Agile Development Blog

Last week, I ran our quarterly planning session and was very positively surprised with the results of testing Toyota’s A3 method in the meeting. Before the meeting, I was convinced that I was trying to “push” too much, but instead the team sucked them up.

Breakout groups at Rally quarterly planning

If you don’t know what an A3 or problem sheet is, I recommend starting with John Shook’s article in the MIT Sloan Management Review.

What is an A3?

John says in his article, “At Toyota, there exists a way to solve problems that generates knowledge and helps people doing the work learn how to learn. Company managers use a tool called the A3 (named after the international paper size on which it fits) as a key tactic in sharing a deeper method of thinking that lies at the heart of Toyota’s sustained success.”

An A3 is a problem sheet in which the owner attempts to:

1. “Establish the business context and importance of a specific problem or issue

2. Describe the current conditions of the problem

3. Identify the desired outcome

4. Analyze the situation to establish causality

5. Propose countermeasures

6. Prescribe an action plan for getting it done

7. Map out the follow-up process”

There is much more information on this topic on the Lean.org blog.

Introducing A3′s to the Rally team

At Rally, we started using A3′s to diagnose issues due to growth and market maturity last summer.  I hired a trainer and friend from my US WEST days Jay Arthur and focused our first effort on product marketing and product management.  In that three-month effort, we had very positive results from working 4 simultaneous A3′s and built a well prioritized backlog of countermeasures.  We knocked off the highly feasible and highly effective ones that next quarter, but we continue to work off that list today.  After product marketing and product management, we brought the technique to operations team, too.

Given this foundation and 25% of our team trained on A3′s, we brought them into quarterly planning as part of our rock prioritization process. Jean and others warned me that it was a ton to grasp in fully packed day of checking the last quarters results and adapting for the next quarter. For that reason, I was prepared to fall back to our old way of working and prioritizing.

Homework is good?

What happened was even more than I could expect. Instead of throwing out this process, the team embraced it and even worked through breaks. Using A3′s to structure your thinking requires discipline and critical thinking.  I guess there was more pull waiting in the room than I expected; maybe it was the required reading of John’s article that helped?  My conclusion – homework is good?

As Jean and I continue to explore what makes an Agile organization, I am curious as to what others are using in their business planning processes to prioritize their quarterly or annual efforts.

About the Author: Ryan Martens is an avid outdoorsman, founding board member of the EFCO, and Founder and CTO at Rally Software Development. Subscribe today to get free updates by email or RSS.