Developing a Fabrication Business Strategy

Estimated reading time: 1 minute

Over the years, we’ve talked a lot about business strategies for PCB manufacturers here in the pages of PCB007 Magazine. But let’s back up a bit and look at the process for developing a new strategy. Where should you even begin? What’s your strategy for developing a strategy, if you will? 

We asked Chris Chapman, a Lean/Agile leadership coach and publisher of the Digestible Deming newsletter, to share his thoughts on developing successful business strategies and how the management philosophy of W. Edwards Deming can help leaders in our industry take their companies to the next level. 

Andy Shaughnessy: Tell us about your background, and how you got into studying Deming and the process of developing strategies. 

Chris Chapman: I’m a software developer turned consultant turned management consultant, and I’m based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. And I've been doing what I do for over 20 years.  

I started as a software developer in the year 2000. I quickly discovered all of the problems that existed in management of software projects, and became exposed through that to the ideas and thinking of folks like Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, who created the Scrum framework, and Kent Beck, who created the XP (extreme programming) framework. And a lot of these guys were influenced by practitioners like Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka, who discussed the new product development game in the Harvard Business Review in 1986. They were trying to figure out how to develop complex knowledge-based products in such a way that we can actually control the variation that exists.  

To read this entire conversation, which appeared in the August 2023 issue of PCB007 Magazine, click here.