WHAT STOPPED THE WORK TODAY? Identify each step (details!) For each step ask: Why is this necessary? What is its purpose? —-> Eliminate unnecessary, wasteful details. Can this detail be done outside of the critical flow? —-> re-sequence. Prior to the start, everything ready to go. Clearly define who must do what and when. Content [...]
One of the more effective facilitation tools I have come across is to have a team first construct an ideal flow, without the constraints of the space geometry, known flow-busters, or even too much concern about the takt time. Just make things flow as smoothly and efficiently as you can envision. Develop the flow as [...]
I have probably written around this question in the past, but it comes up often enough that I wanted to address is specifically. One of the challenges facing the lean practitioner is the “What can you do for me?” boss (or client). This manager wants to know the expected ROI and outcome of your proposal [...]
Yesterday, Kris left great comment with a compelling link to a TED presentation by Tom Wujec, a fellow at Autodesk. Back in June, I commented on Steve Spear’s article “ Why C-Level Executives Don’t Engage in Lean Initiatives.” In that commentary, Spear contends that business leaders are simply not taught the skills and mindset [...]
“What have you learned?” It is a question I hear often at the end of kaizen events and other improvement activity. The key points of a typical report-out, though, seem to be on how much was accomplished, and what was learned comes as an afterthought. A typical week-long kaizen event is organized like this: Monday: [...]
Lesley Doherty, the Chief Executive at NHS Bolton in the U.K. was recently interviewed by IQPC as a precursor for her being a keynote speaker at a conference IQPC is sponsoring in December (Zurich). In the spirit of full disclosure, IQPC had invited me to participate in a “blogger’s panel discussion” (along with Karen Wilhelm, [...]
One of the issues Mike Rother says he has had with the coaching questions in Toyota Kata is question #5 “When can we go see what you have learned?” In the west, inevitably it seems, once the word “When” is uttered, everyone in the conversation leaps to hear “When will you be done?” no matter [...]
In my review of Toyota Kata by Mike Rother, I suggested that the staff-level practitioners who are embedded in almost every company that is “implementing lean” could put those practices to work immediately, even if it was not an ideal “top down” teaching process. This week I gave that a try. I was coaching a [...]
This week I am coaching a kaizen team in the first phases of implementing a process to respond to problems on the shop floor. They clearly understand the objective, and are working hard. The key is to keep them focused on working out the problem response process vs. getting distracted by the production problems they [...]
A great key point comes out on page 124 of Toyota Kata by Mike Rother. …a Toyota person once told me to focus on the biggest problem. However, when I tried to do this I noticed a negative effect: We got lost in hunting for and discussing what was the biggest problem. When we tried [...]