Saturday 9th April was my birthday. One that put me fairly and squarely in the "late thirties" category (san-ju-hatuchi to be precise). In honor of this occasion, my in-laws treated the whole family to a sushi lunch at a serious but not overly pricey sushi restaurant in the Hibiya district of Tokyo. Hibiya is a financial office district to the North East corner of the Imperial Palace. As it was hanami season and the palace gardens were busy with visitors, the restaurant which was no more than a sweet 5 iron over the moat into the palace grounds, was also busier than usual for a Saturday. However, this seasonal variation must be considered as common cause rather than special cause because it is entirely possible to anticipate that any Saturday during hanami, the restaurant will be busier.

On arrival we were told that we could not be seated - there was a constraint ;-). The constraint was being protected by a capacity buffer of seats outside the door. We sat down. The menu was brought to us but strangely no one came back to take our order. Eventually we were seated inside at our table and a waiter arrived to take our order. My brother-in-law had placed some serious effort into selecting the pieces to be ordered and the numbers of each piece including some special treats for me as the birthday boy. The order was placed and we waited and waited. Meanwhile, the almost 3 year old in the corner seat was getting hungry and was eager with anticipation for the arrival of her California roll.

A plate of sushi arrived. No California roll!

On further inspection, it appeared that only half (han-bun) of our order had been fulfilled. An enquiry was made. A very polite waitress explained that the sushi chefs were fully loaded (a capacity constrained resource) and that in order to keep all the guests happy and provide food in a reasonable lead time, they were filling only half the order initially. The sushi chefs were self-organizing. They were presented with the order list and could burn it down as they saw fit. So an essentially randomly chosen selection representing half of our order had been delivered. Fair enough! Small batch sizes. Incremental delivery. Shorter lead times. It all made sense.

However, the vocal toddler was annoyed and frustrated. She started to chant, in English thankfully, I WANT SUSHI! I WANT SUSHI!

This was a serious sushi restaurant. You could tell this because the only condiment on the table was soy sauce. The sushi was served with ginger but no wasabi. This is to prevent uncouth foreigners from insulting the sushi chef by adding extra wasabi. The chef has expertly selected just the right amount of wasabi to enhance the flavor of each piece. Why add more? However, the uncouth do have an outlet, they can always dip pre-prepared pieces such as unagi (grilled eel which already has soy sauce) into the soy sauce - henna gaijin!

So we offered our unhappy customer the tamago (egg) sushi. She wrongly identified the egg as cheese and said, "I don't want cheese!" So she dismantled the sushi, offered the "cheese" to daddy and ate the rice!

Eventually, the second plate of sushi arrived. No California roll!

This was a serious sushi restaurant! They could not or would not make us Kariforunia maki! A lot of bowing came with this explanation. The toddler burst into tears and wept uncontrollably to the consternation of the waitress who could not comprehend what had just happened. My brother-in-law skillfully negotiated an alternative order and asked that they expedite it.

So now other customers order were being delayed whilst they processed our expedite order.

Serious sushi eaters, eat their rolls (maki) after the individual pieces. The chefs had chosen to make any rolls we ordered last. As they were self-organizing and burning down our order list, the information that they could not or would not make the California roll had not been forthcoming until the last moment. Hence, the surprise!

So what is the moral of this story? Iterative incremental delivery and self-organizing burn-down aren't enough! There has to be some analysis of the requirements and an attempt to understand the true customer needs - to understand the customer's definition of quality. Based on this, the priorities should be set for the incremental deliveries. There should be a commitment to the customer - a promise made - and it should be honored.

In addition to the quality problem, this restaurant had a broken organizational structure and poor separation of responsibilities. The "Anderson lunch project" should rightly have been the responsibility of the waiter who should have been playing the project manager role (and maybe the program manager role). The waiter should have analyzed our requirements and understood our priorities. This should have been communicated to the chefs and the order of production of our sushi should have been negotiated against the competing orders at the time. The sushi chefs should have been purely responsible for the production of sushi. They should not have had any project management, program management or scheduling responsibility. After all, they had no direct contact with the customer and as the system's capacity constrained resource, they should not have been wasting sushi making capacity trying to do anything else. (Actually, they weren't wasting capacity, they simply weren't doing a job that needed to be done. This was the root cause of the quality problem.)

[We will see when I get back to discussing Ray Immelman's work that he agrees with my separation of functional capacity against project flow responsibilities but for tribal reason rather than variation and constraint reasons].

All of this goes to show that quality is not a given in Japan. They might be great at making cars but many of the management lessons have not transferred elsewhere. No end of bowing can make amends to a 2 year old whose expectations were disappointed.