March LMJ Mark Stewart

Starting Out

In this issue:

Starting out, starting over, just carrying on– how different are they?

How Accolade Wines bottle up their lean initiatives.

The Lean start-up- how and why?

How to start as you mean to go on, lean.

Company culture in lean start-ups

The role that culture plays in lean beginnings.

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Organisations and interviews in this issue include:University of Sheffield, Cardiff Business School, Online Business School, Accolade Wines

How to begin a lean transformation and how to go lean from the get go.

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Starting out, starting over, just carrying on– how different are they?Gil Woodward, global lean manager at Accolade Wines, tells us how his organisation deals with lean.

The Lean Start-up: why and how? Jerry S. Sikula talks about lean champions and their role in the lean start-ups.

Solving daily problems is everyone’s responsibilityOwner of ProSolve Solutions, Mark Stewart, examines the role of problem solving in a lean organisation.

Company culture in lean start-upsMarcos Panaggio writes about the culture needed to start lean.

Lean university- the early yearsSarah Lethbridge discusses the ways Cardiff Business School managed to lean down.

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Lean startup at The University of SheffieldWe have an indepth look at the savings that the University of Sheffield made after setting up a lean programme.

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Selling horses and seeing systems on a road less travelledBill Bellows is back and discussing how black and white is not always the right way to look at things.

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It’s the start that stops us: five factorsGwendolyn Galsworth discusses the problems of starting and how to overcome the most common pitfalls.

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Solving daily problems is everyone’s responsibility

If we take an organisation as a whole (all employees) most are not LSS belts and this means that even after many years of investment in

Lean Six Sigma deployment Over the last two decades lean six sigma (LSS) has been adapted from manufacturing to service processes and has become the dominant operational improvement mechanism in business and government. In fact, recent studies indicate that more than 70% of the top 2000 global organisations say they use lean six sigma in some way, shape or form.

There can be many problems with deployment, ranging from leadership support, relevancy to the business (maybe due to strongly competing priorities) and effective change management.

Mark Stewart

A significant cost of deployment is regarding the training investment for the LSS belts. The issues below are typical of why the return on investment is not realised:

• Significant numbers of green/black belts not achieving certification

• Significant numbers of green/black belts not completing more projects after certification – and hence becoming mature belts.

• Yellow Belt is ~40 hours of training with little practical application – so much of it is forgotten. Similar for White Belts.

Owner of ProSolver Solutions Ltd

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application themselves as well as understanding the bigger picture.

“Where there is no standard, there can be no kaizen.” – Taiichi Ohno.

This quote is used frequently to emphasise the importance of standardised work such as systems and work processes – but it is also important to have a standardised problem solving process across the organisation.

Deploying a very simple version of DMAIC provides a very light but effective method to leverage the strengths of LSS to all employees. It should be:

• Easy to train via a train the trainer approach so all levels across the organisation are trained

• Supported by a people

change model to ensure that the skills learnt become habit

For those that already have green/black belts it is totally complimentary and will add further value and impetus to those programmes. For any size organisation, which wants to embark on LSS deployment, this is an innovative way to engage employees faster and more cost effectively – more like a ‘bottom up’ approach that can expand into green/black belt training if required.

Future green belt candidates can be selected more effectively by choosing employees who show a real aptitude – this also gives a message that employees who show an aptitude can be rewarded with green belt training and are more likely to achieve certification and use lean six sigma going forward towards possible black belt.

are generally below the desired standard.

• Significant time discussing problems without using data, a formal structure and without resolution

These are all examples of the chronic condition of chasing the symptom and not executing a formal problem solving process to understand those symptoms, uncover the root cause and repair it. Only solving the symptom costs the organisation significant time / money.

But there is a way to change the mindset, to leave behind the symptoms and identify and attack the true root causes so that problems are solved robustly, workarounds are avoided and processes are fixed.

Training all members of these organisations in the common techniques used in problem solving can reverse those losses and start to change the organisation’s culture. Success cannot be sustained without developing an army of problem solvers throughout the organisation. Limiting problem solving to a select few experts, as is often the case with initiatives like LSS, prevents creating a culture where everybody improves the work they do every day.

An organisation-wide initiative engaging all employees in a standard problem solving process based upon a very simple version of LSS DMAIC is an innovative way of approaching this. It allows for all employees to be able to embrace the basic

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LSS programs the vast majority of employees have not been involved in any practical application, and therefore have little understanding of what LSS is. After all the investment, effort and time spent on deployment this a real shortfall – especially in the quest for organisational culture change to drive continuous improvement.

Surely in today’s market of complex and relentless business challenges everyone in an organisation needs to take on the responsibility of solving workplace problems and this requires a formal structured approach. If you were to ask 20 random people within your organisation to spend ten minutes and write down what is their approach to solve simple daily business problems, what would the summary show? Without a structured approach employees will waste precious time focusing on symptoms and therefore implement inappropriate solutions. When you solve for a symptom you don’t solve the problem – the problem persists affecting productivity both internally and externally.Regardless of the experience level of the employee most professionals feel compelled to jump to the answer and not apply the upfront critical thinking in order to identify the true problem at hand.

Quite often, organisations experience the following:

• Problems that they just can’t solve; workarounds are the norm.

• Solving the same problem

over and over again.

• Significant or repetitive complaints from customers (external/internal).

• Areas of performance that

An alternative or complimentary lean six sigma deployment approach

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Another benefit of deploying a simple DMAIC based problem solving process is that all management are more fully involved and introduced in a practical way to LSS so when they have to sponsor projects and work with their teams they feel confident to both use it, support it and experience the benefits.

In the 1980’s and 1990’s, many companies introduced total quality management (TQM) which introduced the culture, attitude and organisation of a company that strives to provide customers with products and services that satisfy their needs. One of the areas of TQM was in employee teamwork – quality circles, a participatory management technique that enlists the help of employees in solving problems related to their own jobs. Circles are formed of employees working together in an operation who meet at intervals to discuss problems of quality and to devise solutions for improvements. A simple DMAIC based approach focused on problem solving, giving a methodology and a common language can be an enabler to employees (and management) engaging in continuous improvement teamwork.

A large-scale employee-training program would have little payback if it were not supported by a strong change management strategy to drive regular use. Here the powerful and portable change management model recommended is Influencer™ (New York Times Best Seller) by VitalSmarts. This proven, yet simple model can help ensure the

behaviour change of employees across the organisation to achieve that vision of all employees using simple DMAIC for problem solving.

It focuses on a few high-level ‘vital behaviours’ that are driven by strategies from six-sources of influence. Understanding these vital behaviours and also the ‘crucial moments’ when they must demonstrate the use of that vital behavior is key – and as these vital

“Training all members of these organisations in the common techniques used in problem solving can reverse those losses and start to

change the organisation’s culture.”

behaviours become habit we get the change we need. So the way forward is not just the training but also the change management to go with it and truly make it part of the organisation’s culture.

Once a culture of problem solving ability is established across the organisation, all employees can:

• Think about daily challenges in a structured way

• Define problems properly, measure current state, identify root causes and implement robust solutions

• Make alerts and recommendations to their 1st line manager

• 1st line managers can help, understand and prioritise issues

• Demonstrate to the customers that they can fix any issues

• Be more productive both individually and as teams.

Driving habitual use - a culture change model