Excellence Is Not Achieved By Bringing Everyone Else Down

Let's just get this out in the open; I am a free market conservative and one of the best tools in our arsenal to grow market share, innovate, and improve customer satisfaction is competition.  We compete with people, teams, companies, and economies.  We also have the innate ability to compete with ourselves.

As your organization travels your path you will have opportunities to grow and learn.  It is up to you to decide what to do with this new found knowledge; let it sit or implement it into your Standard Work instructions.  This new knowledge is not like wine that will get better with age.  Each day you do not implement is lost productivity and this loss is one of the barriers to growth.  You think, "we can't take on new work, we more than we can do right now", and you are right based on how you run the business today.

Excellence is a customer-based performance characteristic and you must compare your's to those you compete with.  I'm not suggesting that you try to get a tour of their facilities and steal the metrics hanging on the walls, but look at their service offerings on their website or talk to your customers that you know use your competitor's services.  You can also use your industry's benchmark.  But you have to look at that gap analysis as opportunity to improve.  Make sure you do not fall into the trap of rationalizing your poor performance by attributing your competition's success to luck or political alignments.




If you are not measuring your performance then you do not know what you do not know.  Also do not use the "I have not been yelled at by the Boss lately" metric to gauge your performance, this is a lie your brain uses to avoid potential conflict.  Using a Balanced Scorecard approach uses a series of questions and operational layers to determine what are the potential measures that would apply to your product or service, but is up to you to determine which to use.  You should use some of the measures that relate to Safety, Quality, Cost, Delivery, and Morale that will should aggregate performance, but not a single metric due to the risk of sub-optimizing the process to improve just one characteristic at the risk of negatively impact the others.

As you create your dashboard you will be tempted to use some high-end measurement system with all manners of bells and whistles.  I don't recommend this in the early phases of your measuring because you probably do not know what you need yet.  Spreadsheets or home-grown tools created in something like SharePoint will be just fine to start with.  As you develop your measures you must also determine how to respond.  What do you do when you see the measures going off the track?  Who is notified, how do you attack the problem, and how do you document the findings?

When you have your performance history documented and you see you are on your way to the top, think about comparing your current measures to past performance.  This would be the same as watching the futbol tapes after a game to see lost opportunities or turn-overs.  Where can the team improve performance by improving their skills?

What are you measuring in your office processes?

Book Review: The Integrated Enterprise Excellence System

Forrest W. Breyfogle III, the author of "The Integrated Enterprise Excellence System", has written about a system of strategic tools and methods to see the alignment and performance of organizations.  His book lays out the different methods of metrics, management governance, goals, and strategic development.  He connects these and other concepts using an Enterprise DMAIC model.

In my opinion this book was written for Leaders and Managers of organizations, people who's work is at the system level of the organization.  These could be team leaders, supervisors, managers, and executives.

Mr. Breyfogle has been a proponent of the "wise use" of statistical techniques and this book does a great job of connecting those dots to transforming organizations into customer satisfying machines.  I recommend this book to all my readers.

Bi-Polar Working Environment

Looking back on it, the highs were high and the lows were low.  Does work seem like an endless roller coaster?  Do you run from one fire to another, double-booked status meetings, or was that another failed review with the originator pulling out of the parking lot for the weekend?  You think you get off the ride at the end of the day when you leave the gate, or is that just the part of the ride that is not doing loops?

What is in your mind when hear "a steady flow of work"?  A gently flowing stream that pops with trout hitting the surface and the water is bubbling through the rocks?  No, that is supposed to be a vacation.  Did I just hear someone's cell phone buzz while we are fly-fishing?

How many of us walk in to the build and put on our fire fighting gear?  Go ahead and put your hands down, I'm not taking a survey.  Our never taking off the gear is an indication that we do not have a workflow control system.  Everything is hot and/or late.

Getting out this mode of operation requires everyone on the team, including the coach, is making a conscience decision to stop treating everything as a fire.  And we have to start learning from our mistakes.  The solutions that support the learning must also be appropriately applied.  Anchoring the entire organization because of ethical or technical issues does not help foster trust between management and employees.

Operational Excellence is about the journey, not the destination.  We learn and grow while building trust through relationships.  You may not see it at first, but when you realize the roller coaster is no longer running you can see organizations are made up of people, not systems and tasks.

I Smell Soap!

How many times have we heard the warnings?
"Our biggest customer is coming (or the boss, or some shareholders, or OSHA) and we need to clean this place up!"

So we have two days to "clean this place up!"  Lucky for us we have a few well trained firefighters that can work and hide stacks of files, miscellaneous inventory, and review those customer reports so we can ship them out early tomorrow morning.  Everything else comes to a screeching halt.  Did I just hear one of the supervisors whisper that this looks like a 5S Blitz?

The big day arrives, everyone looks busy, the boss looks at the Ops Manager and says, "I smell soap!"

Or...

The big day arrives, everyone is busy, catching up on two days of downtime, when our favorite customer arrives.  "All of your office areas smell so clean!"  

She is getting the 5-Star treatment.  Walking through the areas, seeing a white board with tracking numbers next to the reports they ordered with status of "Delivered" next to them.  The Office's Operations Manager is smiling, and gives the customer a box of branded office swag, cups, banner pens, and flash drives, on her way out the door.

LOVE the banner pens!!

For those of you who honestly think this is what a rapid 5S Event looks like or that 5S is Housekeeping, I have a little secret for you.  You are wrong, not mistaken, and those who told you that were wrong.  For the rest of us this is turns into an effort in futility and the clutter will return in about two weeks.

There is a way to avoid all the dramatics, and fire-fighting.  The site has to become organized.  This is not something that a small group can accomplish, it's going to take everyone from the employees all the way up to the Leadership team.

5S is a system of organization that helps us answer the following questions:
Sort - Do we need everything we have?
Set in Order - Do we have everything we need?
Shine - Can we see abnormalities?
Standardize - Can anyone do this repeatedly?
Sustain - Are we maintaining or backsliding?

Each "S" is built on the previous, and it starts by Sorting to remove the fog of clutter.  If you see half eaten bags of cheesy poofs laying around, listen to the voices in your head and throw them away.  When we Set in Order we are removing searching waste.  We are no long a hunting and gathering society, work should be the same.  The work of Sorting and Setting in Order is executed by the smart people.  The actual people doing the actual work knows what is needed or not needed.  The boss can come participate, but only as a set of hands doing work.

When we Shine we are keeping our machines (printers, computers, network drives, etc) in a like new condition so we can see a small problem before it becomes a much larger problem.  How often does the printer go down because you ran out of paper in the office or because little hang-ups turned into an issue where we have to call the guy who sold us the printer four months ago?

When we Standardize we are documenting how we do things.  Is there a standard method to creating folders on the servers for new projects?  How about projects that are complete or abandoned?  How long does it take someone to find the information they are looking for?

Sustaining the gains involves Leadership being active in the change process and I don't mean they only move their furniture around.  Take a waste walk, go to the gemba!  That is the actual place where the actual people are doing the actual work.  Does the work flow?

One of these days the customer, or the boss, or OSHA is going to stop by unannounced...

Don't just shake your head up and down, share what you have seen in the comment box.

Teaching With Simulations

One of the joys of being the Lean Guy in the office is I get to share my knowledge and experience with other people writing contract documentation, purchasing orders, engineering changes, software code, system specs, and all the other pieces of information floating around the office.  When we talk about Lean and the thing they are working on it is helpful to show an example of what right looks like.  This is helpful because their product is special, and no one else processes it like they do.  Special....right.

We will presume that I am not dealing with a TQM victim that is feeling frisky that day.

A tool that I keep handy is the paper flow simulation.  We use index cards as the "document", technical reviewers, value-adders transforming the document, and some metrics for quality, cycle time, and throughput.  This sim is cheap, easy, portable, gets the point across, and I'm not going to give away the ending, but all the team win.

Another great teaching aid is the 5S Numbers Game.  I'm not sure who developed this, but it is my favorite for teaching 5S in the information flow.  This link will take you to Lean Simulations' 5S Numbers Game page where you can download it and try it out for yourself.

My Favorite Sim in the Office!

There are other longer Lean System simulations, The Beer Game at The Lean Learning Center, and a  simulation used by the U.S. Military called FedSim.  These teach supply chain control, aligning tasks with requirements, and passing products through the enterprise.

Videos are great too!  Terry Tate, The Bridge of Death with the Old Man from Scene 24, Dinosaur Office, Building Planes in the Air, and others help to lighten the mood and show how far into the extreme a process could go.

When thinking about sims and videos, make sure the topic fits the organization.  Factory sims, stories, or videos will not work in the office.  First reason is because few of the people you are talking to have ever seen a factory, much less stepped in one.  Second is because factories are loaded with assets; equipment, inventory, tools, things being transformed into a product being sold to someone.  And our processes have computers, printers, fax machines that no one uses anymore, binders, paper cutters, IT Helpdesks; yeah, we're special.

What kind of sims do you use in the office flow?