How do I know a good Lean consultant/coach when I see one?

Someone asked this question in the who I am page so I thought I would post my whole answer here as it was an excellent question! So here it is:

That is an excellent question!! I might have to write a post about that (note I have written a post just pasted the comment, I like to think of that as lean ;)). Firstly, if they profess to know and have done everything then you should be suspicious. Lean is a learning experience and not hubris. This makes humility a key skill in any good lean practitioner, the ability to learn and not rigidly stick to one approach is key. Ask them how they got to where they are today, if everything is perfect and all projects delivered perfect incredible results be suspicious. Ask what their influences are? How do they connect to the lean community? If they do read their stuff, blog, tweets, book etc. I have tremendous respect for Mark Graban as he puts it all out there. Being a lean thinker is about putting yourself out there and accepting input from others. Finally as a coach or a consultant (in any form not just lean) they should spend more time listening to your problems and your needs than they do telling you what you should do. There is a never a one size fits all approach in lean and be wary of those trying to sell you that. Lean is about learning how to implement basic principles in diverse situations. 

What else would you add?

Delivering Kepner Tregoe’s new PSDM course

There are some challenges with delivering the revised 3 day PSDM material from how it was previously. As those who have attended or taught the course will know before the course was very heavy on using easels. Easels were used for everything; process demonstration, case studies, teaching aids, lists and so on. A lot of easels. This also meant, a lot of easel writing for the course leader. Either as pre-written easels (and the subsequent headache of flipping between them…) or writing them on the fly (messing handwriting anyone?). The revised material brings with it a reduction in this easel based headache. Firstly, several of the easels that were to be pre-written for training material now exist in the powerpoint presentations with animations. Examples of these are the IS/IS NOT venn diagram or the deviation/standard/changes diagram, and they are much better for it. Secondly and this is due to necessity of increased process steps and more rich (note I am not saying complex) case studies, it is not really possible to fit all of the discover case/process demo on easels. In my conversion we were recommended to still do these on easels to some degree. however, I practised this at home (yes I have 2 easels in my apartment) and I just could not make it flow. I therefore decided to develop the blind specification into a blank table in powerpoint as the course attendees fed me the information. This requires a little extended desktop setting changes in windows but worked very well for both myself and the attendees.

 

This is all well and good but this then also raises another serious issue to deal with when teaching the new material. How do the attendees document their team work on cases? We cannot comfortably fit these on easels anymore as already discussed. I experimented a little with this. First I tried giving them the new ledger sheets. This worked ok, however, they tended to work individually rather than together and couldn’t present from it to the rest of the groups. After this was not all that satisfactory I got the attendees to sign-up and download the worksheet or the app or preferably both! This proved very successful. Teams then set one person in charge of documenting into the worksheet or app and the rest focussed on the example. It also made presenting very easy indeed. One minor challenge was that not all the team members could see everything but this will be solved for future course by having break-out rooms with external monitors.

Data Related Rant

Hello there people! Sorry for being so quiet. Lots and lots of travelling has been done. I am a little more settled this month so expect some more wisdom (?) to be imparted through this blog over the next few weeks. I just wanted to have a quick rant…. and it is about data. Or rather the way people interpret changes in values over the short term…. (I think many of you see where this is going)

These days everyone likes to talk a lot about making decisions with data. Unfortunately everyone who says this rarely understands the data that they see in front of them. I haven’t got good graphics at the moment to demonstrate these points so bare with me. I will add some later.

Usually data graphs are generated in excel and will look like a month by month value plotted on an over-sized scale. What does this tell us? Well it can tell us over time what trend we are dealing with. If I plot turnover per month for a full year I can get an idea whether it looked reasonably stable or not (?) or at least see if it is trending upwards or downwards. Usually upwards is preferred in this case! But how do I know if it is stable or not? If those month by month variations are small compared to the absolute value, how do I interpret them? If I am not looking at a large data set or rather a value month by month or week by week how do I know what the trend is or will be? Unfortunately, these are questions that are rarely rarely asked, but they should be.

I would suggest that if you do not know at the top of your mind what the answer to the above questions is you check out what a control chart is. There are lots of great resources online and on amazon for these. Wheeler wrote what many consider to be the premier books on the subject. The principles are very simple and easy to follow and despite what many people tell you, you don’t need minitab to draw them. I prefer a pencil, ruler, calculator and graph paper myself! Check it out, see what you think and let me know if it helps!

The Kepner Tregoe world of things

I love love love Kepner Tregoe processes. IS/IS NOT, distinctions and changes, DA, PPA. They are really fun to teach and really easy to use as a facilitator. I also think that whilst the 3 day PSDM (problem solving and decision making course) is intense and from my own experience when I first attended difficult to absorb everything, it really delivers an insight into how to be a more effective individual.

I have struggles with KT to some degrees but never to the extent that I would not use them or recommend them to anyone. I get very annoyed with people who challenge their IP and undermine it.

I am therefore very pleased with the 2013 PSDM upgrade. For those that do not know KT their material was last updated some time in the 90’s. It needed a bit of an update. This led to people still enjoying the course but a lack of take up of the tools in work without a strong management push. This new upgrade addresses all of these issues. A quick summary from my view is:

• The training material itself links up much better between the instructor guides, presentation slides and the student handbook
• The training cases have been updated and made more complex which makes them more relevant and engaging. They also provide a great demonstration of the power of apply the KT processes
• The switch to video cases makes delivering the 3 day course much less of a physical effort for the trainer. I find this allows more energy for coaching during the case activities which is a big positive
• The excel worksheet has been revised and is excellent! Especially compared to how it was previousl
• The iOS application (iPad only, I think it is android as well) is great, I still need to play with this more though

So you can probably guess that I am very happy with all this. I think the changes above will result in a richer training experience, lower barriers to start using the process after the training and therefore justify how keeping training material centralised can result in a very high quality training experience and process interaction. Kepner Tregoe are pushing back the people who undermine their business by raising the bar significantly!

Good job Kepner Tregoe!

We focused on services as that is new

Sorry for not being around. I know I am writing this to very few people except myself so it doesn’t really matter. I was as usual intending to write a deep and meaningful post about the contrast between the lean start-up movement and lean in manufacturing. I haven’t had time to fully form those thoughts to sufficient quality (mostly due to being busy on six sigma projects for work). It is still going to happen though!

Something happened today which shocked me though and I wanted to share it. We are a generous bunch here in the company I work for and people get a lot of training and honestly there are very little expectations on the value returned to the company. A shocking example of this was a young guy we have who had the company pay for him to attend a masters course. As part of this masters he studied six sigma and therefore did a project. Bear in mind we are a manufacturing company…. his project was service based, in a hospital. His former manager approved this. I challenged this today in terms of the value this brought to us. His reply, “we focused on services as it is new and developing”. “It is also, more interesting.” <– WELL FUCK ME!!! You work for a manufacturing company kid. We produce stuff. Yes we are trying to grow our services and our existing service are sub-optimum but it is a long way away from being our core business. “Oh, by the way… I would like to attend this other training course next year.” <— NO.

Why am I sharing this, well, I think it is very important to invest in people. I do. However, that investment should always be to develop the person in line with the needs of the business. If it is not, there is no value for the company and therefore definitely no value for the customer. That means it is not lean.

We Labelled some stuff, that’s lean, right?

Erm… no. Wrong. Now before I go on to give a better outline. I must say to the person who said this to me. I like you and don’t be angry I quoted you albeit anonymously. 

I hear this a lot and I mean a lot. People mistake application of a lean tool here and there as “doing and “being” lean. I can say honestly it is better than doing nothing for sure but it is definitely not lean.

So what is lean? Well from my view which I expect is well aligned with those who are much more sage like than I is that lean is about constantly striving to be a more productive organisation. Respecting your firm’s resources in order to deliver the maximum amount of value to the customer. Then the following day, trying to deliver more!

I think it is important for people to remember this and prioritise understanding this concept before anything else. See my previous post on the topic. If we keep this in mind it helps to drive the correct behaviours from the top to the bottom of the organisation, every day. And that must be a good thing.

The frustrating part of working with this is the general lack of understanding or “buy-in” we can face. I recently was talking to a friend who was moaning about how his engineers do not have time to do all the work at his customer than he would like them to do. He was begging his customer to pay for a third full time onsite engineer. Obviously the customer refused as my friend could not show the benefit of the third person. His mind was in the state that the only solution to getting things better was to add resources. In order to try and get him to think differently I asked him, how was he respecting his two engineers who were currently onsite full time? His response was typical, that he paid them. We discussed this at length. After a resolution of views we then turned to more practical means. What do the two current guys do at the moment. What value are they adding to the customer. I suggested he breakdown the work they do into value and none value added time to the customer. We could then focus on the waste. I am waiting for the results and we will see how it goes!

I will continue the story above as it develops as I think it will be an interesting learning for my friend with some good reflections. 

 

To conclude this post, please take a more principled look at lean and not focus on the tools. They are the mean to the end which is not to be lean but to be always striving to be more lean than you were yesterday.

Promises promises

So I know I have been promising to have a post on here about lean versus lean start-up and it is in the works I promise. The thing is that the more I read about lean start-up and comparing it with lean the more I appreciate it as a model and I therefore want to do it as much justice as possible when I write about it. I think Eric Ries has produced a truly commendable piece of work and it is not often I say that about people in general. The wait will be worth it and to keep you all interested in the meantime I have saved up a few rants that I will write up this afternoon.

Cheers

Lean 

Where to start being lean. The real lean startup?

When taking an organisation that has absolutely no concept of what lean or even “best practice operations” is, where do you start? For the record I like to call these types of organisations “Germans”. I am joking of course (not much). The most challenging organisations I have worked have been German and Chinese. German organisations are fairly typical in my experience of being extremely ERP (read: SAP) orientated with very complex planning systems that never seem to reflect the reality of what is going on in production. They then spend all their time “managing” the difference and not really understanding what went wrong. Back to my original question, where do you start if this is the case for you? Or as a consultant you are called into start a “lean transformation” or something like that?

There are as many answers to this question as there are lean consultants in the world. Let us explore some of the more popular ones.

• Understand your value streams first. We can call this the Womack approach. From what I have read and have heard this is the LEI general way to go about creating a lean transformation. I have never been able to convince a company to take this approach of identifying value streams, asserting management of the value streams and then driving those horizontally across the organisation. It is too big a pill to swallow at the beginning. I cannot help but think that if you could, it would be the most successful way to start.
• Map your processes. Now, some might say this is the same as above. But it is not. Processes and value streams do not correlate well with one another. This could go back into the age old argument of what came first the process or the value stream but I need to finish that off with Melvin before writing about it. (Melvin is my fascinatingly geeky American friend). So map your processes, then start to understand where they are going wrong. Work to make them more reliable (less output variation = better quality), available (better PTU) etc. Sounds like it could be sensible approach doesn’t it. The issue here is that you are completely ignoring how productive you are and what value there is being produced. You will become obsessed with perfecting your processes very quickly without considering what is outside.
• Start small, show an example of good practice and then spread. I used to do this. This was my preferred method and I have had some success with it as well. For example, I had a supplier who was just in chaos. They worked hard but definitely not smart. The first thing that struck you when you visited was what a mess the place was. They said this was a consequence of their work. I disagreed. I showed them pictures and video of other production environments in far dirtier industries and then I went through the theory, application and positive results of implementing 5S. They seemed to be pretty convinced but wanted to pilot it first. So we took one small area of the factory where my parts were made and we implemented 5S in that area. We ensured that the senior management understood what good should look like and set up and auditing system for the MD daily. Everyday he went down and asked questions of what they were doing. Within a week the guys in the area next to it had got jealous of the attention and quality of the workspace that they started doing it themselves. Within 6 months the entire factory had gone through a 5S transformation and the SAP system could show the increase in productivity that had been achieved. Now this was not world class levels of 5S, it was more just cleaning stuff and applying labels but it showed how things can easily improve with the right attention. I am not advocating this method. Just putting it forward as an option. The downside of this is that it is rarely sustained well and only usually impacts small areas at a time leaving the big gains untouched.
• Educate all management levels on lean. This one I like. One of the barriers to lean implementation (I would rather call it a lean organisation), is that a lot of people do not believe in it. Once they really see it working in a good way they usually get it but then they can find it hard to apply the principles to their own area. A recommended way to start then is by educating all management levels, together, about lean. Why is lean used, why it is beneficial and how to understand what value streams etc are. You then look to the organisation itself to take the principles and apply them directly led internally. I can only think that this is probably the most painful way to start the lean journey but as long as management remain committed the business case will come as the improvements develop. I have not seen this approach ever proposed or used however. Why? I don’t know honestly.

So that is just some thoughts from me on how to start a lean journey. Please note the journey never ends so you need to be very committed. I look forward to your comments!

Pointing to cause

I see it all the time. People generally have no clue how to do a real root cause analysis. This results in many different issues. For example, your root cause is that if you had the solution you had in mind in place, the problem would never have occurred. Therefore the only possible solution is to implement that solution. Sounds ridiculous doesn’t it, but how often do you see this? I see it all the time.

Luckily for all you lovely people there are ways to avoid this. Firstly when doing a root cause analysis do not just ask “why?”. What? I hear you cry! That is what the whole tool is about. But is it? 5 whys is about identifying and mapping cause and effect relationships for a given situation. Therefore the question I like to ask is, “what could cause….?” This helps because it retains us in the cause mindset and helps avoid the solution mindset. Solutions will have their time once we understand the problem’s causes to the real root level.

Secondly try asking therefore going back up the chain from the root cause to the problem statement. Remember you are telling a story of consequences leading up to the problem. If something doesn’t make sense when you do this, review it and alter things. Most likely you will have taken a big jump and need to add some more steps in. This is very common.

My final tip for today is do not ignore the physics of the situation. I will give you a real example. A problem I was helping a colleague with. He had a metal pin, in a hole in a plastic part. The pin was getting small and the hole was getting larger. What is the cause? Well, it wasn’t what my colleague thought it was for sure. He theorized that the plastic was swelling causing excessive friction between the plastic and the pin. Not too much application there really. He ignored that there must be physical movement between the two parts to cause the wear.

I did have another tip for you which I had written but it seems the WordPress app on my ipad thought it was a bad tip and lost it. If I remember what it is I will write it in.

Cheers!

SIPOC is not a friend of the Dalek

Makes sense doesn’t it, why would it be a friend to the evil alien creatures? I love SIPOC, I think it is the best starting point when trying to define a process that is not functioning correctly. I see a lot of people who are afraid of it though, as if it is…. you got it 😉 I thought I would therefore write you some tips on how to do a SIPOC well and to help you feel at ease with using the tool.

1. There are no good SIPOC templates out there. I have never seen one. Don’t even waste time looking. My advice, is to draw it on a whiteboard. Supplier, Input, Input Requirement, Process, Output, Output Requirement, Customer. Remember to add a name and purpose for your SIPOC at the very top
2. Ensure to start with the beginning and the end of the process. It is important to establish these limits before filling in anything else. If you miss this you could have a lot of re-work to do later
3. Don’t mistake a SIPOC for a detailed process mapping. The steps in between the beginning and end should be big steps which will require (if necessary) more detailed mapping later. This is a good thing! Do not mix your SIPOC with your process map.
4. Do map the suppliers, inputs and outputs for each of the big process steps you have identified. It will help you later!
5. Do not forget your customers and to split them between your primary and secondary customers. Your primary customer is the receiver of the value of the process. Your secondary customers are other stakeholders in the performance of the process
6. Include where known the input and output requirements. What are these? They are “features” that are looked for in the input or output. For example and output of a purchasing process step could be an order confirmation the requirement on that could be “sent to customer within 24 hours of receiving the order”
7. Do not fall into the trap of mapping should be or desired state, to start with focus only on AS IS. You can convert this later to reflect future state but unless you map as is you cannot identify the big gaps that exist and there will most likely be some!
8. Later ensure that your outputs and output requirements are aligned with your CTQ’s (critical to quality attributes) that are aligned to your VOC (voice of the customer). So what your process kicks out is aligned with the value the customer wants not what you as a business want to deliver. Note this is only done later when try to define the new way of working

You get 8 tips as that is all I can think of right now, any more ideas?

Oh one more, try to avoid skipping the layout of each supplier and inputs for each process step. If we do it is just work later and it ruins the advantage of visualising the gaps in the current way of working from a high level.

Cheers

Lean