The huge benefit of the giant Corona jolt

May 4, 2020 | Change, Leadership, Lean

The huge benefit of the giant Corona jolt

For years I have been a proponent of what is loosely described as ‘Lean thinking’.

In effect it is a continuous process of removing waste by a combination of critical thinking and continuous improvement.

The biggest impediment to a lean process is always the mind set of those who need to change in order to reap the benefits. Change is really hard, especially when the existing state is comfortable. It usually takes a jolt of some sort to gain any sort of traction. There have been times when I have applied that jolt myself, as a means to remove complacency.

However, we are currently in the middle of a giant jolt delivered by the bug, which should have created the greatest potential for lean traction I have seen in many years.

A lean process will progressively remove any activity that does not add value to the end customer, and seek to compress the time it takes to deliver that value.

In other words, if it is essential it stays, non essential, it is on the list to be dumped.

Suddenly we are all looking at the services we saw as part of life and re-evaluating them with the question: ‘Is that essential, how does it add value?’

We are involuntarily applying a critical eye to everything we do, seeking to identify and line up for removal, anything that is not essential, that is just consuming time and resources for little or no value.

To use lean parlance, the ‘Current state’ as it was pre Corona is recognised as no longer an option, and we are by necessity experimenting with the elements we need to survive commercially. In that process, will seek to understand how the ‘Future state’ might look. In every case, you can make some assumptions, and apply them as guiding principles to the things you are considering.

For example, will it be part of the ‘future state’ for office workers to commute, often multiple hours a day, to sit in expensive offices in a CBD to do their work? For the last 20 years, despite the amazing communication tools suddenly available, it has been for most. The dominating management culture, mostly the child of old white guys like me, who substituted a bum in a seat for useful outcomes, said it was so.

This current experiment with remote working has demonstrated the nonsense of this formerly dominating view. We do need however, to substitute the humanity of the casual conversation and social networks built from personal contact.

We can save ourselves a lot of time and money by working from home, partly from home, or perhaps decentralised mini-offices. Reducing commuting time is like reducing machine changeover time: it releases capacity otherwise being wasted. For no cost beyond a change of mindset and perhaps a few modest enabling tools, we can free up huge amounts of potentially productive time.

Ask yourself the Question; ‘how much time per person can we save by the removal of the necessity to commute’? When you have answered it, ask if there was a better way, for the people concerned, and the stakeholders in your business, to have spent that time.

Header photo courtesy Dominic Freeman

How do you trouble shoot flow?

Feb 27, 2020 | Lean, Operations

You never get this process of articulating flow right first time, or second, maybe third for simple tasks. People are always people, they are in a hurry, forgetful, negligent, or new to the task, so it has to be made as easy as possible.

Toyota pioneered this idea of flow in a manufacturing environment, but whether you are in a factory, or in an office, the process is the same. There has to be a process for continuous improvement, or at the least one to identify and remove impediments to orderly and consistent flow, in any organisation that aspires to survive and prosper. It results in the optimisation of the process, which is usually radically different to what is required to encourage innovation, which is by its nature more ‘scrappy’ and disorganized, as the activity seeks to test its viability and grow.

Improvement only comes from a stable environment, where things happen in a consistent and predictable manner. When you have stability, you are in a position to experiment, and observe quantitatively the result of the experiment. Was it beneficial, is it worth incorporating into the standard process? If so, then the process check list is changed to incorporate the change as the new standard procedure. If not, a note is made so that at a later time someone can review and know the change has been tested, or indeed, use it as the base for construction of a hypothesis and further experiment that takes the change one step further to where it may make the difference.

A client some time ago installed a coffee machine in the tea room. An expensive unit, that took beans, ground them and dispensed with hot water and milk on demand. The unit has three things that needed to be done. Beans added to the container, water added to its dispenser, and the line from the milk bottle, held in a small refrigerated unit on the side, needed to be removed and cleaned each day.

These seemingly simple things caused a lot of problems, and really shitty coffee. Water was put into the bean dispenser, (strangely perhaps, beans did not seem to find their way into the water dispenser) requiring an extensive service (twice) and the milk line seemed immune to any cleaning.

To address this challenge, we engaged the staff in a bit of a game, using a fishbone diagram and post it notes.

Within a few days, the diagram was covered in suggestions, which at a lunchtime meeting we ‘workshopped’ down to those that the people using the machine thought were the best. We wrote a checklist, or standard operating procedure for the coffee machine, which was tested over a few weeks by a small group of heavy users, then posted on the wall of the kitchen, as well as included in the businesses then developing library of SOP’s. We also left a big framed photo of the fishbone on the wall in reception, as a reminder to all that improvement was everybody’s job, and that it could be fun, as well as useful.

And, far fewer problems with the coffee machine since.

Header photo courtesy Alwin kroon via Flikr

Discover ‘flow’ to build scale

Nov 28, 2019 | Leadership, Lean, Operations

The notion of ‘flow,’ or as we call it, ‘In the zone,’ is a psychological state first articulated by psychologist Mihaly Csikenmihali, published outside academic circles in his 1990 book ‘Flow: the psychology of optimal experience’.

From time to time, most of us experience ‘flow’ in our lives.

Those rare times when deeply immersed in a task, when energy and concentration are together forming a focus and delivering a rolling output, that makes the time seem to compress and fly. The level and quality of output when in such a state is surprising to us, even astonishing.

I wonder if there is a collective noun that describes such a state to a group?. It would apply when a group of individuals are so closely working as one, but using their individual skills simultaneously, and cumulatively, such that the collective output is greater than the sum of its parts.

How does a group go about achieving this state of flow?

It takes engagement, focus, alignment around a common purpose, and preparation. The output when it happens, is amazing.

Einstein must have been in an extended state of flow during his 1905 ‘miracle year,’ when he wrote four papers that together formed much of the foundation of modern physics.

He did not achieve this by himself, although he was not known outside a small group of friends. He was working full time in the Swiss patents office in Bern, these seminal papers were his ‘side-gig.’ He was not able to access the supposedly best minds in the fields he was thinking about, as he could not get a job in a university, so he walked and discussed with his few close friends and colleagues, and significantly his first wife, herself a substantial mathematician.

There must have been some degree of collective ‘intellectual flow’ present in that time, the state where collective and collaborative activity delivers compounding outcomes, leading to those seminal papers.

Every enterprise should strive for ‘Flow’ in their activities. The flow of processes, such that everything happens predictably, smoothly, to a predetermined cadence, building on itself, delivering a compounding outcome.

This applies as much to innovation activity, and strategy development and implementation, as it does to the mundane processes that we need to have happen every day to keep the doors open.

Can you see any sign of ‘flow’ in your enterprise?

Header credit: Lucidpanther via Flikr

How to measure ‘Flow’ through a process.

Oct 23, 2019 | Lean, OE, Operations

The word ‘Flow’ has a few differing meanings, but all imply the smooth transition from one place to another.

To improve operational efficiency, as well as the productivity of a process, the best way to go about it is to remove the sources of interruption to the smooth flow of the product or service from one point to another.

In some cases, the results of the interruption will be obvious, a build-up of WIP waiting for the opportunity to move forward, and its sibling, lack of product to move into a waiting machine, or part of a process. In others, it will not be so obvious, and often takes time to isolate and address.

Fortunately, the metrics of ‘Flow’ are simple, there are only two:

Throughput.

Cycle time.

How much moves from one point to the next, and how long does it take.

These metrics can be applied to a whole process, and parts of the process. Usually an improvement starts with the former, and as investigation proceeds, it digs into individual stages in the process, removing interruptions progressively, starting with the biggest, which may in itself have several components.

Tracking and making transparent these two measures, while having those involved take responsibility for continuous improvement is where the productivity gold lies hidden.

Tracking can be achieved by some sort of digital visual display, now everywhere, and/or the original and perhaps still best way, with Kanban cards (which means in Japanese ‘visual signal’) that follow the process, step by step. Utilising both achieves the benefit of both wide transparency, and individual responsibility.

In its simplest form, the metrics track time and delivery.

The example above in the header shows, in period 1, 8 units were delivered, period 2, 10 units, and so on.

The time will be whatever is appropriate to the process being measured, as will the units.

It may be minutes, days, weeks, whatever is appropriate.

This may represent the total process, or a small part of it. In the latter case, it will usually be sensible to add a column between each of the process stages to capture the WIP, the reduction of which is almost always the best place to start when optimising the flow through a multi stage process.

When you need an experienced head to assist you think your way through this seemingly simple idea, give me a call.

The cost of preventing errors

Sep 18, 2019 | Change, Lean, Management

Prevention of waste is a core tenet of lean thinking, and has been systematically used to optimise processes of all types.

However, it is not universally useful.

Prevention of errors in an existing process is one thing, you have the process established, and can map the manner in which the process is applied, and the outcomes achieved. However, when dealing with a new product, or process, things are a little different.

There is no known path towards an outcome, you are in effect telling the future, and that is an occupation with a high failure rate.

In order to tell the future with anything approaching an acceptable level of certainty, you need to experiment, try things, see what works, ask customers, deploy the ‘Lean start-up’ type mentality to the development of the process.

This means there will be many false starts, errors, failures, or more accurately, opportunities to learn.

Established businesses often do not accept errors. Promotion, salary reviews, and all the other trappings of corporate success are usually based on not making mistakes, so guess what, nobody tries anything new that just might not work, just in case.

An effort to remove these errors will end up costing more, as the implication is that the product or process will be developed until it is seen as ‘Completed’ before launching. As we know, not all new products work, so the losses involved in such an exercise can be huge

Remember ‘New Coke,’ the new improved taste of new coke that nearly destroyed the brand? With the benefit of hindsight, it was obviously a dumb idea, but at the time, I am sure Coke management had market research coming out their ears that confirmed this was a great idea. Pity they did not pick a small test area, and put the change into the market, similar to a Minimum Viable Product, (MVP) to see what Coke consumers in real life rather than is some contrived market research environment said. Such a ‘waste’ would have saved them many millions of dollars, and being head of the queue in the greatest marketing blunder of all time list.

The lesson here is to encourage experimentation, each being an opportunity to learn, and improve your fortune telling skills, substituting small errors that do not compromise the business, for the big blunders that will.

How to get really big, important stuff done, and win!

Sep 16, 2019 | Lean, Operations

40 years of observing business and life, success and failure, has led me back to a conclusion that smarter people than me reached thousands of years ago, and winners in all sorts of fields keep using today.

Follow the process.

Achieving big goals is what we are all pushed to do, but often it is overwhelming, simply too big to contemplate, so mostly we hide, in our own particular way. We watch in wonder while others achieve their big goals, and put that success down to luck, circumstances, or a dozen other things.

We would be wrong.

Whenever you see someone achieve a big goal, they have done so by applying discipline, and following a process. They have broken the big goal progressively into smaller more manageable chunks, until they are concentrating just on what is in front of them, right now. Get that right, embed it into the ‘muscle memory’ and then move to the next one, which is an incremental and cumulative movement towards the big goal.

Several of my children were successful elite level athletes. While the big goal was always there, in the background, providing a reason why they were working so hard, what they concentrated on, every day, was what was in front of them.

Another set of reps of a specific move that provided another brick in the foundation of their performance, as they cumulatively built the wall.

The chaos that exists in all our lives, the big things we face can similarly be broken down into simple, progressive steps to be taken. Simple is not easy, simple is in fact very hard, but necessary. Break down the difficult big thing into its component parts, and tackle each one in turn, succeed at it, and move on to the next one.

Improving productivity of a factory process is no different.

Break down every job into its component parts, and get done the one in front of you.

As I work with factory management, one of the best ways to improve without trying to make the big changes all at once which leaves people out, is to have a daily ‘WOT’ meeting, (What’s On Today). Depending on the factory, it may be the whole staff, or it may be individual work cells, the process is the same. Agree the priorities for today, ensure the resources needed are available, and do it, knowing the other parts of the process are doing the same thing, and they all feed into each other.

Excellence is just a matter of steps, excelling at, and continuously improving each one along the way before moving on to the next.

When it comes to getting stuff done, distraction, disorder, and uncertainty leads to failure.

A process is something that goes from A to Z, we lose the game when we focus on Z, forgetting the B to Y steps in the middle.

Play what is in front of you, without losing sight of the wider context, the next step, and overall objective.