brigade. That’s flow.
 

What does this approach to engineering help you and your team accomplish?

We can offer predictability to the business while also experiencing sustainable working methods. We can eliminate context-switching. Through something called “pull,” we can natively balance capacity and demand. 

We can confirm that customers want a feature while building it, choose as we go whether to fund further development or cheaply abandon it. It is a huge win for the business and incredibly empowering for UX and product teams. 

We’re early in the journey. But by taking it together and building processes incrementally — in a way suited to local conditions — we can understand the meaning behind the methods we consciously adopt and build front-line competence for problem-solving and change, rather than falling into the trap of trying to replicate someone else’s success by replicating their methods.