Quality and Acceptability of Solutions

In the past we have explored the difficulty of change.  One concept attributed to General Electric that we can wrap our heads around is Q x A = E.

Q = Quality Level (1-10) of the Solution to Solve the Problem

A = Acceptance Level (1-10) of the Solution in the Organization

E = Effectiveness (0-100) of Deployment of the Change

When Good Ideas Go Bad

In my experience, groupthink is a behavior that can sink an improvement project if not caught and stopped early. Groupthink is where there is group pressure to ‘go along’ with the decisions of the group or the beliefs of the group. This can start with ill-defined problem statements, scope, and/or goals, and the team will stay on the wrong path if assumptions are not tested or questioned. Keeping charter information simple and validating the problem statement can go a long way control groupthink. Validation is accomplished through using process timelines or data that is reflective of the problem statement.

Another method to reduce groupthink is to use a balanced functionally diverse team. Members bring their own perspective of the problems and causes to the team and if functional diversity is not present, then the natural group will have the numbers to force their perspective on the other team members. Using balanced teams with one or two members from each function can prevent groupthink.

ummm, no.

My favorite cause of groupthink is when one "expert on everything" arrives and begins to tell everyone how to think. Many will go along to get along because they are afraid of making someone mad or they do not want to be seen as a non-team player or because they are introverts that are uncomfortable speaking up. As a project lead my first method is to take them off to the side and tell them to knock it off. If it continues I have called them out in front of the team, which usually sends them into the stratosphere. If I still do not see the behavior I am looking for I will send them back to their work group and let the boss know that I'm not interested in baby-sitting their problem child. I have not had to do this very often because we use ground-rules for team member behavior that are discussed during the kick-off of the project while everyone's Supervisor, the Project Champion and General Manager are in the room.

This type of behavior can show up at any time during the project whether it is executed through weekly team meetings or kaizen style locked in a room for a week. When the behavior arrives a the end of the week when everyone is tired and ready to go home, the aforementioned expert will begin to implement her solution. Another method to overcome is to provide everyone with a number of votes or rating system to use across different possible solutions. I have had good results with this style and will continue to use it in the future.


Ultimately setting the expectations for team behavior must be established early (and often). If you are on a team and you begin to recognize groupthink, it may be time to become the voice of dissension.

Idea Transformation

How to make an "idea" person into an "implementation" person?

Sometimes you are minding your own business watching the clouds float by, working on another marketing presentation, or on a date with that special person in your life, and then POW!!!  You are hit so hard that it gives you a shiner on your driver's license.  The Idea Fairy has shown up to occupy the brain space you were using to focus on what was in front of you.  If you know whats good for you, you will write the idea on a napkin so you can put your focus back where it belongs.  Even better if you have a bright idea notepad (handy-dandy notebook?) that you carry around.

"Life's tough when you're stupid"

If you have spent some time observing your behavior, you may have determined during the day when you are at your most creative state and when you are at your most productive state.  I am an early morning thinker and a rest of the day doer with a brief blast of creativity late in the day.  Find your thinking time and space and pull out the idea assault from the day before and think about what you want to accomplish.  This is a dreaming phase to help you characterize the idea; write as much as you can about the end state.

What does your idea look like??

WARNING!!  The next step is where our excited idea holders begin to fall off the rails on the way to Awesome Town.  As boring as this sounds, you need to plan the implementation of your great idea.  

• What stuff (material or data) do you need to start with
• What kind of people help do you need
• What do you need to learn
• Do you need some money to make the idea happen
• How are you going to market the idea
• How much time do you need (or can you take) to implement this great idea.  

Keep in mind that some ideas have a short time span when the market is right and there is alignment between your great idea's purpose and the need it is meant to serve.  The project plan is to lay out our path and assist in determining if an important task needs to be accomplished before another.

If you are in the middle of a kaizen event and someone is hit in the head by the Idea Fairy, you can use a simple form to capture the idea that can help with implementation like the one below.  She will show up at the most inopportune of times demanding respect and acknowledgement.  Capture the idea, stick it to the process map or fishbone diagram and move along until you are ready to evaluate the idea.

There is DOWNTIME from the 8-Wastes!!

During implementation of the great idea, stop and look at the plan for changes that may need to be made and talk with your team members or mentor about the progression.  Is it coming together like you dreamed about days or weeks ago?  If you suffer from Not-Invented-Here (NIH) Syndrome, I recommend that you get over yourself.  No, I'm not kidding.

While this is an over-simplified version of what project managers do, it will take some practice before you are doing it right.  Remember that each failure is a stepping stone to success.  Don't give up, and learn as you move through your Journey.

Also remember that great ideas can come from little brothers.  Thanks Jeremy!

Process Entitlement

We are all entitled to something, aren't we?  How about some peace and time to think before the fire-fighting begins?  Probably not.  That is unless we have thoughtfully designed our processes to perform at a specific level.  Short cycle time, high quality, just a few people touching the product, and we do not leave the day with a backlog larger than we can emotionally handle.  How often does this happen in your operations?

Profitable and Customer Satisfying processes do not happen accidentally or magically appear just because someone has the specials letters on their resume (MBA, MBB, SSBB, CQE, PMP, ETC).  These processes also do not "just work" because the right people are in the right place at the right time (Process Heroes).  It does not matter if we are using manufacturing or business processes, we should be able to receive predictable and profitable performance no matter which well trained and qualified person is sitting in that chair at that time.

Our Process Hero Saves the Day!

When you start measuring your processes you will probably find that the performance is not what you expected and you will have that sinking sensation.  Stop and breathe, this is normal to feel some level of anxiety once you have swallowed the red pill and it will pass as soon as you start to think about how to begin analyzing for root causes and implement solutions to address those root causes. So logically, if your process just happens because you throw a contract or database at the team then you will have the performance (good or bad) that just happens by chance.  If you have your Process Heroes in place you may have decent on time delivery or quality with rework and inspection, but performance will not be predictable.

Our Process Heroes can only go for so long, and remember what Dr. Tyrell told us, "The light that burns twice as bright can only burn for half as long" (Yes!  It's that important!).  When we burn out our Process Heroes we have to rely on people to inspect quality into our products, and Dr. Deming had something important to say about that too.

This change begins like most others, measure the results of the things going though your system.  This could be airplanes, circuit boards, decisions, grades, reports, or sales of widgets.  Are you receiving the results of your process that you are Entitled to receive?

Lean Policy Deployment

Aligning tactics to strategy

Welcome to September!  Guess what it is time for now?  That's right, this year's goals and objectives for the company.  How are we doing this year so far?  Did you set sales, safety, delivery, or financial goals?  Did you build that new capability you wanted?  Are your teams progressing in maturity?

These are worthy and usual safe things to chase, but are they the right things for your company or teams?  You will also find that you may have a team or site that is the benchmark for the company.  Translating your vision into the strategy is up to you and your board of directors, and determining how to advance to that vision will be executed by management and the teams.  Each team member is aware of their strengths and weaknesses, and this tool can help them grow into that type of person they want to be.

How to build

1. Identify the key issues in the organization's customer focused performance.  These may come from a Value Stream Mapping Event or a strategic offsite meeting.
2. Determine measurable business objectives that address these performance issues.  You are not boiling the ocean, and they do not say "do stuff better".  A good tool to use here would be a Balanced Scorecard.
3. Define or Refine the overall vision and goals.  Goals will be listed under Target Operational Results.
4. Develop supporting strategies for pursuing the goals.  These will be listed next to the Objectives.
5. Determine the tactics (or projects) and targets that facilitate each strategy.  List tactics above Selected Projects and targets next to Improvement Targets.  
6. Decide the strength of alignment within the matrixed entries on the map.
7. Implement performance measures for every business process.  If it is worth doing, it is worth measuring and doing right.  Yes measuring is hard, but so is laying people off because you did not work on the things that were important.
8. Measure business processes during execution.  Do not wait until the end of the year to see if you hit any targets.

How to measure

And now we are off and running!  We are delivering sales orders, reports, and briefings.  The team is collecting data and we are compiling it into something that tells the real story.  Whether we are using a fully automated workflow tool with performance reporting, or collecting information on a form and typing it in a spreadsheet, we need to make sure we share it with the team.

Don't try to create excuses if the information is not great, we are smart enough to see through management's smoke screens.  This is the perfect opportunity to use some A3 Problem Solving.  Use the results to strengthen your system and processes, and celebrate your successes once in a while.


What results have you seen with your improvement planning?

Costs Saved or Avoided?

Improvement opportunities in the office are everywhere; document reviews and the resulting rework, quarterly or monthly tasks that are late, and the amount of money spent on printing paper that ends up in the recycling bin, just to name a very few.

Sometimes Continuous Improvement teams have to justify their existence so they set financial targets.  Usually something bold like 1-2% of budget or 5-10% of salary (that's not really bold).  These become very interesting when the Lean Guy asks how much is a minute of downtime worth in our office processes or to show the metrics?  This turns into Lean Transformation only by project, not at the enterprise, and starts the familiar battle between two obvious allies, the Lean Guy and the Money Girl.

When charters are created and signed off by the Project Sponsor, we have to go create the "business case" for the projects.  This is usually a half dreamed up estimate with a shaky basis to a disco beat.  Enter Money Girl with her list of questions and the first one revolves around how much money can she have back at the end of the project.

Lean Guy's or Project Sponsor's first response is, "This is all cost avoidance".  Which is code for, "You ain't getting any of this money back" or "You slashed our budget last year".

Let's first have a common understanding of the terms, and this will work in almost any environment whether it's manufacturing, health care, design, government, or services.
1.  Cost Avoidance - This is where we decide to keep any money saved to use on other projects, or we were already overrunning budgets and this project brings us a step closer to even.
2.  Cost Savings - This is where we are going to return some amount of the savings back to the provider.

Cost avoidances can show up as improvements to Cost of Poor Quality.  This cost is usually comprised of rework costs, repair costs, and scrap costs, and all three of these are comprised of unplanned labor and material.  In the office processes rework will outweigh the other two as they are usually associated with manufacturing.

As we consider the amount of rework in our processes we use the amount of time we are actually touching the things we are creating and was kind of material we are using.  Material is easy to calculate as it is the number pages you printed before you stop seeing your document return for more rework, multiplied against the printing costs per page.  This number can be found online or provided by your handy-dandy IT Helpdesk friends.  Try not to pass out when you see the number and when blood is pumping again into your head, don't call the IT people to scrap all the printers.  Think about how to make information portable.

Another will come from the variation in the different ways the different team members perform the same task.  This may be measured in minutes or hours, but this needs to be one of your measures.  You can pull time & date stamps if you use an automated work-flow control system or email.  When you have a well documented baseline, share it with the team, maybe pull out a fishbone and ask why a few times.  When you begin developing a solution remember that email is not an automated work-flow control tool.

Cost savings arrives in the form of performing better than budgeted or projected.  This will be simple to calculate and defend if this can be applied to the cost of the product going to the paying customer.  If the new performance does not manifest increased demand, then you may find yourself overstaffed.  This is a great opportunity to think about other ways to add value to the internal products, or see if opportunity exists elsewhere in the firm.

Keep in mind that LEAN is not an acronym for Less Employees Are Needed.  I have seen this model used without improving the flow or scope of work tasks and within a short time the number of people were back to original levels.  This type of activity reduces the trust in you from your team members and would be labeled as L.A.M.E., a concept developed by Mark Graban, a blogger at Lean Blog.

If we are going to sell your improvement as a cost savings, there should be a reduction in the final price of the product for manufacturing or service organizations, or elimination of unneeded assets, or reduction in the tax rate for tax payers.  If the money is "intercepted" and used somewhere else, this is no longer a savings.

Although money is a great way to talk about projects, Lean Transformation is reflected in the Customer and the employees working in the information processes.  Don't ignore elimination of the other wastes just because you cannot quantify a financial figure.  If reducing the wait time a report experiences in the flow improves customer satisfaction, then you learn what you can about the flow stopper and improve your process.

What are your thoughts and what have you experienced?

Book Review: A3 Problem Solving

Over the past week I had a chance to read "A3 Problem Solving" by Jamie Flinchbaugh.  This book is easy to read and Jamie does a great job connecting the dots at the high level down to how a team interacts with the information and knowledge gained using the form.  Leaders will gain understanding of transformation that sticks.

A3's are a one-page brief of the opportunity or project that reads through the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle.  I'm sure some of us have seen 125 slide briefings of Green Belt or Black Belt projects, but this brings it to a scope appropriate for easy and quick consumption.  I used the word "opportunity" because problems we have on our teams with performance are a chance for all of us to learn.

The profound part of the book is about measuring the success of Lean.  It's not about the number of people trained, but "the percentage of the leader's own work that has changed". You can see the change in the performance of the team, and the practices of the leader.

Whether you are new or old to Lean Office transformation, this book can provide further insight to the use of A3.  I highly recommend this book to all of my readers.

Office Kaizen Leadership Kickoff

Have you been asked to kickoff a kaizen event?  You're may be thinking, "Say something at the kickoff?  I can't even say kaizen without someone correcting me!"  Take a deep breath, I'm going to make this easy for you.  Your job in this situation is to set the Vision and Direction of the event.

You need to express the following:
1) Your support for change, but not "The" change.
2) Your own words why this event/project/kaizen/etc is important.
3) Your confidence in the team member's ability to succeed.

You may even want to go over the important parts of the charter such as Goals and Deliverables.  Remember you are setting the Vision and Direction, and instilling your confidence in the team.