Lean
Tip #1726 – Management is Responsible for Removing Barriers
Sometimes
employees encounter barriers when implementing changes.
Barriers
can be with other employees, other departments, inadequate training, lacking
equipment or supply needs.
Sometimes
management also needs to deal with resistant or difficult employees.
It
is management’s responsibility to ensure that employees can implement change
without obstacles and resistance.
It
is unfortunate but there are times when employees simply can’t accept a change.
In these rare cases employees simply need to move on in order to successfully
implement a needed change. These are difficult but necessary decisions.
Lean
Tip #1727 - Acknowledge and Celebrate Progress Along the Way.
Reinforcement
is key to building and maintaining momentum. The relapse syndrome is powerful.
Psychologists tell us the time takes to develop a new habit depends on how
engrained the old one is. Thus, it is almost always easier to move back into
our comfort zones than move forward into the unknown unless we are highly
motivated to do whatever it takes to overcome that resistance.
Reinforcement
and celebration are powerful motivators that can drive momentum. By staying
focused on reaching the goal with everyone on board, helps people overcome
resistance. Help people learn from mistakes and breakdowns, but stay focused on
recognizing achievements.
Lean
Tip #1728 - Focus on Building Trust.
There
have been many statements about how you have to repeat something over and over
in order for it to stick. There’s something that comes before repetition. If
you do not have trust, it doesn’t matter how often you repeat something. When
you are leading change, focus on building trust it’s the most essential element
of leading successful change.
Lean
Tip #1729 - Build Relationships Between Your Employees.
As
your team starts to cooperate more, examine the way they work together and take
steps to improve communication, cooperation and trust amongst the team. If
there are any conflicts, try to resolve them amicably. Listen to both sides of
the argument and act as a mediator. One way to do this is to brainstorm
solutions, which helps to empower your employees and may lead to new solutions
to the problem.
Lean
Tip #1730 - Foster Teamwork.
Once
you have established relations with and between your employees, it’s time to
help them work together effectively. Encourage your team to share information,
both amongst themselves and within the wider organization. Also, try to
communicate more with your team. This goes beyond simply holding meetings, and
includes things like being open to suggestions and concerns, asking about each
team member’s work and offering assistance where necessary, and doing
everything you can to communicate clearly and honestly with your team.
Lean
Tip #1731 – Make the Goals Measurable
Knowing
the business goals of your product is a prerequisite for selecting the right
KPIs. But it is not enough. To effectively apply the indicators, analyze the
resulting data, and take the right actions, the goals must be measurable. The
challenge is to establish measurable goals that are also realistic, particularly
for brand-new and young products. The next tips helps you address this
challenge.
Lean
Tip #1732 – Avoid Vanity Metrics
Stay
clear of vanity metrics, measures that make your product look good but don’t
add value. Take the number of downloads for an app as an example. While a fair
amount of people might download the product, this tells you little about how
successful it is. Instead of measuring downloads, you should choose a relevant
and helpful metric, such as daily active usage or referral rate.
Lean
Tip #1733 – Don’t Measure everything that can be Measured
Don’t
measure everything that can be measured and don’t blindly trust an analytics
tool to collect the right data. Instead, use the business goals to choose a
small amount of metrics that truly help you understand how your product
performs. Otherwise you take the risk of wasting time and effort analyzing data
that creates little or no insights. In the worst case, you action irrelevant
data and make the wrong decisions.
Lean
Tip #1734 – Employ Lagging and Leading Indicators
Lagging
indicators, such as revenue, profit, and cost, are backward-focused and tell
you about the outcome of past actions. Leading indicators help you understand
how likely it is that your product will meet a goal in the future. Take product
quality as an example. If the code is becoming increasingly complex, then
adding new features will become more expensive and require more time. Meeting
profit targets and delivery dates will therefore become harder. Using backward
and forward-focused indicators allows you to tell you if you have met the
business goals and helps you anticipate if the product is likely to meet the
goals in the future.
Lean
Tip #1735 – Look beyond Financial and Customer Indicators
Financial
indicators, such as revenue and profit, and customer metrics, including
engagement and referral rate, are the two most common indicator types in my
experience. While these metrics are undoubtedly important, they are not
sufficient. Say your product is meeting its revenue and profit goals and that
customer engagement and referral rate are high. This suggests that your product
is doing well and that there is no reason to worry. But if at the same time,
the team motivation is low or if the code quality is deteriorating, then you
should be concerned: These indicators suggest that achieving product success
will be much harder in the future. You should therefore look beyond financial
and customer indicators and complement them with the relevant product, process,
and people indicators.
Lean
Tip #1736 – 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 #1737 – Hold a Daily, 10-minute Company Meeting
While
meetings are generally considered a necessity, they can carry on to the point
where they eat away at the work day. Rather shorter, more efficient meetings
that cover the basics in 10 minutes flat are preferred.
Daily
huddles serve as a firehose of information that keeps everyone in the loop,
including a roundup of our key performance indicators, the celebration of
accomplishments, and the identification of opportunities to improve.
Not
only is it a good way to keep all employees up to speed on any new developments
within the company, keeping meetings short and sweet forces a streamlined
meeting process, and reduces time wasted.
Lean
Tip #1738 – Figure Out How the Work Gets Done.
We
have lots of assumptions about how work gets done that don’t mirror exactly
what happens. After all, during the day-to-day grind, we don’t think about how
we do the work, we often just do it. Ask an outside observer to record the
steps of the process in a way that he/she could repeat it themselves if they
had to, without assistance.
Lean
Tip #1739 – Remove Inefficiencies and Waste.
Once
you know what the workflow of your process looks like, take a second look at
any step in the process that doesn’t directly create value for the customer.
Manage, improve, and smooth your process flow to eliminate non-valued-added
activity (e.g., wasted time, wasted movement, wasted inventory due to
overproduction, customer delays, waiting for approvals, delays due to batching
of work, unnecessary steps, duplication of effort, and errors and rework).
Lean
Tip #1740 – Make the Smallest Effective Change
You
want to make a change that will solve the problem, but try to make business
process changes as minimal as possible. The more changes you make, the more
time you will lose in retraining and transitioning from the old process to the
new process.
The
more changes you introduce, the greater the uncertainty about the effect of
those changes. Making precise, targeted changes to your process reduces the
risk that unintended consequences can make you worse off than you were before.
