Lean Leadership - Management and Staff Development

Lean Nation,

One of the primary responsibilities of leadership during a performance and cultural transformation is to develop management and staff.  Why does the management and staff need to be developed? Likely many habits exist within your organization.  These habits show up in actions that occur daily.  An organization really shows its colors when it is placed under stress. 

Is lean thinking exhibited, or are traditional solutions employed when problems surface.  Even if you are in years 3, 4, or 5 of your improvement journey,  when stressed you will consistently see non-lean solutions to problems encountered.  Hiring extra people, ordering additional resources, working overtime,  inspecting in quality problems,  purchasing extra equipment, etc.  The list goes on.

Does an A-3 get opened, or an A-4?  Do we practice kaizen?  Is our approach to eliminate waste in lieu of adding resources?  This is how a lean organization would respond. A kaizen week, for example,  might eliminate hiring a new staff member that could take up to six weeks.

Our goal is to create a culture of continuous improvement; one that sees and eliminates waste in real-time.  To get to this point we have to learn habits that enable excellence.  This is why both staff and management need to be developed.

There is very long list of what the staff and management need to know.  At a minimum  everyone should know the 5 principles of improvement and the 7 wastes.  Additionally,  I prefer everyone understand A-3 thinking which is the documentation and thinking used to execute the (PDCA) scientific method.    Finally everyone needs to know the common tools to see and eliminate waste.

Management needs even more skills. In addition to the skills listed above, management needs to understand problem solving using the fish bone diagram and 5 why skills. Management also needs the discipline of following standard work.  They need to hold the staff accountable for their standard work and they need to follow their leadership standard work. Management finally needs some data collection and measurement skills.

This list is not inclusive of all the skills needed, but would be a great place to start.  ? And  by the way for your organization to become competent in this list of skills, you are looking at multiple years. If your organization is not on a track to develop these skills,  you will not see the change needed to overcome the inertia of your current culture.  This is why I recommend you get a Sensei.  Having a single expert in your organization is not even close to sufficient. But hiring someone with the skills and experience to navigate the challenges and issues can be quite beneficial.

Lean Blessings,

Ron

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

The Power of Time Observation

Lean Nation,

One of the common tools used to see and eliminate waste in a lean environment is time observation. There is no better way to see waste than through direct observation. You can spin work and processes many different ways, but when we go to Gemba, the place where work is done, and observe, waste is seen everywhere.

As a refresher, waste is any activate that takes time, space, or resources, but fails to deliver value directly to a customer. When we watch work being done, we can quickly observe that 95 to 99% of the time, no value is being added.

So what does time observation have to do with direct observation? Great question! Waste can be quantified in time. as we observe we can document in the waste in increments of time. This is extraordinarily helpful because it allows us to determine the cost of non-value added activity. It also allows us to predict the improvement potential when the waste is eliminated. In effect, time observation is a tool used to help both "see" and "eliminate" waste.

Most team members fail to document the time associated with waste. Team members find it easier to use interview techniques and approximate the time or use averages from computer reports. This is actually sloppy work and should be avoided if possible. We want to use direct observation to see the waste and time observation to quantify the waste if at all possible.

When combined with takt time, the data from the time observation can be used to build a loading diagram (see earlier blogs for this topic), that enables the team to calculate staffing levels and create one item flow. This is the key to productivity.

Lean Blessings,

Ron

Ron Bercaw
www.breakthroughhorizons.com

Seeing non-value added activity

At its most fundamental, lean improvement is about seeing and eliminating waste. By waste, we mean the operational, unevenness, and overburdening activities that interfere with value from being delivered. The operational wastes include the wastes of over-production, over-processing, motion, transportation, waiting, defects, and inventory.

In the early stages of improvement, most people cannot readily see these wastes and have to be taught how to make the waste visible. More-over, many processes are designed to hide the waste. This hiding of the was happens for many reasons, but a common problem I find is that most management systems do not reward the identification of waste. when is the last time you heard an leader say, "thank for identifying this problem". As a manager if you do find it, likely you have added to your workload as you will be responsible for resolving the waste.

One of the great tools used to surface waste in a classroom environment is the technique of product/process and information flow mapping. More recently this techniques has been given the more glamorous name of "value stream" mapping, or value stream mapping and analysis.

What I enjoy the most about value stream mapping is it requires the team to map the flow of activities, both good and bad, so they can understand the entire work flow. This end to end look at a process enables people to not only see how they fit into the system, but it also shows how the system is truly performing. And this system performance is analyzed from the customer's perspective. This perspective is quite humbling when the team realizes that 95-99% of the activities are Non-Value Added activity. You can review the picture of a value stream map to get a sense of appreciation for how much activity is "wasteful". The pink post-it notes in the picture document the wastes identified with the current process.




I have a simple axiom I like to quote when working with teams, " If you can't see the waste, you can't eliminate it." Using some of the tools and techniques of value stream mapping will help you and your teams see the non-value added activity.

Lean Blessings!

Ron

Ron Bercaw
www.breakthroughhorizons.com