Month: June 2011

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Continuously Improving

The term “continuous improvement” has been around a long time. The truth is most companies don’t do continuous improvement at all, rather they schedule improvements in batches and projects.

The effect of batch improvements is that “improvement” is not “business as usual” and people learn what they do every day, not what they do intermittently. That is one reason why it is usually necessary to precede a kaizen event with a training session.

But there is a deeper ramification here that challenges the very goal of the process.

We all assume (myself included up to this point) that the goal is continuous process improvement.

Maybe it is.

But we also say it is about developing people.

Processes come and go with new technology, new products, reorganizations, etc. The people are the only constant.

Let me float this idea out there –

How would your continuous improvement process change if you thought of its  primary objective as continuously improving the capability of your people?

Process improvement would be a vehicle for people development. In effect, your success at process improvement would be an indicator of how well you were developing people.

To paraphrase a common expression, process improvement is the shadow of how well you develop your people.

That would mean if your process of continuous improvement is targeted at anything other than the capability of people, you are trying to move a shadow by pushing on it.

Its about the people.

hmmmm.

Thoughts?

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Pushing Innovation

3P – the Production Preparation Process – is often used to develop a complete “reboot” of a process. The term kaikaku is often applied.

Like many of the lean tools, subtle points sometimes get lost in rote application.

Here are a couple of thoughts from some experience:

Developing and Exploring Target Conditions

One of the obvious characteristics of 3P in its early stages is mock-ups of the product and processes. The purpose of these mock-ups is to explore various concepts, gain understanding, surface and propose solutions to problems before anything expensive is actually built.

The result of this process is a fairly well defined target condition.

That is, we understand the performance the product, and the process, must deliver in order to meet the goal. And we know what they need to look like in order to meet those goals.

The mock-ups give much more definition to “how the process needs to work” than any sketch or CAD drawing can provide. They give the team confidence that, at the minimum, they understand what problems must be solved to turn this proposal into reality.

As the 3P continues, these mock-ups should be morphing into functioning prototypes, and finally into full-scale production. At each step there should be a verification that the team is converging onto the goal.

Any time there is divergence from the goal is time to symbolically pull the andon, huddle, reset to a known point, and reestablish a track to success.

Keeping the Solution Space as Wide as Possible

One common mistake that teams make is to focus too quickly on a single solution. This is a result of trying to quickly solve the “big problem” rather than seeking first to gain much deeper understanding.

The evaluation process is not about picking winners. The goal in 3P is to keep as many viable solutions in play for as long as possible.

At each iteration of exploration the team learns what problem must be solved next to keep this solution alive. If that problem seems too big and overwhelming, you are likely working on more than one thing. Time to decompose the process to its basic elements (again) and tackle things one-by-one.

Plan B

While you are exploring alternatives, you always want to have something in your hip pocket that will, as a minimum, work. It might not be elegant, as cheap as you want, but it delivers. Having a viable Plan B in play gives the rest of the team much more freedom to push the envelope and explore.

The Plan B team is working continuously to improve from the baseline. Often they can develop some quite radical improvements. But they always start from something that works.

The beauty of this approach is that elements of the true innovation teams’ work can often be incorporated back into the baseline for even higher performance of the baseline.

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Nancy Bruner: “Do They Really Want a Change Agent?”

Nancy Bruner blogs on Word | Rap. Her first (and as of this writing, only) post is titled Do They Really Want a Change Agent. Since most lean practitioners are, rightly or wrongly, expected to be change agents, the points she makes caught my eye.

The harsh reality of this is summed up in her second key point:

2. You will spend more time convincing the very people who hired you to make the changes they hired you to make than you will spend competing in the market.

I recall visiting a company a couple of years ago. As I spoke with a number of people, they all had the same question: “How can we go faster?” Yet they already had (have) a world-class expert on staff. “All you need to do,” I told them, “is listen to him and do what he says.”

And there was the rub. The company, while wanting to alter their results, was (is) struggling with the idea that the leaders themselves must change the way they manage and lead if they want a different outcome.

This is a common problem.

The other common problem is that the practitioners, while clear on the tools and methods of “lean” are far less clear on exactly what leaders need to do differently other than a vague notion of “support the changes.”

The literature, until recently, has not done much to help with this problem. The practice of leaders is starting to get more definition, but the lean community itself still has a huge inertia behind implementation methods that have been proven, again and again, to fail.

There are change agents within the lean community as well. Not surprisingly, they are finding the same resistance that the practitioners in the field complain about.

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Don’t Lose “How To Make Things”

One of the catch phrases in the Toyota culture is “the art of making things.” Everything I have read, and everyone I know who has worked there suggests that “making things” is a passion there that goes beyond a means to make money.

In today’s finance / MBA driven world, I think too many companies are losing sight of the difference between truly creating value vs. simply gathering wealth. They are not the same.

The “makers” of the world are the ones who are creating the incredible breakthroughs we are reading about every day. Making things is a skill that must be practiced, nurtured, focused. With the pace of technology today, the second you are complacent, you are obsolete.

But that isn’t what I am writing about. I want to discuss the consequences.

A company that works to truly create value has to grasp the process of doing so. They have to continuously seek to understand better ways to do it. They gain competitive advantage not merely from making things, but from improving how they make things. Their focus for improvement is a drive toward building the deep skill within the organization.

Finance driven organizations build different skills. They become skilled at developing accounting models, and analyzing them. And those skills may very well serve them for a long time.

But something is lost. When a company’s understanding of its own manufacturing technology becomes superficial, they may very well still make money. The question is whether or not they retain the ability to achieve a breakthrough when one is necessary.

A number of companies out there are well known for a key product breakthrough. Often, though, behind that key product’s success is another breakthrough that enabled that product to be produced economically.

On the other extreme, many a breakthrough invention has failed in the marketplace, not because it was a bad idea, but because the inventor couldn’t make them.

If you are a company that creates value through the conversion of material into products to sell – manufacturing – take a long hard look at the process of making. Are you experts? Do you, or could you design and build your own production equipment? Those skills, that knowledge, once gone is extraordinarily difficult to rebuild.

The alternative is to becoming beholden to the open market’s ability to meet your needs. This might well work if you have a superb relationship with those suppliers. Most companies don’t.

What is your competitive advantage? How do you create the value that is the foundation for all of your profits? How well do you understand that process? Can you fix it when it breaks? Are you making it better every day? Or are you counting on tomorrow being like yesterday?