[mindcrime]

This Toyota stuff gets a little bit of a bad rap in some circles, because of the infamous "TPS report" thing - some people believe it's a reference to "Toyota Production System." My understanding is that the Office Space reference was actually meant to be to Testing Procedure Specification documents, but it's hard to be sure.

In any case, Toyota / Lean / etc. is a mindset that has a lot of really good ideas embedded in it. I'm sure you can take it and distort it and come up with a monstrosity (like people do with "Agile") but the core stuff is really good.

As noted by lemax, The Machine That Changed The World is a really good book on this topic.

It's also interesting to note that a lot of the "Toyota" system was inspired by the teachings of an American, W. Edwards Deming. If I recall the story correctly, Deming was pushing these ideas on statistical process control, and nobody in America would listen to him, so he want to Japan and they embraced his stuff, ran with it, and it helped them become a manufacturing juggernaut.

[Retra]

I'm pretty sure the writers of Office Space have gone on record saying "TPS report" is a meaningless term used simply to evoke a sense of wasteful bureaucratic nonsense.

[mindcrime]

Hmm... this article[1] cites an interview with Mike Judge where he says it mean "Test Program Set" when he was an engineer.

Anyway, I've seen more than a few people jump to the conclusion that it stands for something to do with the "Toyota Production System" which is unfortunate.

[1]: http://mentalfloss.com/article/57338/what-tps-report

[Ambele]

That's too bad. It's quite funny thinking Toyota Production System is where TPS reports come from because it's so believable. Even though Toyota switched to Agile-ish methodologies, they still produce 20x the documentation and paperwork that the Waterfall method produces!