Lean Governance - New Product or Process Development

Lean Nation,

One of your key responsibilities as a leader is to make sure that your products and services meet the needs of your customers. Depending on your type of industry, your focus may vary slightly.  For example,  if you are in the technology business at least 1/3 of your total sales volume should come from products developed in the previous 12 months.  This means that you better have a robust new product development cycle to keep the flow of new items making it to the marketplace.

If you are in a service industry,  new services should be introduced when the pull arises from your customer.  When do you need to add a new service in your print shop, or in your hospital.  While this flow might not be continuous,  this flow is not zero either. 

Most organizations have some type of project management structure to deliver new products and services.  A "lean" organization uses a full suite of waste free approaches to understand the voice of the customer, translate that voice into specifications and attributes, and operationalize those specifications.  a lean organization can do these activities in 50-75% less time than a traditional organization, and with 14 to 1/3 less resources.  While benchmark numbers do not exist,  It has been my experience that these capabilities can be delivered with a higher quality yield and in a smaller footprint as well. 

Some of the tools that a lean organization might use in their new product/process development include:

• Kano Model
• Vertical Gantt Chart
• Voice of the Customer / Quality Function Deployment
• Value Added Engineering
• Production Preparation Process (3P)
• TRIZ
• Taguchi Targets
• Design of Experiments
• Design for Service/Manufacturability ( DFS/DFM)

There are over 50 tools in the lean new product/process development process.  Like any other lean approach it takes years to learn and lifetime to master.  From a governance perspective you need to be able to answer a few questions.

1. Do you have a measureable target for new products and services?
2. Do you have a system for introducing new products and services?
3. Does your system perform at the level of best in the world?
4. Would start-up stress and rework be significanlty less if your systems were designed to be error free?
5. Are your cycle times for new products and services getting shorter or longer?

If you can't answer these questions,  understanding your baseline might be a good place to start.  If you don't like the answers to the questions, I encourage to see what the best in the world are doing. 

Lean Blessings:

Ron

Ron Bercaw
President, Breakthrough Horizons
http://www.breakthroughhorizons.com/

Lean Leadership - Governance

Lean Nation,

Continuing on our leadership series, this week's post will focus on governance.    There are two levels of governance that should be addressed when trying to transform your organization; enterprise and value stream.  Let's discuss each in turn.

Enterprise Wide Transformation Governance

To effectively implement the Toyota Production System across the enterprise you need an effective steering committee.  The steering committee should be comprised of the key change agents across the organization.  This powerful guiding coalition can come from management and staff.   I recommend about 10 people to particpate on the committee. The enterprise steering committe is responsible for at least eight main areas.

1. managing the pace of change
2. selecting the right areas of focus
3. ensuring value stream improvement
4. ensuring standard work is followed for improvement
5. managing the communication plan
6. developing people (improvement capabilities of the organization)
7. managing the improvement measures (process and outcomes)
8. removing corporate barriers

Value Stream Governance

Each value stream will need to have a governance structure.  The value stream makeup will consist of the value stream manager, the key process owners, and support process owners, along with key leadership from staff.  This committee, is much smaller and may only include 3-5 people. I like to have the primary lean lead resource as a part of this team as well.  The value stream governance will be responsible for the following:

1. managing the value stream improvement plan (priorities and intensity)
2. ensuring everyone in the value stream is particpating in improvement
3. ensure improvements are sustained
4. ensure improvements are sustained
5. ensure improvements are sustained (get the picture)
6. follow up on variances from the visual management system
7. ensure resources are allocated to localize improvement
8. hold staff accountible to standard work

If you are not getting the results you are expecting from your improvement efforts,  check your governance structure.  If you are not providing effective (or any) goverance to your improvement efforts,  you likely are skipping some important steps in the transformation process leading to spotty and un-sutained results.

Lean Blessings,

Ron

Ron Bercaw
President, Breakthrough Horizons
www.breakthroughhorizons.com

Lean Leadership

Lean Nation;

I have mentioned many times that the key to lean improvement, above all other things, is leadership.  James Womack commented in one of his e-newsletters that no enterprise transformational  efforts with the focus and commitment of leadership have ever failed to deliver meaningful results.  That is a pretty powerful statement.

So let's discuss briefly what we mean by lean leadership. 

• Leadership cannot be delegated.  Management can delegated,  but leadership cannot. 
• Leadership, loosely defined is doing the right things.  Management is doing things right.
• Lean leadership is about vision, accountability, and empowerment.

When it comes to leading an organization toward world class rates of improvement, there are several items that need "leading"  The list below is but a few of the topics for leadership:

1. management and staff development
2. improvement areas of focus
3. improvement pace
4. breadth vs depth discussion
5. measurement capture
6. skill building and use of internal and external experts
7. change management approaches
8. pay as you go results
9. demonstrated use of tools
10. organizational design and organizational structure when flow cells and value streams are created
11. dealing with "antibodies"
12. value creating (shop floor or patient care areas versus administrative improvement)
13. governance
14. staff engagement
15. new product/new process development
16. lean HR, lean finance, lean IT, lean supply chain, lean budget, lean marketing, lean strategy development
17. what to do with excess employees
18. sustainability and spread
19. leadership standard work
20. PDCA/A-3 Thinking

I think you get the idea.  If you were going to delegate your improvement, you might consider getting educated on exactly what you are delegating and if the person you are delegating to has the experience these issues horizontally and vertically through the organization.    Because of the need to develop leadership,  I have decided to commit more time to this topic.  Next blog we will talk about how to empower improvement teams. 

Lean blessings,

Ron

Ron Bercaw
http://www.breakthroughhorizons.com/

 

Establishing the proper governance for lean change

What I want to talk about today is establishing and infrastructure for improvement. Most organizations fail to establish a governance process for their change and this can cause some damage to the improvement process.

In his book titled "Leading Change", leadership and change management guru, John Kotter summarizes the key reasons why some transformational changes succeed and other's fail. Mr. Kotter cites the 8 step change process in his best seller. These steps include the following:

1)Create Urgency
2)Form a Powerful Coalition
3)Create a Vision for change
4)Communicate the Vision
5)Remove Obstacles
6)Create Short Term Wins
7)Build on the Change
8)Anchor the Changes in Corporate Culture

What I want to focus in on today is point #2, forming a powerful coalition. The first hurdle to overcome is convincing people that change is necessary. This takes strong leadership and visible support from key people within your organization. Managing change isn't enough - you have to lead it. Easy to say, but difficult to do since likely we are not totally clear on where we are going and perhaps no one has gone here before.

Every organization has effective change leaders. But to get to the "real" leaders you need to recognize that they don't necessarily follow the traditional company hierarchy. To lead change, you need to bring together team, of influential people whose power comes from a variety of sources. These sources may include position title, status, expertise, and political importance. These leaders can be formal or informal. Once formed, your guiding coalition needs to work as a team, continuing to build urgency and momentum around the need for change.

Over time, the responsibilities of this team should become more formal. I teach that the guiding coalition or steering committee has six main responsibilities:

1) Make sure you are working in the right areas - Are we climbing the right wall and do the improvements link to the strategy of your organization?
2) Make sure the changes are being sustained - You can only go forward if you hold the gains.
3) Monitor the pace of change to maintain momentum - If we go too fast and sustaining results will suffer; if we go too slow, you will never get momentum
4) Develop people - Where are the change champions? Are they being properly developed?
5) Capture the results - What are we measuring? Are the results relevant and current? Are we capturing the hard measures like productivity, and cost?
6) Remove organizational barriers - Align policies and procedures to facilitate change. Deal with the "antibodies" in the change process.

Without the powerful coalition to steer the change process, the current culture of your organization will likely overtake the few change champions and derail your change efforts.

Lean Blessings,

Ron

Ron Bercaw
www.breakthroughhorizons.com