Are your internal lean experts excelling?

Lean nation,

Today's blog will review an important lesson.  If you have read any of my blogs in the past, your will quickly recognize this theme.  About 1/3 or more of my blogs focus on this topic.  Have you guessed it yet?

Leadership

I was teaching a Master's class at the University of Toronto, and an adjunct this week on healthcare quality improvement.  I had a class of some the best and brightest minds in healthcare including a blend of physicians, clinicians, and administrator's.  It is inspiring that our next generation of healthcare leadership is getting a grounding in lean quality improvement.

This class was an intense course.  4 days of  consecutive lessons.  I prefer teaching in that format since the concepts are progressive in their application and the back to back consistency enables better retention and application of the material.  The questions I received from the class were very interesting and an excellent gauge for what is happening within the healthcare industry.  As least as it relates to the students in the class. And this class was international in their make-up.

Would you be able to guess where the majority of questions came from?   Yes there were thee usual list of questions related to tools and their application.  The concepts students struggled the most with included the following:

• the application of takt time
• properly completing a time observation
• properly completing a loading diagram
• applying the scientific method through the A3, and 
• process control

Ironically, the broader issues with the class were not tool related at all.  There were leadership related.   As we talked through linking lean improvement to corporate strategy, removing the barriers to large scale organizational change,  dealing with accountability issues,  one theme became apparent.  Leadership in these students organizations were unclear of their roles,  or not engaged in the improvement process at the level required to be successful.  

All of the major issues that need to be resolved to transform an organization must be dealt with directly by senior leadership.  This topic dominated the class from the first through the fourth day.  I had to spend a lot of time addressing the leadership aspects of each of the change concepts. More time was spent talking about the tricks to get leadership's attention.

Let's go back to the title of this blog.  Are your lean improvement experts excelling in your organization?  If not,  the problem may not lie with the improvement team, it may lie with leadership.

Lean Blessings:

Ron

Ron Bercaw

President and Sensei

Breakthrough Horizons Ltd

www.breakthroughhorizons.com

Shingo award winning author

Pay As You Go Results

Lean Nation,

Following our theme of lean leadership, today I will discuss a concept known as pay as you go results. A lean leader needs to make sure that there is organizational alignment between improvement activity and execution of the corporate strategy.   You do not have enough time, resources, or space to waste time on activities that are not going to help you achieve your true north measures.  As a refresher, the true north measures are:

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)

These are the categories that almost all measures roll up into.  They are also the measures that reflect operational excellence.

In addition to the alignment to the true north measures, your improvements better generate a return on their investment.  The collection of all your improvements should have a positive return after all of the improvement related expenses.  These expenses will include the cost of experts (internal and external),  staff costs for the improvement, supplies and incidental expenses associated with the improvements, and any operational and capital expenses spent as a result of the improvements.

This is what is meant by pay as you go results.  After the initial investment in training,  a lean improvement initiative should be self funding.  There should be a business benefit to improvements in staff morale ( less sick time, less turnover), quality (rework $ spent), delivery ( reduction in waiting should result in higher through-put and potentially more sales), and cost savings should be realized.

Many, in fact I'd say most,  organizations fail to achieve the potential of the pay as you go results, because of selecting the wrong measures, budget protection behaviors, failure to hold staff ,technical experts, and management  accountable for following standard work, and frequently an inability to execute the human resource changes needed to realize the savings.

If your improvement program isn't "free",  then I'd look at your measures first, and execution of your improvement activities second.  Lean is designed to create world class improvement in performance and culture.  This should include a healthy ROI.

Lean Blessings,

Ron

Ron Bercaw
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/

 

Deploying your Strategy

Lean Nation:

We have all heard that execution eats strategy for lunch. It is infinitely better to execute a mediocre plan exceptionally well than implement a brilliant strategy extremely poor.

The challenge most organization fail to deliver on is neither a poor plan, nor a poor strategy, but rather that no mechanism exists to implement the strategy. Yes, in many cases the strategy is vague with poorly defined direction, outcomes, and measures. But in most cases this is not the problem.

What many organizations do is jump to tactics. I heard today, everyone come up with 2 new breakthrough ideas for your area for next year! Likely these breakthrough ideas will link to a strategy direction of operational excellence for example, so leadership thinks there is alignment.

What most leadership teams fail to understand is the vertical and horizontal alignment necessary to deliver world class results.

What is the mechanism to create the vertical and horizontal alignment? Is it bubble charts, or resource maps?

World class companies use an approach known as Hoshin Kanri to deploy their strategy. Hoshin Kanri, more commonly known as strategy deployment or policy deployment in the western world, is a tool that brings your strategy to life.

There are several key steps in policy deployment. At a very high level they include:

1. Establishing the Organizational Vision
2. Develop 3-5 Year Strategic Breakthrough Objectives
3. Develop Annual Breakthrough Objectives
4. Deploy the Improvement Priorities
5. Implement Improvement Priorities
6. Monthly Review
7. Annual Review

If you are not happy with your organizational performance and you are consistently failing to deliver on board level strategic goals, you might want to explore using strategy deployment as a way to execute your strategic plan.

A word of caution, only use policy deployment if you are willing to unwind your current planning and execution process. It is not designed to bolt on top of your existing systems.

Lean Blessings,

Ron

Ron Bercaw

www.breakthroughhorizons.com