Daily Lean Tips Edition #44

For my Facebook fans you already know about this great feature. But for those of you that are not connected to A Lean Journey on Facebook or Twitter I post daily a feature I call Lean Tips.  It is meant to be advice, things I learned from experience, and some knowledge tidbits about Lean to help you along your journey.  Another great reason to like A Lean Journey on Facebook.

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Here is the next addition of tips from the Facebook page:

Lean Tip #646 - Don’t Automatically Blame the Tool.

It’s not the hammer’s fault if the person swinging it uses the wrong end. It just won’t work well. Most tools are decent enough, they’re just used incorrectly. Rushing to change a tool because things aren’t working well may be a mistake.

Lean Tip #647 - Share More, Not Less When Implementing Process Improvements.

Even in a small company, silos emerge. A policy of more sharing will help everyone stay in touch with what others are doing, and create a collective expectation. Keeping everyone pointed in the same direction is hard; sharing more about what’s going on, how you’re doing things, reasoning behind decisions, etc. will help.

Lean Tip #648 - Identify Changing Requirements So You Don’t Lose Your Way.

Over time your needs will change. You need to stay aware of this, so you can change processes accordingly. Keep a list of your top requirements to help you make better decisions on tools to use.

Lean Tip #649 - Use Process Mapping to See the Entire Process.

Use a whiteboard or large post-it note pads so everyone can see and think about what starts the process. Then just keep asking the team, “and then what happens,” until you get to the end of the process. The biggest challenge here is making sure the team doesn’t go off on tangents. If you are leading, tell the team that you are not solving any problems to start. You must understand the process first before you look at ways to improve it. Process mapping allows you to do this by seeing the entire process visually.

Lean Tip #650 - Think Strategically On Your Process Improvements.

There is nothing worse than optimizing a process and then having the entire system be less than optimal. In order to understand the parts, you must understand the whole. Get your entire team involved, understand the business strategy and goals, and start thinking from a high level. After that you can drill down into the details.

Lean Tip #651 - Encourage Others: Give people something to prove.

People grow when they have to prove themselves to themselves. Provide people and teams with stretch assignments that hold them accountable to a higher standard of performance.

Lean Tip #652 – Encourage Others: Reward Courageous behavior.

It is not enough to reward successful outcomes. To signal to the workforce that behaving courageously is truly valued, you also need to reward courageous behavior, regardless of whether that behavior produced a successful outcome. When workers take calculated risks, or even make forward-falling mistakes, their behavior needs to be recognized and rewarded if you expect others to extend themselves too.

Lean Tip #653 - Be a fixer, not a victim.

When you see a problem that you think “someone” should address, ask yourself if you could be doing something about it. It’s easy to complain or point fingers – it takes courage to be a part of the solution.

Lean Tip #654 - Keep your focus on being effective.

Effectiveness is doing things in a streamlined manner.  It’s about getting things done and eliminating delay.  By keeping “effectiveness” as your standard, you’ll access your courage more often.

Lean Tip #655 - Do something, take action.

Give it your best shot to overcome your fear, no matter what it is. Trying builds your strength, or else, you become more fearful if you let your (irrational) thoughts overcome you. Preparation almost always does the trick if you're apprehensive. If you're armed with the right skills and information, it's easy to give that daunting job a go.

Lean Tip #656 – Problem Solving Tip: Identify and fix the right root causes.

Complicated problems have multiple root causes, probably more than you can fix in a reasonable amount of time. Don’t waste time or money on causes that are either insignificant in impact or only peripheral causes of the problem you’re trying to fix.

Lean Tip #657 – Problem Solving Tip: Choose solutions that are effective—and implement the solution completely.

Identifying the right root causes is necessary, but unless you then implement a solution, you still have a problem. Double-check to be sure your solution plan really will eliminate the causes you’ve identified, and then execute the plan. It’s easy to get distracted by other projects once you get to the implementation phase and never finish.

Lean Tip #658 – Problem Solving Tip: Reward prevention.

Although it’s generally understood that it costs more to deal with crises than to prevent them, many companies do not recognize and reward those who push past the symptoms to the root causes, preventing future occurrences. If you want to focus on prevention, be sure to reward those who do it successfully.

Lean Tip #659 – Problem Solving Tip: Everything necessary, nothing extraneous.

Make sure you solve the problem completely, but don’t get sidetracked into doing other things that won’t make this problem go away. Put those extras aside to evaluate later as special projects.

Lean Tip #660 – Problem Solving Tip: Everyone necessary, no one extraneous.

Make sure everybody who can contribute to the problem solving effort is appropriately involved. Only have the people on your team who will contribute actively to solving the problem. People who need to know what’s going on can be informed more efficiently in other ways.

You Don’t Need Quality Police, Focus on Quality Prevention

In some organizations, we might as well give the quality folks a uniform, a badge and a gun. They act like they are the Quality Police. Progressive companies realize you cannot inspect quality into a product.  By the time product is inspected, its level of quality has already been established. The primary means of ensuring a quality product is delivered is not by waiting until the product is assembled to test it. Great companies build quality in from the start and maintain that quality throughout the manufacturing process. To improve quality, you have to improve the process that produced it.

Generally the most effective way to achieve quality is to avoid having defects in the first place. It is much less costly to prevent a problem from ever happening than it is to find and correct the problem after it has occurred. Focusing on prevention activities whose purpose is to reduce the number of defects is better. Companies employ many techniques to prevent defects for example statistical process control, quality engineering, training, and a variety of tools from the Lean and Six Sigma tool kit.

Start with the idea of preventing defects, not waiting until they are identified and correcting them. Many companies have an active Zero Defects policy where defect prevention is paramount and quality inspection is almost just a verification of what they already know – that the product is defect free. If we can start with quality and maintain that quality throughout the process we will have a quality product.

Quality must go beyond our product specification or contracted service. We cannot add it at the end of the line or inspect it into the product. At best that is only a false sense of security. If we want a quality product it must be made with quality processes by quality minded people. A focus on quality must be intrinsic to the company culture and practices for the customer to take notice.

Quality is about prevention—you cannot "inspect" quality into a product. It has to happen before the inspection process.

Lean Quote: Courage is the Key to Great Leadership

On Fridays I will post a Lean related Quote. Throughout our lifetimes many people touch our lives and leave us with words of wisdom. These can both be a source of new learning and also a point to pause and reflect upon lessons we have learned. Within Lean active learning is an important aspect on this journey because without learning we can not improve.

"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts." — Winston Churchill

Leadership takes making bold and often unpopular decisions. Effective leadership requires courage - to stand up for what is right, for what we believe in, and to take the necessary risks to be innovative and creative.

The courage of a leader will inspire commitment from their followers. Billy Graham said, "Courage is contagious. When a brave man takes a stand, the spines of others are stiffened." When a leader demonstrates courage, it encourages others to want to follow. Seeing the courage of a leader will inspire courage in the followers. A courageous leader is inspirational!

An important lesson I have learned is that the entire workforce wins when everyone shows up to work each day with more courage.  With less fear and more courage, workers take on harder projects, deal better with change and speak up more willingly about important issues. In short, courageous workers try more, trust more and tell more. As a business leader and entrepreneur, your job is to put courage inside of people— to encourage them.

It takes courage to be a change agent, to rise up and lead the way when others are filled with fear. It takes courage to walk in a different direction when others walk along a contrasting path. Most important, it takes courage to drive persistence to overcome resistance…to find comfort outside your comfort zone when the promise of reward is ambiguous.

The courage of true leadership is revealed while still standing in the midst of controversy and challenging circumstances. It is relatively easy and requires little effort to stay in your comfort zone or to do what is convenient. Courage is not required to stay comfortable. Leaders need essential people skills to get people to work together smoothly even if some compromise may be needed. However, it also takes courage to make a stand on what you believe to be right.

 

When it Comes to Improvement Sweat the Small Stuff

You’ve probably heard both of these sayings before.

“Don’t sweat the small stuff.” and “The devil is in the details.”

That first statement would suggest that worrying about small things is a waste of time and resources, while the second statement suggests quite the opposite, telling us to pay very close attention to each detail.

Big breakthroughs at work are really rare. But small wins are something people can experience pretty regularly if the work is chunked down to manageable pieces. This suggests that you really have to sweat the small stuff.

When it comes to attaining success in Lean you have to, “sweat the small stuff;” more often than not the small stuff makes or breaks successful improvement. Even the small things make a huge difference to what your employees think and the way they act.

A key component of continuous improvement is to show progress. It’s not about miracles or heroic solutions or solving massive problems overnight. It’s about building momentum. It’s showing your employees that you’re headed in the right direction. It’s making visible changes, even slight ones, that show you’re doing something. You’re demonstrating that you support them. You’re giving them a reason to trust you. You’re building faith.

Many in today's workforce ignore the “small stuff,” claiming to have an eye on the bigger picture. People with a passion for improvement do sweat the small stuff. They know that it's the small stuff that can make a big difference––possibly the difference between success and failure. If you have any interest in lasting change than start sweating the small stuff because every little thing does count.

Rework Hampers Root Cause Analysis and Improvement

As a customer, you know how you feel when a supplier lets you down by giving you poor service or by failing to deliver the right quantity and quality product at the right time. When the shoe is on the other foot and you are the supplier we see it different.  These situations usually mean that your system has broken down and you need to initiate some form of corrective action, rework, to try to recover the situation.

Nearly every business has some level of ongoing rework. Most product-based businesses have some form of rework when they don’t satisfy the customer with their first effort. It may be that you can’t supply the complete order in one lot, or the quality of the product does not meet the customers’ needs. In service businesses, rework can occur when the customer is not happy with the service and some form of corrective work or follow up is required by the management team. 

Scrap and rework costs are a manufacturing reality impacting organizations across all industries and product lines. No matter why scrap and rework occurs, its impact on an organization is always the same—wasted time and money. Activities that reduce the quality or efficiency of a manufacturing operation or business process, but are not initially known to managers or others seeking to improve the process are referred to as “The Hidden Factory.” Most organizations have some form of a Hidden Factory.

Often, the corrective work occurs so frequently that the management team accepts rework as a normal part of business. This is a very dangerous interpretation of rework as it can hide many problems that should be made to stand out. A close examination of each and every cause for rework can provide improvement opportunities that can really lift business performance.

Instead of trying to fix the rework process (which is Muda), determine the root causes of needing rework/repair and fix those. If priority is given to evaluating and improving your manufacturing processes, it becomes much easier to reduce the amount of scrap and rework in your organization. Remember, Lean is about zero defects.

The first step to understand the size of your rework problem is to set up a monitoring system that will capture the data, including what happened and the reasons why. Building a system to record each individual rework event will establish baseline data that will enable you to assess future progress as your team works to eliminate rework.  This data is also valuable as you can use it to start to understand just how much money is being consumed by the rework process.  It is often surprising to realize the total cost of the hidden factory, but this can provide the strong motivation to attack the causes of rework.

To maintain a competitive edge, manufacturers must constantly find ways to cut costs and improve efficiency. One way companies can save time and money is by preventing scrap and rework. Correcting your systems by finding and eliminating the root causes of rework will result in a much smoother workflow where good days become normal.

Management by the Numbers Makes You Blind, Go Beyond the Numbers

Businesses love numbers and every good business manager loves metrics. After all, the old adage, “You can't manage what you don't measure” still holds true in most management circles.  However, a singular focus on metrics and worse, concentration on wrong metrics, keeps getting executives in trouble.

But here’s the key thing about numbers: they tell a story. They represent the culmination of the work you are doing. The story is a business need. And this is where managing the business and managing by numbers starts to get very important for those of us working in cubes.

People need to measure all types of work so as to be able to tell when things are working right and when things need to be corrected. We need to be able to measure our work for review and update as necessary. Meeting those numbers is critically important.

When managers use numbers to run the business, they are all involved in the story behind the numbers. They want to understand what the numbers are telling them about the state of the business. They want to know so they can change what is being done with the business to make it better.

But when a manager runs the business according to numbers, the world changes. No longer does the story matter. No longer does your input count as to what can make the business better. No longer, even, do logical and rational reasoning make a difference. No longer do innovative ideas on improving the business matter. No, what matters is the number. Not the story.

But there is measuring performance and then there is managing to a number to the exclusion of good business sense. There is a world of difference.

The effort to go “beyond the numbers” by using direct observation has the potential to help manage business efficiently and effectively. If we invest more in understanding people and less in understanding numbers, we’ll start to see the root causes behind performance problems.

Today’s lean management favor more holistic, less quantitative, and presumably more “dynamic” approaches. Know what to measure, and manage the numbers; don’t let the numbers do the managing for you, or of you. Organizations should be flexible, Lean, and focused on people and processes, not numbers.

Lean Quote: Small Improvements Are Believable And Therefore Achievable

On Fridays I will post a Lean related Quote. Throughout our lifetimes many people touch our lives and leave us with words of wisdom. These can both be a source of new learning and also a point to pause and reflect upon lessons we have learned. Within Lean active learning is an important aspect on this journey because without learning we can not improve.

"Small improvements are believable and therefore achievable." — Anthony Robbins

In the spirit of doing better, the smallest ideas are likely to be the easiest to adopt and implement. These improvements are sometimes called Point or Mini Kaizen. Making one small change is both rewarding to the person making the change and if communicated to others can lead to a widespread adoption of the improvement and the possibility that someone will improve on what has already been improved. There's no telling what might occur if this were the everyday habit of all team members.

One of the most counter intuitive facts about small ideas is that they can actually provide a business with more sustainable competitive advantages than big ideas. The bigger the ideas, the more likely competitors will copy or counter them. If new ideas affect the company's products or services, they're directly visible and often widely advertised. And even if they involve behind-the-scenes improvements--say, to a major system or process--they're often copied just as quickly. That's because big, internal initiatives typically require outside sources, such as suppliers, contractors, and consultants, who sell their products and services to other companies, too. Small ideas, on the other hand, are much less likely to migrate to competitors--and even if they do, they're often too specific to be useful. Because most small ideas remain proprietary, large numbers of them can accumulate into a big, competitive advantage that is sustainable. That edge often means the difference between success and failure.

In a Lean enterprise a strategy of making small, incremental improvements every day, rather than trying to find a monumental improvement once or twice a year equates to a colossal competitive advantage over time and competitors cannot copy these compounded small improvements.