Is Lean/TPS Possible in the Public Service? – Part 1

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

Senior public sector leaders asked W. Edwards Deming asked this question in the early 1980’s.

His approach was working in companies around the world. Would it work in the public service?

“I don’t know,” Deming said.

Some diligent leaders ran experiments – with decidedly mixed success.

Adapting Total Quality Management (TQM) to Government,

Quality Comes to City Hall

As a general rule, government departments most similar to private sector operations had the greatest success – (e.g. a city’s motor equipment division which maintained & repaired its cars & trucks).

But the literature suggests that even those areas were unable to sustain continuous improvement, which as we know, entails building a supporting management system.

That said, our colleague, Gary Vansuch, has cited encouraging activities in the U.S. Department of Transport. Well done, folks, and please continue.

What are the obstacles to Lean in government? I’ll explore this question in upcoming blogs.

There’s a great deal at stake. Good people are giving their all to continuous improvement in government. Why shouldn’t civil servants have the opportunity to develop what Deming called ‘pride of workmanship’?

Why shouldn’t they be involved in developing and improving their work processes? Why shouldn’t their work be fun and motivating?

In fact, morale in the US and Canadian federal governments is at all-time lows.

Good news: Federal worker morale has finally bottomed out. Bad news: It’s still terrible.

Morale In The Public Sector

Moreover, the growing gap between performance in the private and public sector fuels a corrosive cynicism and disengagement – surely the last thing we need nowadays.

More to come.

Best regards,

Pascal




In case you missed our last few blogs... please feel free to have another look…

Henry & Edsel Ford – the Pride & the Sorrow
Ethics Enables Leadership
Leadership in Times of Crisis
More on Walt Disney

The Four Levels of Visual Management

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

Lean is about making problems visible, and visual management is a core methodology.

You can’t fix what you can’t see!

There are four levels. Here they are in order of increasing power:

Level 1 – Tells only

STOP signs are a good example. In our neighbourhood, people blow by them all the time.

(We call them ‘Hollywood stops’ – the driver slows by 5 miles per hour, takes a perfunctory look around & drives on through. Not exactly, Safety First!)

Level 2 – Something changes, which gets your attention

Traffic lights are a good example. “Hey, the light’s changed to Green. We can drive on.”

Level 2 has more power because, done well, it wakes people up.

Our regular readers may recall that Lean is about wakefulness…. ``Hey, we have a problem here. We should do something!

Sadly, visual management in many organizations gets stuck at Level 1.

In many Health Care organizations, for example, visual management amounts to signage telling people to do, or not do something.

This amounts to blaming the work, as W. Edward Deming observed a generation ago

Doing so, subtly shifts responsibility from senior management to front line workers. “Hey, I told them not to do it…”

A nice trick – “I’ll take the power, privilege and perks of power – but not the responsibility!”

This amounts to a 21st century variation on “Let them eat cake.”

Most of the time, the root cause is in the system - which senior leaders own.

Next time, Level 3 and 4 visual management.

Best,

Pascal

Design Thinking and the PDCA Cycle

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

To everything there is a season

In a world of tumultuous and endless technological change, Design Thinking has rightly become a core methodology.

In many industries, we can no longer confidently claim that we understand the customer’s problems. An thus, we can no longer define Value with any certainty.

A generation ago we rediscovered, seemingly, Deming’s Plan-Do-Check-Adjust cycle.

Deming’s work, in turn, was heavily informed by Walter Shewhart and the idea that operational data comprised both a signal and noise.

And that through patient observation and statistical methods, we could separate the proverbial wheat from the chaff.

Before Shewhart, Deming and the other great pioneers of modern management, business processes were essentially unknown – unknowable.

(In a some sectors this is still the case, no? The ‘Noble Savage’ approach to management…)

Both Deming and Shewhart informed our Toyota senseis. Every day, a little up, Pascal-san!

Is Design Thinking entirely new? Or is our current expression of the timeless ideas that Shewhart and Deming conveyed in generations past?

Like PDCA, Design thinking entails a Diverge-Converge pattern. The 4 D’s are perhaps its most succinct expression:

Discover – (Diverge)

• Develop empathy with the customer
• Go see and experience for yourself
• Seek thereby to understand their jobs/pains/gains in a direct way

Define – (Converge)

• Define the customer’s jobs/pains/gains
• Pick a focus and define the essence of problem

Develop – (Diverge)

• Ideate possible countermeasures
• Develop and test prototypes
• Focus on the best solution

Deliver – (Converge)

• Test and confirm your design choice
• Once the design is confirmed, develop a deployment plan
• Release and scale

Each of the 4 D’s finds unique expression in different industries. Develop, for example, entails very different activities in, say, web design vs car detailing products.

In the former, Develop entails developing, say, the web page’s content, and the front and back end – (translation to HTML, functionality, database, logic).

In the latter industry, Develop entails testing the various chemicals and application methods in the lab. This one works, that one does not…

Like PDCA, Design Thinking entails a journey up a staircase in the fog, during which we learn through rapid experimentation and iteration.

In my view, both are rooted in the same tradition but differ in that one is aimed at continuous improvement, the other at continuous innovation.

We need both arrows in the quiver, no?

Best regards,

Pascal

Is Lean/TPS Possible in the Public Service? Part 1

By Pascal Dennis

Senior public sector leaders asked W. Edwards Deming asked this question in the early 1980’s.

His approach was working in companies around the world. Would it work in the public service?

“I don’t know,” Deming said.

Some diligent leaders ran experiments – with decidedly mixed success.

Adapting Total Quality Management (TQM) to Government,

Quality Comes to City Hall

As a general rule, government departments most similar to private sector operations had the greatest success – (e.g. a city’s motor equipment division which maintained & repaired its cars & trucks).

But the literature suggests that even those areas were unable to sustain continuous improvement, which as we know, entails building a supporting management system.

That said, our colleague, Gary Vansuch, has cited encouraging activities in the U.S. Department of Transport. Well done, folks, and please continue.

What are the obstacles to Lean in government? I’ll explore this question in upcoming blogs.

There’s a great deal at stake. Good people are giving their all to continuous improvement in government. Why shouldn’t civil servants have the opportunity to develop what Deming called ‘pride of workmanship’?

Why shouldn’t they be involved in developing and improving their work processes? Why shouldn’t their work be fun and motivating?

In fact, morale in the US and Canadian federal governments is at all-time lows.

Good news: Federal worker morale has finally bottomed out. Bad news: It’s still terrible.

Morale In The Public Sector

Moreover, the growing gap between performance in the private and public sector fuels a corrosive cynicism and disengagement – surely the last thing we need nowadays.

More to come.

Best regards,

Pascal

Pascal Dennis Bio

The Four Levels of Visual Management

By Pascal Dennis

Lean is about making problems visible, and visual management is a core methodology.

You can’t fix what you can’t see!

There are four levels. Here they are in order of increasing power:

Level 1 – Tells only

STOP signs are a good example. In our neighbourhood, people blow by them all the time.

(We call them ‘Hollywood stops’ – the driver slows by 5 miles per hour, takes a perfunctory look around & drives on through. Not exactly, Safety First!)

Level 2 – Something changes, which gets your attention

Traffic lights are a good example. “Hey, the light’s changed to Green. We can drive on.”

Level 2 has more power because, done well, it wakes people up.

Our regular readers may recall that Lean is about wakefulness…. ``Hey, we have a problem here. We should do something!

Sadly, visual management in many organizations gets stuck at Level 1.

In many Health Care organizations, for example, visual management amounts to signage telling people to do, or not do something.

This amounts to blaming the work, as W. Edward Deming observed a generation ago

Doing so, subtly shifts responsibility from senior management to front line workers. “Hey, I told them not to do it…”

A nice trick – “I’ll take the power, privilege and perks of power – but not the responsibility!”

This amounts to a 21st century variation on “Let them eat cake.”

Most of the time, the root cause is in the system - which senior leaders own.

Next time, Level 3 and 4 visual management.

Best,

Pascal

Pascal Dennis Bio

Dr. W. Edwards Deming - “People work in the system that management created”

By Al Norval

In this blog, I pay homage to one of the greatest quality minds of all time. Dr. Deming said many incredible things but this quote is one of my all-time favorites.

It was triggered by a recent problem solving session with the senior leadership team of a large corporation. The team was examining a problem and like many teams was going down the route of the 5 who’s instead of the 5 why’s. They ended up blaming the people for not following the process and saying something like – if only Joe or Cindy followed the procedures, everything would be OK.

Dr. Deming knew better. He understood that people inherently tried to do a good job but what prevented them from performing to the best of their abilities was the system they worked in. The system that was created by and owned by the management team. The workers didn’t have the power to change the system. They may have been able to make improvements within the system but only management had the power to do system kaizen and to change the system.

That’s where his famous quote originated where he said that 90% of all problems were management’s responsibility and workers were only responsible for 10% of all problems. The root cause of most problems ultimately is the way the work is designed within the production system.

As I work with management teams, most struggle to grasp this. The separation between actually doing the work and the design of the system for doing the work. In fact, most don’t even know they are responsible for the systems the organization uses. That’s why we end up with people watching machines do the work, with overly complex data input algorithms and with teams with no understanding of or connection to the customer. Have you ever seen a management team look at each other in bewilderment when asked who is responsible for driving improvement in one the key systems?

Organizations have many different systems; HR systems, Maintenance systems, Finance systems to name a few. What’s the best way for Leadership teams to know which systems need to be strengthened? Go to Gemba and Go See and understand what’s actually happening. As I did this with one executive he remarked somewhat embarrassed “I can’t believe we actually make people work like this”. As he said this though, he did take on the responsibility for changing the system.

By doing this, people can then become engaged in problem solving and work on fixing the problems that inevitably occurs. The people that are closest to the work can work on improving the work knowing that the improvements they make will continue to deliver value to Customers because of the way the system is designed.

Dr. Deming may not be with us anymore but his legacy lives on in the lessons he left us.

Cheers