Lean Leadership - Pace of Change

Lean Nation,

Continuing on our theme of leadership, I'd like to blog briefly this week about breadth and depth.  By breadth and depth, I'm talking about the focus of improvement within an organization.   Every organization has to make the choice of where to spend the critical improvement resources.    There are always many good opportunities for improvement, but picking the critical few is the responsibility of leadership.

We want the improvements to align with the strategic focus of the organization.  Improving the speed and accuracy of the mail room might be a good improvement project, but I doubt it will help improve your lead-time for products and services, or grow your sales.   But we are trading off that decision with creating a culture of improvement.  The best way to create a culture of improvement is to get everyone involved.

So the decision to go "deep" implies picking a few key value streams within your organization and transforming these value streams consistent with your strategic plans.     The decision to go broad implies using lean thinking in all areas of the organization so everyone can participate.

Leadership has to balance the resources and pace of change in the initial stages of an enterprise wide transformation.  Going too deep at the expense of going deep will shut off the balance of the organization from learning lean thinking.  Going too wide at the expense of going deep will dilute the focus of improvement, slow the actual transformation, and eventually impact the sustainability of the improvements.

Different third party organizations that you may use to help you in your transformation have different views with respect to which is better and which pace to shift from wide to deep or vice versa.  At the end of the day it is the role of leadership, and the steering committee to regulate the pace of change.

While you didn't ask, I always prefer to go deep first, then wide.  Everyone really underestimates the effort it takes to make meaningful change.  And everyone wants to transform really fast.  If I told you transforming your organization was a 20 year journey which model would you pursue first.

Lean Blessings,

Ron

Ron Bercaw
President, Breakthrough Horizons
www.breakthroughhorizons.com

Lean Leadership

Lean Nation,

Following our theme of Lean Leadership, this week's blog will continue discussing staff engagement or empowering individuals.  You may recall last week's blog on empowering teams.  I discussed the three elements needed to empower a team.  These ingredients include having the right measures and targets, assembling the correct team of stakeholders, and following the correct process to deliver the improvement.   If you do these three things well, you can turn the team loose and let them deliver a change that increases the value to the customer, while delivering measurable results.

This week we are discussing empowering individuals. There are several ways to actually empower individuals.  Today we will focus on one of those techniques known as the daily huddle.  The daily huddle is a team based activity that focuses on delivering small, incremental  improvements on an ongoing basis.  The composition of the huddle is the entire cross functional team that works in a certain area on their shift.  Let me say this differently.  At a fixed time each shift, we gather all of the team members for a five minute meeting.  The focus of the meeting is the department measures.

Each area should have a balanced scorecard that measures their daily work aligned with improving the true north measures of the organization. As a refresher, the true north measures include:

1. staff morale (many times shown as a staff safety measure, but also how you measure staff development)
2. quality (a measure of service quality, process quality, or outcome quality)
3. delivery ( a measure of lead-time or wait time)
4. cost ( a measure of $ per unit of service, or hrs per unit of service)
5. growth ( a measure of volume)

In our huddle, we want to discuss our unit level measures (captured on a daily basis) to show how we are performing against our targets.  The huddle agenda consists of discussing yesterday's results, today's targets, and to assign small tasks to staff to improvement performance and to problem solve reasons why we missed target.  During the huddle,  only spend one minute on each true north measure. Ideally a different staff member would cover one of the various measures each day. Again, what we are after is engagement.

The actions taken from the huddles are assigned and are documented visually, so everyone can see the action item, the person responsible to resolve the issue, and the due date.  Where possible, we prefer the staff take on the majority of the action items, although management will need to take ownership of the bigger issues.

This standing huddle takes place in front of a large board with each measure shown in graph form on 8/12 inch by 11 inch paper.  We want everyone to have total transparency to all the measures, targets, and actions.  This meeting is typically lead by a line lead, like a team leader, or charge person.  It is designed to give everyone who works in the area a detailed understand of the measures, targets, results, and actions necessary to deliver on those results.  The daily huddle is designed to happen every day, every shift, and it is designed for the people who work in the area to take action to improve the process.

Done well, it is possible to improve the operation every day and every shift.! The daily huddle is a key step in creating a system known as managing for daily improvement (MDI).  I will discuss MDI next week.

By engaging the staff, you are empowering them to solve problems.

Lean Blessings,

Ron

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