Scatter - a Symptom of Big Company Disease

By Pascal Dennis

By scatter, I mean the tendency large organizations have of disassembling the PDCA cycle - and giving different parts to different people.

One group develops the Plan, another deploys the Plan, yet another monitors the Plan.

Sometimes a fourth group is responsible for adjusting the plan.

More often, though, there is no adjustment. We just hope what's left of the Plan will quietly fade away.

The role of a Key Thinker (Deployment Leader, 'Control Department' at Toyota) is to "wrap their arms around" the problem -- and to shepherd it through the entire PDCA cycle.

Thus, you have a holistic understanding of what's happening - and a much better chance of making diagnoses & adjustments.

I see scatter is New Production Development, Marketing, Engineering and Strategic Planning in general.

We like to take things apart.

That's okay, so long as we put them back together.

And so long as one person is charged with seeing the whole chessboard, and grasping the unfolding story.

Best,

Pascal

Aussie & Kiwi Adventures, Part 2

By Pascal Dennis

Thanks for your feedback to the question I posed last time:

How can Qantas, a major company in a highly competitive market, be so indifferent to the customer?

You'll recall that, among other failures, Qantas lost my bags - both going & coming home! And provided no easy means of providing feedback or seeking recourse!

Here are some common themes in your responses:

"Qantas doesn't care because they're an oligopoly in Australia."

"Qantas knows the government (i.e. the Australian tax payer) will always bail them out!"

"Service levels, in general, are substantially lower in Australia than in other countries. Knowing no better & having no alternative, Australians think Qantas behavior is normal."

I defer to our readers' insights, and especially, those of our Australian colleagues. If true, these comments provide important lessons for policy makers.

• In the absence of competition, the customer, and the concept of Value, will be forgotten. Waste will increase exponentially


• Accept oligopolies only as a last resort, therefore. Seek to foster competition so that the customer is not forgotten.


• If your market is small & can only sustain a very small number of companies, compel the company to provide, through legislation if need be, hassle-free recourse for customers.

What kinds of waste did I experience dealing with Qantas?

Transportation, Delay, Motion, Over-processing, Defects...

Qantas also experienced these forms of waste, as well as, Work-In-Process (my lost luggage - and me!), and Knowledge.

For Qantas, the latter waste is the worst of all. By scorning customer feedback, they'll never improve.

This is what happens when the Customer is forgotten.

So, for Lean thinkers, the most important questions remains: WHO IS YOUR CUSTOMER?

Best,

Pascal

Aussie & Kiwi Adventures, Part 1

By Pascal Dennis

Just returned from three weeks in Oceania.

Splendid adventures in a beautiful part of the world - a business nomad's delight.

My Aussie & Kiwi colleagues were gracious, kind & understandably proud of their countries.

(Special thanks to my mates Matt Wall of Boeing Australia, and Mike Butler of Fonterra NZ. I hope I can reciprocate when you visit North America!)

Forgive me for leading off with the only negative part of my journey - another unhappy adventure in international air travel.

But there may be some useful lessons.

Qantas, Australia's national airline, managed to lose my bags - both going & coming home!

Other hassles too, which I'll not bother describing, and all on a business class ticket!

When I went to the Qantas home page to share my story - feedback which top-shelf companies would consider invaluable - I found it was impossible to do so.

Qantas makes it very difficult for customers to provide feedback (!?)

A few minutes of web research confirmed that many other travellers have had a similar experience - with no recourse.

Qantas' message appears to be, "Who cares?"

My misadventures surprised neither my Oceania colleagues, nor the various Lost Baggage attendees I spoke with.

"Qantas is the worst..." and "At least they're consistent!" were common refrains.

My Aussie chums questioned the capability of Qantas' CEO & management.

Labor relations are so bad that Qantas grounded its entire fleet in 2011 and early 2012!

How can a major company in a highly competitive market be so indifferent to the customer?

I welcome feedback, especially, that of our Oceania colleagues.

For my part, I was struck by the painfully obvious absence of:

1. Standardized work, and
2. Embedded OK/Not OK tests

At every Lost Baggage desk, Qantas staff seemed unsure of what to do - in the face of a common defect!

Nor did there appear to be easy ways of confirming a Good/No Good condition.

And thereby hangs a tale of importance for Australia's future.

More next time.

Pascal

The Power of Doodles!

By Al Norval

Why doodle? Why draw images of problems, of notes, of ideas, of meetings? There are a couple of main reasons, namely to remember your thoughts or what happened and to communicate your thoughts or what happened.

Doodles take your thoughts and translate them into pictures. These pictures have a much deeper meaning than just words. They convey a context that words can’t match, after all a picture is worth a thousand words.

Lean stresses making things visible and the key to Visual Management is:

• We see together
• We know together
• We act together

Doodles help people come to a common understanding before action occurs. This way the action can be laser focussed on the problem rather than being scattered.

So why don’t more people doodle in meetings, why do people keep notes in a word form? I think it’s because people quite simply, don’t believe they can draw and fear the judgement of their peers. So the safe route is to take and publish notes in a word format.

Lately, I’ve been fascinated by the social media called Pinterest. It’s a wonderful idea that is catching on like wildfire. It’s based on posting images, pictures or doodles of things you are interested in. What’s even better is that you can collaborate with people on a team picture board and use it to plan events, projects, kaizen, and team improvements. It eliminates the biggest objection people have to doodles by providing a safe, fun environment that is relaxed, comfortable and playful.

You’ll find this type of environment is great for idea generation as the embarassment factor has been lifted. This makes it good for brainstorming, Design, kaizen, and problem solving.

If you’re interested, please see Lean Pathways on Pinterest for more details.

Cheers

Reflection - the Breakfast of Champions

By Pascal Dennis

Reflection entails. honest, humble acceptance of successes & failures, strengths & weaknesses.

Hansei, as the Japanese call it.

Reflection is the countermeasure to hubris, overweening pride & arrogance, that destroyer of people and organization.

Reflection is central to all great religions, in the form of prayer, meditation, and rumination.

In some traditions the acolyte leaves civilization and seeks reflection in solitude.

In my experience, reflection requires both solitude, as well as, the camaraderie of one's team.

Thus, questions like 'What have I learned?’ naturally lead to 'What did we learn?'

Reflection, of course, reflects the Adjust phase of Plan-Do-Check-Adjust cycle.

We close of the loop thereby, and lay the foundation for next year's PDCA loop.

A couple of points here:

To close the loop, we need to have been there for all phases of PDCA.

Otherwise, we suffer the debilitating ailment I call Scatter - one group does the Plan, another Deploys the Plan, yet a third Checks the Plan.

Result: lousy results and little learning.

Scatter is at epidemic proportions in large organizations - because they're so large & complex.

More to come.

Making the Invisible Visible in Design Projects

By Al Norval

Have you ever walked through a large design center and wondered what the heck was happening there?

If so, you wouldn’t be the first one to do so. What do we see? Lots of people working at computers in their cubicles.

What’s the current condition?

Is everything OK?

Are we meeting the needs of our customers?

Is anyone having any problems?

This is not to imply that these people aren’t working hard, it’s just difficult to tell what’s going on.

Why is it like this? Because the work is invisible! It’s not like a manufacturing process where we can see the flow of materials going through the factory. We can’t see the flow of a project. The key then becomes making the invisible work visible so we can see the flow of work, the status of the project and most importantly see any problems that are occurring. All projects have problems, all designs have problems, in fact all organizations have problems. What separates the great ones from everyone else is their understanding of this and their ability to surface problems and solve them.

How do we make the work visible?

• Use simple visuals to track progress. Red/ green, hand drawn Gant charts or a simple timeline with 5 or 6 key milestones.
• Keep a scorecard with a few key metrics – meeting Customer Needs, on time, on budget
• Make work assignments visible by showing the projects assigned to each person on a card.
• Stacking cards allows you to assess whether they are at capacity or not.
• Unassigned projects or tasks can go into a queue which can then be made visible.
• Do a FMEA at the start of a project and for the top 3-5 problems, put in a standard countermeasures. Both potential problems and countermeasures are made visible.
• Do a weekly check of project status where people check for on or off track.
• Make things Yes/ No, or binary which forces problems to the surface.
• For problems, make them visible as well, keep an action log and make visible who, what, when and status.

People say “why do all this it’s in the computer” but that doesn’t make it visible to all. When it’s in the computer it’s only visible if people go look for it which they usually don’t do.

Key is that when we all see together, we understand together and take action together.

Sounds simple right?

Try it out and let me know how it works

Cheers

Cross Training in the Factory vs the Office – Why one and not the other?

By Al Norval

As I work with clients I note a common theme as it relates to training. In the factory, people are trained with back-ups and a certain amount of effort goes into ensuring there are trained back-ups for people at each position. You can argue there are not enough back-ups or the quality of the training needs to be improved but in any case, the bottom line is that there is more than one person trained to do the work whether it’s for vacation relief, running multiple shifts, overtime or positioning for job postings. It’s a natural way of doing things in the factory.

The opposite is true in the office environment. Rarely do I come across organizations that have trained back-ups for any position in the office. The result – people taking their laptops with them on vacation, working long hours before and after returning from time off sorting through the mountain of email, taking conference calls while they are home sick and stress levels through the roof.

Just last week, I was talking to a couple of young engineers who were on a week’s vacation. Both had their laptops with them. After spending fifteen minutes getting through the required security protocols for remote access each faced over 350 emails. I could feel the tension rise as they got back into “work” mode.

Why did they have to do this? Lots of reasons including staff cutbacks, smartphones, wireless networking, job security (no one else can do my work so I’m OK) but ultimately it boils down to there was no one else trained to take care of the work while they were away. Respect for People, one of the foundational principles of Lean, deals with giving people meaningful work that makes full use of all their capabilities. It means developing people’s capabilities so people become “The best they can be”. I’d suggest it also means giving people adequate time off to recharge, refresh and reflect so they can deliver both the work and improvements that are expected.

To do this we need to treat work in the office just like work in the factory and have stable standard processes with trained, capable people able to execute the work.

TWI or Training Within Industry was developed during the second world war as a method of training new recruits in the work force on specialized skills. It includes Job Instruction, Job Breakdowns, Job Skill Matrices and training plans that are the basis for today’s Standard Work.

I’d suggest we need to apply this toolset to office work to understand:

• What are the work processes?
• What Standard Work is required?
• What skills are required to do the work?
• How many people are required to do the work?
• How many people have the requisite skills?
• What’s the training gap closure plan?

Doing this will bring some sanity back to office work.

Cheers

Confronting the Business Haters

By Pascal Dennis

Another fine piece by Jack Welch in a recent issue of Fortune. [read it here]

As ever, he effortlessly gets to the heart of complex issues.

I've encountered each of the four groups of business-haters that Welch cites.

Sadly, they are all too prevalent among our media, academic and political elites.

(BUSINESS = FAT-CAT-IN-A-TOP-HAT)

Do these elites see the countless small business owners who every day work hard to provide services or products that make our lives easier?

People like my parents, who ran a small family restaurant for four decades, employing dozens of people, providing thousands with good, wholesome food at reasonable prices.

(And putting their kids through school thereby, so we could start small businesses of our own.)

A big problem, if you agree that sound, stable ethical business is the way back for American and the world.

What to do?

For a start, each of us in business must reflect on our core values - and try to practice them every day.

Disgraceful behavior by financial leaders is a root cause of business hatred.

It'll take time, but through daily practice we can rebuild the good name of commerce.

Secondly, let's not be shy about calling out bozos that bad-mouth business with impunity.

Business (commerce) is an honourable calling which has fuelled prosperity, art & civilization for millennia.

Where there is free-wheeling, ethical commerce, arts, science, and democracy follow.

Classical Athens, the Renaissance & Elizabethan England are just a few examples of this pattern.

The Medici, great patrons of the arts, were businesspeople first.

If not businesspeople, who?

Do we put our trust in academics, politicians, labor leaders or media pundits?

Can anybody point to a flourishing culture that was created and sustained thereby?

Best regards,

Pascal