By Boris Gloger
“In factories around the globe, Toyota consistently raises the bar for manufacturing, product development, and process excellence,” says Jeffrey K. Liker in The Toyota Way. He goes on to define fourteen principles that he claims drive Toyota’s success.
If we accept his premise that Toyota is the world’s best manufacturer and that this success is based on fourteen clearly identified principles, then we should model these principles in our own product development processes to increase our own success. Scrum practices map very well to these principles and provide an effective way of making them part of your day-to-day workflow.
Principle 1: Base your management decisions on a long-term philosophy even at the expense of short-term financial goals.
In a Scrum project, the vision is defined by a key representative of the organization: the product owner. He translates the company’s long-term philosophy (road maps or financial goals) into specific, tactical decisions within the project. These decisions are communicated to the project through the product backlog.
