The Roadmap to Organizational Excellence- Part 7 of 7

Lean Nation,

(Part 7 of 7) I am continuing to blog on a seven part series on how to create a world class organization. As a reminder, here are the seven steps to creating a culture of continuous improvement.

1. Find a Sensei - You need a coach to make the journey.
2. Select your organizational wide outcome measures - these are known as the True North measures.
3. Prioritize and map your value streams - select the areas with the most leverage.
4. Deliver Improvement - Use A-3 thinking and lean principles to make the changes identified in your value stream mapping sessions.
5. Sustain your improvements using visual management and leadership standard work. Results are only realized if the gains are held.
6. Support your improvements with ongoing training and leadership development.
7. Spread your improvements to other parts of your organization.
In this blog, I will expand on step 7: spread your improvement to other parts of the organization.  At this point in your journey,  you have prioritized your improvements,  created a detailed improvement plan,  executed the plan using A-3 thinking, and sustained the improvements with equal parts of visual management and leadership standard work.  While completing the previous steps,  you have continued to develop the organization with ongoing training and leadership development.  Now what?
If you are realizing and sustaining double digit improvement in your areas of focus,  you should be getting many requests for help from other parts of the organization.  Everyone wants to get better, make budget, meet targets, etc. Done well, you will not need to push change on other parts of the organization.  You will get a pull from these departments. 

Another key point of spread is that you will need to determine if you are spreading solutions and artifacts or lean thinking.  We can take checklists, visual management tools, and workflows and apply them to other areas.  This ensures consistency from area to area and shortens the lead-time for implementation.  The main draw back is there is not a lot of buy in for the solutions since the receiving department may not have been involved in the development of the solutions.

The other approach is is to translate lean thinking to the other departments.  Allow the areas to customizes their improvements consistent with lean principles.  This leads to enhanced buy-in,  but lengthens the implementation curve. I usually recommend a combination of both approaches.  We want to aggressively implement standards while translating lean thinking through the organization. 

Be sure to create the measurement systems to support spreading of improvement.  We need to be able to see the status of both process and results at a glance.   Many spread initiatives fail because the accountability for results and sustainability is not present.  Having the systems to see the progress and results will help.  Leadership will still be needed to get through the change management issues.

Summarizing the process to get to organizational excellence,  there are 7 steps that I recommend you follow.  We have discussed each of the seven steps over the last 3 months.  (note, there is a different blog topic on each step)  I think it important to note that there are entire books written on each of the seven steps.  There is simply no way to provide all the details in a weekly blog covering only a few paragraphs on each topic. 

If you follow each of the steps with the proper humility and intensity,  you can get your organization on the road to excellence.  This journey will not be a short one.  It will take more than 10 years to create a world class organization.  (Actually 20 years is a more realistic time frame). Because of this,  many organizations skip steps.  Skipping steps will lead to failed results or significantly delay your journey to excellence.  This is not something that can be accomplished in the next quarter or the next year.  You need to budget for the long term.

My first publication (available for sale in early October, 2011),  "From the Assembly Line to Healthcare,  the Application of Lean to the Healthcare Industry"  covers several, but not all of the steps.  Beginning in late fall 2011,  I will be writing my second book, this one pertaining to Lean Leadership.I will be covering the leadership aspects of the seven steps to organizational excellence.  Leadership remains the key to any organizational change!

Lean Blessings,

Ron

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

The Roadmap to Organizational Excellence- Part 4 of 7

Lean Nation:

(Part 4 of 7) I am continuing to blog on a seven part series on how to create a world class organization. As a reminder, here are the steps to creating a culture of continuous improvement:

1. Find a Sensei - You need a coach to make the journey.
2. Select your Organizational Wide outcome measures - these are known as the True North measures.
3. Prioritize and Map your Value Streams - select the areas with the most leverage.
4. Deliver Improvement - Use A-3 thinking and lean principles to make the changes identified in your value stream mapping sessions.
5. Sustain your improvements using visual management and leadership standard work.
results are only realized if the gains are held.
6. Support your improvements with ongoing training and leadership development.
7. Spread your improvements to other parts of your organization.

This week I will expand on step 4: Deliver Improvement.  This step is where most organizations want to begin.  Skip the step of finding an improvement coach,  skip the high level aims,  and skip the planning. Jump right into the tools and go make magic happen.

Working from the premise that you have completed the three prior steps, you have now earned the right to improve.  Following the plans from your value stream analysis, improvement consists of scoping a portion of a value stream and using lean thinking to re-design or design that area.  As a refresher the principles of lean include:

• flow
• pull
• defect free
• visual management
• kaizen

Work that is based on the collection of these principles is known as lean thinking.

You will want to provide lean thinking using the scientific method.  Improvement is not a series of just go and do stuff. You will want to follow the Plan-Do-Check- and Act cycle to prepare for the change, develop a solution, implement the solution, measure the results, and sustain the solution.

A tool that lean organizations use to follow the PDCA cycle and ensure the scientific method is followed is the A-3.  The A-3 is a size of a sheet of paper and also a format and report of the scientific method.    The steps in A-3 thinking include the following:

1. Define the reason for action
2. Identify (quantify) current conditions
3. Document target conditions
4. Document the gaps between current and target conditions.  Identify the waste.
5. Develop Countermeasures for the wastes and develop action plans to test the countermeasures
6. Create follow up plans to institutionalize the change
7. Track the results
8. Document reflections and lessons learned to maintain the organizational knowledge.

I will blog on the A-3 in a future session.  The key takeaway at this point is that the improvements you are making are following the scientific method.  The improvements are linked to value stream improvement, and they are linked to your organizational strategy and their corresponding outcomes.  As a side note, many of the previous blogs in this site talk of improvement tools and lean thinking.

Next week we will talk about step 5, sustaining improvement using visual management and leadership standard work.

Lean Blessings:

Ron

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

The Roadmap to Organizational Excellence - Part 2 of 7

Lean Nation:

(Part 2 of 7) As we discussed in our last blog, I was going to blog a seven part series on how to create a world class organization. Here are the steps to creating a culture of continuous improvement:

1. Find a Sensei - You need a coach to make the journey.
2. Select your Organizational Wide outcome measures - these are known as the True North measures.
3. Prioritize and Map your Value Streams - select the areas with the most leverage.
4. Deliver Improvement - Use A-3 thinking and lean principles to make the changes identified in your value stream mapping sessions.
5. Sustain your improvements using visual management and leadership standard work.
results are only realized if the gains are held.
6. Support your improvements with ongoing training and leadership development.
7. Spread your improvements to other parts of your organization.

Continuing in this series,  this week I will expand on step 2: Select your Organizational Wide Outcome Measures.  After you have secured a Sensei,  your next step will be to become crystal clear on your organizational outcome measures.   Lean process improvement is about generating results.  Virtually any results are possible, however,  it is up the the leadership of the organization to define which results are desired.  The results should have several attributes, however.

• The results should be aligned with the key dimensions of operational excellence.  These include a quality measure,  a delivery or a lead-time measure,  a cost or productivity measure, and  often-times a growth measure.  Since nothing happens without people the final dimension is some sort of staff morale, or staff engagement measure.  The collection of the these measures ( Morale, Quality, Delivery, Cost and,  Growth), known as MQDCG for short are also called True North Measures.
• The results should reflect an improvement of greater than 10%.  Double digit improvement is expected using lean approaches and each measure should be a stretch target.  You will need to eliminate waste to improve all five measures simultaneously.
• The results should be directly aligned to your strategic plan.  Do not select lean measures that are odds with either your strategic plan, your board scorecard, your budget.  Lean measures will go the bottom of the deck every time if you force leaders of the organization to choose.
• Have at least three of the five measures in the suite.  It is too easy to game a single measure.  we want to make sure that waste elimination is the focus.  You can often get to one measure at the expense of another..
• Ensure the measures reflect organizational wide improvement.  Do not select department measures for organizational wide improvement targets.
• Choose measures that are simple ratios when possible.  Measures with a simple numerator/denominator relationship are the easiest for everyone to understand.  When you eliminate waste, you can have the improvement teams focus on the numerator or denominator of the ratio for each activity.  This makes target setting very simple.

No that you have selected your organizational wide outcome measures,  You are ready to move to step 3 in the improvement process. I will pick up here next week.

Lean Blessings,

Ron

Ron Bercaw
www.breakthroughhorizons.com

The Roadmap to Organizational Excellence - Introduction

Lean Nation;

Any of you who have worked with me in the past know that I constantly preach the same formula for success.  There are some steps to organizational wide improvement that are proven to be successful.  Also there are no shortcuts.  Yet I find that many organizations want to hit the "easy" button to improvement.  Improvement is earned one team at a time.   This is why successful organizations take two decades to get to world class. 

As a reminder,  here are the steps to creating a culture of continuous improvement.

1. Find a Sensei -  You need a coach to make the journey.
2. Select your Organizational Wide outcome measures - these are known as the True North measures.
3. Prioritize and Map your Value Streams - select the areas with the most leverage.
4. Deliver Improvement -  Use A-3 thinking and lean principles to make the changes identified in your value stream mapping sessions.
5. Sustain your improvements using visual management and leadership standard work.- 
   results are only realized if the gains are held.
6. Support your improvements with ongoing training and leadership development.
7. Spread your improvements to other parts of your organization.

In the next seven blogs I will be highlighting each of the seven steps in more detail.

What I want to leave you with today is that if you skip steps,  the odds that you will still have a lean management system in three years decreased by greater than 70%.  The odds of you becoming world class in 20 years decreases by 97%.

Lean Blessings;

Ron

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