People Process Technology Blog

Priorities

Guest Blogger: Bob Craig

I’m wondering when you do your thinking about what you are doing.  Bill Gates sees and thinks differently than most people do.  He has an amazing ability to find the flaws, or see opportunities, or connect the dots.  He can zoom in to details with precision or zoom out to the big picture.  He can flip back in time or fast forward to the future.  He also has the ability to focus on the merits of the idea or innovation before worrying about the business case. Chances are, you could benefit from Bill’s thinking skills, even if it simply means getting a new perspective on your problems.

First in his thought pattern is Prioritize. The question is “What’s the best thing you should be thinking about?” It starts here. Since time is your most limited and precious resource, this is about asking whether the problem is even worth your time.  Before you throw more time at it, figure out whether it’s worth it.  Is it significant?  How much time should you spend on it?  Think like Bill: Today what is your priority?

How to Stay Afloat

Posted by: Ken Pilone, TBD Consultant and Lean Expert

If you think about it, a ship will sink just as fast from a thousand small holes as it will from one big one.  In fact, it would sink faster.  Why?  Because big holes get noticed.  The captain of the ship will swiftly mobilize every member of the crew when a torpedo hits and yet be completely oblivious to all the tiny leaks occurring throughout the ship all the time.  As long as the ship can pump the water out as fast as it comes in, nobody seems to notice. 

Think of sales as the bilge pump in this analogy.  We tend to think we can overcome our wasteful practices if we could just sell more.  This puts the company under great stress.  Wouldn’t it better to keep what you make in the first place rather than have it leak out all over the place?

The trick is to teach ALL of your staff to ‘see.’  They can be trained to identify waste that you may not be aware of in the first place.  For example, do you create reports that nobody reads?  Do you even know?  Every product, service, task and goal should be challenged to determine what value it provides and, most importantly, to whom.  Who is the ‘customer’ of the report (internal or external)?  What do they do with it?  Is it 100% useful?  What if you omitted section 3?  What improvements do they want?

Here’s an easy but powerful way to attack this.  Have your managers invite their staff to a meeting.  The price of admission is a stack of sticky notes on which each person lists every task, project, etc. they are responsible for, one task per note. The manager draws a window of 4 panes on a whiteboard as below:

RR (Right work done Right)	RW (Right work done Wrong)
WR (Wrong work done Right)	WW (Wrong work done Wrong)

The group then posts their notes on one of panes, pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey style, representing what they think the value to the customer is according to the below:

RR = work customers want and is of high quality

RW = work customers want but needs improvement

WR = work customers don’t want but is of high quality

WW = work customers don’t want and is of low quality

 

Keep in mind that some tasks may overlap two or more panes meaning that it may have some parts that are RR and other parts that may be RW, WR or WW.

 

After each person has put up their notes, stand back and look at your wall.  What do you see?  NOTE:  the top panes represent value-added work.  That is to say that you have determined that there is in fact a customer for those tasks.  Those below are, by definition, non-value added -- meaning the customer either doesn’t exist or doesn’t want that service, product, report, etc.  Pay close attention to the WR box.  This is where pet projects and sacred cows tend to collect.  This is also a great place to start in lowering the waterline to expose waste.

 

For each sticky note, an action should be taken even if it is just to validate that it is indeed work that you should be doing.  One tricky part is work that is regulatory in nature or required by company policy or procedure, e.g., creating budgets or conducting performance appraisals.  The challenge here is to first determine if it is truly needed and, if so, to be as efficient as possible so as to minimize the time you spend on work your customers aren’t willing to pay for.

Employees tend to love this process.  It is a way for them to safely tell you, the manager, what they are doing that may not, at least from their point of view, be necessary.  By listening carefully, you may be able to lighten their load a little while at the same time drawing closer to your customers and building morale and trust.

Try it.  You’ll like it.

How to Save Your Business: Six Sigma? Lean? Both? What’s a Company to Do?

Posted by: Ken Pilone, TBD Consultant and Lean Expert

Six Sigma?  Lean? Both?  What’s a Company to Do?
 
Nowadays, organizations of all stripes are trying to figure out how to maximize their workforce productivity and yet deliver exceptional value to their customers.  Many companies have gone through agonizing layoffs just to stay afloat.  People laid off are devastated; confused; scared and traumatized.  Whole families fall into shock and disarray.  Ironically those NOT laid off also suffer greatly.  They are over-burdened doing the work of those laid off, stressed to the breaking point, frightened, confused, disenchanted and generally demoralized.  Their reward for finishing their plate of spinach is another plate of spinach!  Wow.  Not good.
 
As the economy worsens, those companies are facing an increasingly difficult dilemma; the basic question being framed here is, ‘how do we increase value to our customers while at the same time, manage an increasingly disengaged, fearful and cynical workforce?  As these negative factors take hold and become multipliers, overall morale drops to critical levels and drags productivity down with it. As the impact hits home the poor attitudes of your staff become obvious to customers and the rest as they say, is history.  In aviation there’s a term called a ‘flat spin.'  This is a nightmare, worst case scenario where none of the plane’s controls work.  If this happens the outcome is certain.
 
So, what’s a company to do?
  
Hope can be found via a set of interventions that, in many cases, have literally saved organizations from the brink of certain death.  Here are two approaches that might just save the day along with some high level descriptions of each.
1.  Six Sigma arose from a need to reduce or eliminate defects both in process and products or services.  It has achieved enormous results where quality issues were the primary concern.  It relies heavily on statistical analysis and process controls using highly specialized experts to lead the way.
2.  The term 'Lean' was first introduced to describe the vaunted Toyota Production System in a landmark book, The Machine That Changed the World by Jim Womack.  He described what he observed as a Lean Manufacturing system that later morphed into ‘Lean Thinking’ and is now generically known as just ‘Lean.’
3.  Some companies have developed a hybrid of the two known as ‘lean/six sigma’ to describe their overall improvement strategy deploying a blend of the best of both approaches.  All three have unique qualities and share some overlapping philosophies, techniques and tools. 
 
For example all these approaches:
• Can achieve relatively quick, significant improvements within their specific ‘target areas' 
• Focus on adding value to customers 
• Empower workers to solve problems as low in the company as possible (although differently). 
• Seek to identify and eliminate waste in all its forms
• Use solving real operational problems (vs. hypothetical case studies) to teach workers
• Have the option of bringing in external resources to assist when internal resources are lacking
 
In the case of Six Sigma; the approach is to invest heavily in a select cadre of employees who become experts called ‘Black Belts’.  They function like paramedics.  When the bell rings, they bring their expertise to the place where it is needed, fix what’s wrong and move on to the next place.  Usually they will also conduct beginner level ‘Green Belt’ training as a means of leaving behind ‘trained people’ who have hopefully learned by solving real problems.  Pros: Generally quick results and elimination of quality problems.  Cons:  It relies on a separate ‘class’ of workers who can lose focus on their real jobs and who can risk being distracted by pursuing a sub-career working to increase their status and influence within the Six Sigma ‘belt system’.  Many of those without training will shun it due to its tediousness and complexity.  They react to the rigors of the system the way some of us run from the Amway guy down the hall.  No offense.  I used to be one.
 
Lean approaches this empowerment/productivity dilemma differently.  It seeks to create a ‘culture’ of improvement so that ALL employees are trained to be expert problem solvers.  It seeks to narrow the gap between workers and supervisors so that the line between the two becomes blurry and even indistinguishable.  Traditionally supervisors are expected to be ‘experts’ with experience.  They often come from the ranks themselves.  They solve problems and make decisions.  In a lean culture these become basic skill levels shared by every level. 
 
In advanced lean cultures, the supervisor’s role gradually evolves along a continuum from expert, to boss, to teacher, to teammate, to coach, and ultimately to mentor.  Many decisions are made at the lowest level possible in these organizations.  Even those seemingly ‘sacred’ functions such as hiring, firing, scheduling or purchasing can be made by first line workers who function at a very high level.  This is accomplished through a strong emphasis on training and empowerment which leads to much higher levels of engagement and the unleashing of discretionary effort. 
 
Put simply, Lean helps you draw from your staff not just their hands but also their heads and their hearts.  Pros:  Employees are trained to solve their own or their team’s problems which taps into their creativity, innovation and natural talents triggering high levels of employee satisfaction and productivity.  It also strengthens teamwork and general business acumen dramatically.  Cons: Even though problems can be solved quickly, changing any culture takes time to achieve.  
 
Lean/Six Sigma, when working together as ‘bookends’, this blend gets you an organization that focuses on customer value, eliminates defects/waste and lifts empowerment which lead directly to higher levels of productivity and morale which put you on a journey to a lean culture.  Sounds easy.  It isn’t.  But neither is raising kids.  But hopefully it will lead to some level of satisfaction.  Although with kids, the jury’s still out.
 
Of course this is an oversimplification but hopefully it helps you have a basic framework to discern what would work best for your company. 
 
My recommendation?  It depends.  There are too many variables involved.  But, with a gun to my head, I’d pick Lean because it is a more lasting solution that builds long term capability within the organization while enriching peoples’ lives along the way.  Better yet, take two and call me in the morning.
 
Best always,
Ken

Lean Thinking - Value Streams and Strings of Lights

Please welcome our newest TBD Consultant and Lean Expert, Ken Pilone. 

Ken comes to TBD with 35 years experience in HR, Education, Training and OD in manufacturing, government, retail, automotive, healthcare, distribution, logistics and aerospace industries.  Of those, he spent 19 years with Toyota as a Lean/TPS Consultant. 

Jonena

 

Posted by: Ken Pilone

This past Christmas season, as I stared into our box of outdoor Christmas decorations, I pulled out our Christmas lights which had become a huge, tangled ball, intertwined with other decorations.  Once I untangled the lights from the rest of the stuff, I eventually found a plug.  When I plugged it in, some of the lights came on, others didn’t.  Was this one string? Two?  Three?  It was hard to tell where one string ended and another began.  Eventually, I was able to untangle and separate the strings.  This is exactly what most value streams look like, a tangled ball of interconnected steps that eventually have an end point. 

As I set out to straighten and hang the strings, the metaphor became even more clear to me.  As I stood on tip toes on the top rung of my ladder, it hit me (this isn’t about safety now, is it?).  A value stream is simply a set of activities that, when sequenced together, add value to a customer.  These lights are like that, I thought.  There’s a beginning point, the plug, and an end point where it either terminates or connects to another string. 

The wire is necessary to move current from one light to the next but does it add value? Really?  I mean, nobody will look at my house after I’m done decorating it and say, “Wow, nice wire!”.  We even buy them so that the wire doesn’t stand out.  My house trim is white, so I want to get white wire.  So the goal is to hang them so attention is placed on the lights, not the wire, right?  The wire represents ‘non-value added’ work.  It’s necessary but the customer doesn’t really care about it.  We buy products but aren’t interested in how they got to the store shelves.

My job as a consultant is to help my clients do exactly the same thing.  Our goal together is to untangle their processes, determine which steps in it actually add value for the customer (the lights) and which don’t (the wire).  Then we look at each value-added step and evaluate if it’s working the way we want. Put another way, we ask, ‘if this bulb burns out, does the rest of the string go out too?’.  If not, ‘do we really need it?’.  If so, what do we have to do to fix it? 

What steps in your processes are not working properly?  What is the impact on the customer?  Are your value streams uncluttered and free of knots and tangles?  What do your customers think?

To learn more about Lean thinking and how it's proven methodologies can improve your organization's processes, customer service and bottom line, contact our office.  Our Lean experts are here to help you untangle your Value Streams today! 602-263-1961