February 2011 – The Lean Thinker

February 28, 2011January 9, 2019

Lean Facilitators are Countermeasures

What is the role of your lean facilitator?

This question comes up now and again, was recently posed on the LEI forums by someone looking for help with a job description.

I extrapolated from his question that he was looking to the job description as a line of defense against dilution of the facilitator’s focus and effort by projects that might not be going in the appropriate direction.

In effect, this is putting the lean facilitator in the role of a weakened zampolit with the role of educating the “correct view” and challenging decisions that run counter to it. Except that more often he has to sell the “correct view” rather than impose it.

The fact that the question is being asked at all indicates that the organization has not really thought through what their operational vision is. How will the company work, what are the responsibilities and roles of the leaders?

What are the leaders’ job descriptions in this new world?

Those job descriptions become a target condition for each of them.

What is the gap?

If there are gaps in skills and knowledge, then we need countermeasures.

At this point, the role and responsibility of a lean facilitator might begin to emerge as one of those countermeasures. Don’t have the expertise? Import it.

What doesn’t work, though, is to use the lean facilitator to substitute for the leader’s full and direct participation in the process of improvement. And no job description, no matter how carefully crafted, can fix that.

February 24, 2011January 9, 2019

Notes on A White Board

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
Sequence
Timing
Outcome

How will we continuously verify actual work vs. the plan?

Ask “What stopped the work?”

Why must the team member leave the work area?
What slows him down?

(Back to start)

February 21, 2011January 9, 2019

ART: Capturing the Flow in Photographs

I wouldn’t normally post something like this, except for the subject matter: the Toyota assembly line in Valenciennes, France. Stéphane Couturier is a photographer who tries to capture urban and industrial scenes as organic living forms.

Others have found strong metaphors between the Toyota Production System and the organization of natural processes, but these photographs are, well, just cool (to me at least). See the others at this link: http://www.prixpictet.com/2010/view/995

The artist’s statement seems to have suffered a bit in translation, but the last phrase sums up a Toyota plant:

In front of the Toyota factory assembly line, that is say confronted by a veritable metaphor of movement that is perpetual and implacable as is today’s technological world, rationalized, disembodied, automated and more and more subject to the silent and ruthless profit logic, Stéphane Couturier knows that reality is no longer made up of isolated things, of fixed geometrical shapes, but that it has become a reality of flux, in continuous movement and transformation.

Cool pics, I just wanted to share them.

February 20, 2011January 9, 2019

The Benefits of Continuous Improvement

There are a lot of variations on a theme where someone asks an Internet forum how to quantify or justify the benefits of implementing a continuous improvement program.

If you think about it, though, this is really interesting question.

What are the benefits of NOT having continuous improvement? Why would managers deliberately decide not to have a learning organization, not to have continuous improvement, not to fully engage the intelligence of their workers?

Why would managers deliberately decide not to improve safety, quality, delivery, lead times?

What if we asked the question that way?

What is the benefit of not having these things?

If that question is subsequently dismissed as stupid (which I hope it would be), then the question is no longer whether they should be pursued, but how.

February 18, 2011January 9, 2019

Release the Constraints of Reality

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 though a single person were performing the entire process from start to finish. Make it as smooth as possible for this person. No back tracking, no awkward motions. Everything is where it needs to be, when it needs to be there.

This allows the team to let go of all of the “reasons why not” for a while, and see the possibilities.

Then, one by one, re-introduce the constraints of reality.

How can we make it work when we introduce this problem? Does the process still meet the target objective?

Approaching it this way helps teams that are so embedded in the stormy ocean of day-to-day problems that they can’t see things possibly working smoothly.

It also reinforces the notion that we want to see things, not as “what can we improve from the baseline” but rather “how far are we from the target?”

In slightly modified form, this approach worked pretty well this week. Slightly modified? I, too, sometimes have to bend things around how the world presents itself to me.

February 16, 2011January 9, 2019

One, Zero and Zero

Sometimes we like to talk in abstracts. “Reduce batch sizes” or “reduce lead time.”

But let’s be clear what we are striving for. With every improvement we make, we want to converge on the idea of:

Batch size of one.
Lead time of zero.
Zero waste of resources.

Lest anyone thinks that is impossible, consider the post before this one about 3D printing technology, and look where it is going.

As Mike Rother emphasizes in his teaching the trend throughout the history of making things has been in this direction.

The pendulum swung in favor of volume in the industrial revolution as production shifted from craft (batch size of one, long lead times, high costs) toward large batches, in order to achieve better economics.

Somewhere along the way, we lost sight of the fact that we gave something up for those lower costs.

The companies that can return the benefits of one-off production while holding the costs are going to win.

But.. make no mistake… the suppliers of cheap mass molded and cast parts have a disruptive technology headed their way that fits the model perfectly.

February 14, 2011January 9, 2019

3D Printing as a Kaizen Tool

One of the tenants of TPS is to learn as much as you can, as quickly as you can, with as much future flexibility as possible. This is the whole point of JIT.

The more quickly something can be built or mocked up, the more quickly it can be tried and tested, and the more quickly we learn what improvements can be made.

We are seeing the beginning of a revolution in fabrication technology as 3D printing starts to move out of high-end prototyping shops and into the mainstream.

This (very entertaining) video tells about an open source(!) 3D printer design that can be had for about a little over a grand. (USD$1250) (makerbot.com)

Open source means that you can grab the technology and scale it if you want to.

Why I Love My 3D Printer

The step from one-off prototyping to full mass-customization is a small one. It is just a matter of time. The ultimate die change is none at all.

So – rather than looking at the limitations of this technology, look at the possibilities.

February 11, 2011January 9, 2019

More From Dan Pink on Motivation

This sketchcast from Dan Pink covers the same ground as his TED talk that I posted a few weeks ago, but it is more succinct and direct so I wanted to share it.

When we look at what drives kaizen and continuous improvement, it is important to understand what motivates people to find a better way to do the work.

As we try to alter the dynamics of the way an organization functions (a.k.a. “change”) it is equally important to understand that tying people’s bonuses to their willingness to adopt “the new way” may get compliance, but it is unlikely to motivate true commitment.

What we call “performance management” in its various guises seems to be the worst possible way to get the most from people.

HR professionals – especially the ones who are pushing these networked web-based “performance management systems” – I have a question. What is the intended purpose of these systems? Is it developing people or driving compliance?