You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. · 2018-12-18 · You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.Page 6 of 16 ACE (2011-2012) Achieving Client

MBB Essay

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.

23-8-2016

Author

Marko Steenbergen

KVK 34272285 Banknr. 131886703 BTW NL8179.14.146.B01

ProjectsOne de Corridor 12 L 3621 ZB Breukelen

www.projectsone.nl [email protected] T +31 (0)23 - 707 81 15

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.Page 2 of 16

Contents

Document control .............................................................................................................................................................................. 3

Version control ................................................................................................................................................................................ 3

Reviews ............................................................................................................................................................................................... 3

Master Black Belt Essay ................................................................................................................................................................... 4

About the Master Black Belt .................................................................................................................................................... 4

The essay ............................................................................................................................................................................................ 4

Introduction ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 5

ACE (2011-2012) ............................................................................................................................................................................. 6

Triple ACE (2012)............................................................................................................................................................................ 7

Leadership profile (2012) ........................................................................................................................................................... 8

Golden gate (2013-2014) ........................................................................................................................................................... 9

Incident reduction (2015-2016) .............................................................................................................................................. 9

Where I am now ........................................................................................................................................................................... 11

Addendum ........................................................................................................................................................................................... 12

1. Proposal to embed the lean culture ...................................................................................................................... 12

2. Leadership profile ............................................................................................................................................................ 13

3. Golden gate improvements ....................................................................................................................................... 15

4. The onion for incident reduction ............................................................................................................................ 16


Document control

Version control

Version Status Changes Auteur Datum

1.0 Final - Marko Steenbergen August 2016

1.1 Final Company publication rules Marko Steenbergen August 2016

Reviews

Name Organization Function

Sven den Boer ProjectsOne B.V. General manager

Frank van der Meulen TU Delft Ass. Professor

Ilse Schram ProjectsOne B.V. Trainer

Mascha Schutz Commas Trainer (and my wife)


Master Black Belt Essay

About the Master Black Belt

Marko Steenbergen is a master black belt.

Next to coaching and training people doing greenbelt projects he works in business improvement

projects in a team of process managers. The last year was dedicated to reducing incidents as that is

one of the strategic goals of the company he works for (0 high impact incidents in 2018).

After studying physics at Utrecht university Marko worked for Logica and Achmea in different roles,

mostly managerial or consulting in nature (projects, line management, functional/product/demand

management). In 2011 Marko became a Lean navigator and certified for his black belt in 2013.

You can contact Marko via [email protected].

The essay

A Master Black Belt essay is a reflective text or article for publication in which the author gives his

personal vision of contemporary phenomena , problems or developments in the field of Six Sigma &

Lean in a scientifically sound manner. The essay is written as the last part of the certification as a

master black belt.


Introduction

Improving something always involves learning. As learning and helping others is at the core of my

passion I love doing improvement work! This is an essay of my lessons and experiences of the last 5

years. Although this makes most sense to me, I believe these lessons are valuable for anyone

attempting to improve anything.

One of the first lessons I learned in my career is that success can only be reached with a right

mixture of quality and support. At that time I probably wouldn’t have believed that 18 years later

the topic of support and getting commitment is still a topic that can provide lessons. One of the

secrets is that it’s not about my quality but about the will and discipline for quality in the group.

This essay contains 7 parts: an introduction, 5 projects and a conclusion. I participated in each

project and share some of my experiences. All projects contains the context, some examples and my

main lessons in italic.

When you read about the improvements I use we to refer to the team doing the improvements.

When you read about my lessons I use I as I learned the lessons and explain them. However, these

lessons came in existence through the support and coaching of many individuals. To name them all

would be too big a list so I refer to the group names, you know who you are. The ACE team, the HR

colleagues, the CPM colleagues, all colleagues that I worked with, the people at ProjectsOne, the

people at House of Performance. And of course my wife Mascha who dealt with my lessons outside

working hours.


ACE (2011-2012)

Achieving Client orientation and Effectiveness (ACE) was the name of the program. Coached and led

by the McKinsey company we learned to do a ‘wave’ in a team. This entailed a standard 12 week

approach doing workshops and analysis in 5 lenses:

1. Voice of the Customer;

2. Process efficiency;

3. Performance management;

4. Organization & Skills;

5. Mindset & behavior.

The role of the consultant (us) was to lead each team through the wave, doing workshops and

analysis. Halfway during the wave we planned the commitment meeting in which the team

committed to realize certain improvements to senior management. Goal of the program was a 20%

efficiency improvement for each team.

A first learning milestone for me was after I won an argument from a manager and received

compliments for that afterward. It didn’t feel right; I won the argument and lost the relationship! In

order to be successful the team and I should take the time to build a strong relationship. How else

can I support the team with anything?

Another observation we had with every team in the wave was too much ambition. No team was able

to realize all the improvements in the 12 weeks that were allotted for them. We called it the ‘after

ACE dip’, the navigators moved to the next team and the previous team started to breathe again

(go back to business as usual). What was hurtful was the fact that FTE reductions often were

realized, however, not through the envisioned lean improvements but (partly) through old fashioned

cost cutting as the improvements weren’t realized yet.

One team however touched and inspired me through their actions, they started improving after the

wave and doggedly implemented all of the proposed improvements. They truly felt a motivation

that they could and should do better and embraced that. As a result they over performed on the

efficiency target, their (internal) customers were more satisfied and the team was proud of their

work. They made it clear however that it was them reaching the goals for their own sake, not the

ACE program!

Much can be said about this program, I like the lesson a colleague of mine shared: “If you want to

lose weight, don’t ask your personal trainer to do it for you.”.

In hindsight: People act on the urgency and importance they perceive from management. This

program could have benefitted by focusing more on the improvements instead of only the FTE

reductions.

Looking back after 5 years I can see both the company and I learned a lot, I see many elements we

used in the program that now have become common ground. Elements like a regular short team

alignment standing up, visual management across the company, many teams have useful KPIs to


measure their performance, doing shared root cause analysis of problems, awareness of wasteful

activities. And many other ‘little things’ that maybe are not so little as we now believe them to be.

Have you ever wondered how much effort it took before you could walk? Be happy with small steps,

go slow to go fast.

My lesson for any wave approach is the importance of motivation, without motivation analysis and

actions will be done half-hearted or not at all. This could be countered by:

• Only start a wave if the team (manager) is committed to the result;

• Provide the target to the team, not to the consultants;

• Work only with stable teams, otherwise they can’t focus on the right things;

• Give the team the freedom to reach the target their own way, even if that means they don’t

use a consultant for support.

Triple ACE (2012)

Many of the teams in the company have done the ‘ACE wave’, seeing that teams accepted many

changes and went back to business as usual the ACE team figured it was time for a step in

sustainability. We needed to embed the continuous improvement culture into our culture.

In order to reach this we partnered with an external company for a plan of action (Addendum 1).

Two steps were identified: improve methodology and apply it in a pilot. The improved methodology

consisted of clear goal setting and alignment between three parties (hence triple ACE).

Creating the plan and pre-aligning with the stakeholders was fun to do and created a lot of positive

energy! However, when the decision was requested the answer was ‘yes and no’, the company had

other urgencies to deal with at that moment. In the end it was decided that only the ‘ACE part’ was

to be executed. The ACE team received euro goals, not weird considering we reported to the CFO.

Board of Directors

•Goalsetting

•Steering

Human Resources

•Culture

•Soft skills trainings

ACE team

•Project execution

•Hard skill trainings


Actually this was a signal. We could have understood that the company didn’t want to change the

culture this much at that moment in time. Did we set our goals too high? How big is the need for

change?

It should be mentioned that HR did provide many soft skills training and facilitated inter vision

sessions between managers. These are part of the successes of lean management!

My lesson is that improving alignment between three parties cannot come from one party alone.

Improving co-operation and alignment can only be reached through co-operation and alignment.

Leadership profile (2012) We got a similar lesson the same year, inspired by our experiences and leadership literature the ACE

team wrote a new leadership profile (Addendum 2). The profile was meant as a behavior guideline

for managers and a way to coach management performance. The board of directors accepted the

profile and HR was asked to implement it. After sharing the profile with management questions

were asked:

• How do we measure it?

• How does it affect my bonus?

• How should we align our management development program?

• What are the consequences if I can’t do these things?

And answers were given, however, no significant influence was felt, the profile wasn’t lived the way

we envisioned it...

Feedback we received was that the leadership profile wasn’t concrete enough and that it wasn’t

incorporated properly into current management performance processes.

My view is that we believed in the vision the profile created but couldn’t act on the necessary

changes. The change was too big for a single bite.

In the greenbelt training we teach that we can only eat an elephant by slicing it, yet we didn’t

practice our own teachings. On the other hand, if you want something bad enough, you’ll make sure

to get it. 3 years later a new management approach was embraced and the profile silently went

away.

My lesson is that we should have aligned with the main stakeholders upfront and seek a way to

create the profile together. Although we received positive feedback on the profile, no need was

perceived upfront.


Golden gate (2013-2014)

Improving throughput time of software changes was the next project, a large chain of work from

idea to implementation that touches multiple groups of people. We engaged in many workshops

and encountered many enthusiastic people. This was a project that people really wanted to succeed!

At first we received many different causes for delays, logically many people had their own

perspective on issues. Also the teams worked on their own improvements that we needed to take

into account.

Working through the issues we began to see a pattern of alignment. Better aligned processes

yielded less delays then less aligned processes (31% delays in projects vs 6% delays in releases).

With a core project team with representatives from all teams we devised a set of rules and started

the implementation. Our improvement consisted of 7 guidelines and a visual alignment in the chain

(Addendum 3). We were aware that the improvement needed to grow on people so management

and project team needed to provide enough focus on the alignment.

What could go wrong? Enthusiasm at the shop floor and agreement on the improvement on senior

management level. There was only one thing; management didn’t want to measure less delays, they

wanted real financial results. So we ‘invented’ a metric that could yield real money (less governance

and exceptions).

We measured the benefits between January and July 2014, after a half year the calculated euro

benefit was more than 8 times the forecasted benefit. In July a companywide reorganization was

started (unrelated to the project) that created a lot of turmoil as many teams changed. As a result

focus was lost and agreements weren’t kept anymore and no one succeeded to bring the

improvement back on track.

What’s the lesson here? The improvement could only work if people from different teams stick to

agreements. As the goal wasn’t a goal of the teams but from senior management (and they were

busy with other topics) cohesion was lost and couldn’t be picked up again. An improvement will

only last if people feel the improvement for themselves.

Incident reduction (2015-2016)

Our company is a financial processing company, ideally most of the processes are automated in

such a way that no manual labor is necessary to create the value for the customer. The trick is to

keep these processes running without any incident. Especially with the market pressure for new

functionality (SEPA, mobile, peer to peer, etc.). This results in many changes that provide a risk to

stability. So this was the topic of my next project “improve stability for customers”.

In many ways it was a project any black belt would dream of. A clear strategic goal, a sponsor in the

middle of the influencing area (manager operations) that himself is a General Electric black belt. A

management team that felt the importance of the topic and employees willing to support the

initiative. As we came out of a reorganization, a leaving manager said that any improvement would

be in the area of mindset and behavior.


We approached the project like an onion, to be peeled one layer at a time. Every layer had its own

dynamics, stakeholders and people that worked on the improvements (Addendum 4).

Some of the improvements showed similar results in behavior, meaning a big group embracing the

improvements and a smaller group (20-40% of the population) that was lagging behind. At first we

thought this to be regular improvement behavior as any person needs her/his own time to make the

change. We believed this would be remedied in a couple of months. However, more was behind this

behavior. Diving deeper we realized that sub-groups invented their own standards, especially when

standards weren’t clear upfront. These standards for sub-groups were well justified and needed

improvement work on their own to fix it. The onion was bigger than we thought! We knew that

without a standard you can’t improve. So either the standards or way of working needed to change.

Because sub-groups used own standards I needed to align improvements with many more people

than expected at first (not everyone felt aligned). After a year of projects and improvements a

weariness could be felt on the shop floor, people felt the improvements but wanted to go back to

usual. Furthermore a fusion with another company was eating the rest of the energy available for

improvement work. An improvement project needs to be short and aligned with all stakeholders to

maintain positive energy. Abstractions that are sometimes inevitable when looking at a process from

far away can suck the life out of a project. This is why it’s important to spend time were the work is

actually done!

My lesson is to ask management to execute the agreed changes/decisions in the organization. Sub-

optimizations could then be seen earlier and dealt with. Without that a consultant can only convince

so many people to adhere to a decision.

Another lesson is to share and celebrate intermediate results more deliberate as this can provide the

motivation to continue improvements.


Where I am now

They say a black belt is darker than a green belt because they’ve fallen more to the ground. An

improvement project to me is synonym to learning, and I sure learned a lot in 5 years:

• If you want to lose weight, don’t ask your personal trainer to do it for you.

• Go slow to go fast.

• Without a standard you can’t improve.

• Take the time to build a strong relationship with the team and the sponsor.

• We can only eat an elephant by slicing it and short projects maintain positive energy.

• Improving co-operation and alignment can only be done through co-operation and

alignment.

• An improvement will only last if people feel the improvement for themselves.

The road of improving is always under construction. If you want to learn a lot I certainly can

recommend this road. However, you don’t go down that road alone, it’s a journey that needs the

will and discipline of a group of people to follow through. If at any point the will to improve is

lacking (can be felt in urgency, other priorities, enthusiasm) stop the improvement or otherwise we

are producing waste!

My biggest lesson is this: Don’t take the horse to water unless it tells you it’s thirsty.


Addendum

1. Proposal to embed the lean culture

(copied from the proposal of House of Performance)

Challenge

The BoD believes in the potential of ACE to achieve major results for ****** and has

taken the initiative to create sustainable change. The ACE team assessed that Lean has

reached the ‘local and technical’ phase of maturity in 2012 in The Netherlands and

Germany. To reach the next level and to truly embed a culture of continuous

improvement, a transformation of behavior and leadership within ****** is needed. The

navigators feel responsible for this transformation. Hence the ACE team wants to address

behavior and leadership as an integral part of ACE in combination with tangible results.

Our approach

House of Performance always implements the skills and enhancements by methodology

development in practice. House of Performance suggests starting growth in:

• leadership by reflecting and coaching management during a period of 6-8 weeks. The

reflection and coaching will be carried out along a given case process; using an existing

process (functional or service orientated) to reflect on current behaviors;

• the approach of ACE by reflecting on the program and the navigator team;

• the impact of HR by setting a strategy towards becoming business partners.


2. Leadership profile



3. Golden gate improvements

Guidelines:

1. A rolling forecast of ranked and validated changes.

2. We validate every change on agreed aspects.

3. All change related activities need to be planned.

4. All teams in the chain commit their capacity to the mutual agreed release plan.

5. We visualize our committed plan on a planning board (a Kanban board).

6. It’s ok to make mistakes, it’s not ok to make them twice.

7. Clear and agreed accountability across the chain.


4. The onion for incident reduction

A tree with specific improvements to parts of the process, as stated this is not the complete onion

yet.

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. · 2018-12-18 · You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.Page 6 of 16 ACE (2011-2012) Achieving Client

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