How do you Define Quality Success?

This month in Paul Borawski’s post on ASQ with the back drop of the annual salary survey he asks what’s your case for a raise.

If you accept the premise that you get paid what you’re worth (and it’s not always true) I wonder what you’d tell your boss you did in the last year to increase your value to the organization. Tell me about results. Customers more satisfied, revenue enhanced, money saved, waste reduced, lives saved, or risks managed. What’s your case for a raise?

How do you define quality success? Not knowing how you define success can make the process of becoming successful even more challenging. It’s like fumbling around in the dark to find something when the light switch is right next to you, if only you would stop grasping in the dark and focus on the light switch.

Success is different for everyone and every business. Too often we look at others to measure how successful we are. You may look at a certain person or company and think wow they really got it together. What you may not know is that person or organization probably isn't satisfied themselves. Ask yourself what your standard of success is, but remember you are your own worst critic so go easy. Lean/Quality improvement is a journey not a destination!

Success is the fruit of: 1) Good directing as a leader, providing people with specific instructions and closely supervising task accomplishment; 2) Coaching by explaining decisions, solicits suggestions and support progress; 3) Supporting by facilitating and supporting subordinates efforts toward task accomplishment and shares responsibility for decision - making with them; 4) Delegating by turning over responsibility for decision - making and problem - solving to subordinates.

For me, success means to have a goal, plan the steps to achieve the goal, implement the plan, and finally achieve the goal." Success means that you are adding to yourself and others every day, experiencing growth and change (for the better). And also what you have achieved at the end of the day.

Although these are not a substitute for the various operational and financial results companies track, it can be a powerful sign as to whether companies are staying on the improvement journey path. If you don’t measure your organization’s improvement, you won’t monitor it, and if you don’t monitor your organization’s improvement, you can’t manage it. If you don’t manage your organization’s improvement, it will fail.

Choosing the right metrics is critical to success. Although there may never be a single perfect measure, it is certainly possible to create a measure or even multiple measures which reflect the performance of your system. If the metrics are chosen carefully, then, in the process of achieving their metrics, managers and employees will make the right decisions and take the right actions that enable the organization to maximize its performance.

How would you define success?


I’m part of the ASQ Influential Voices program. While I receive an honorarium from ASQ for my commitment, the thoughts and opinions expressed on my blog are my own.

Daily Lean Tips Edition #40

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.

Click this link for A Lean Journey's Facebook Page Notes Feed.

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

Lean Tip #586 – Share Information and Numbers With Your Employees

Let them in on what is going on within the company as well as how their jobs contribute to the big picture. When you keep you employees informed they tend to feel a greater sense of worth. Keep communication hopeful and truthful – do not be afraid to share bad news, instead be more strategic about how you deliver it. Improve performance through transparency – By sharing numbers with employees, you can increase employees’ sense of ownership.

Lean Tip #587 – Leaders should collaborate and share on problem solving.

When employees get the idea that their manager or leader is the one who has to solve all the problems, it takes away from their sense of empowerment, and ultimately is likely to decrease engagement over time. Encourage team members to take responsibility, and work through problems or issues on their own, or collaboratively. It’s not the manager’s job to fix everyone else’s problems.

Lean Tip #588 - Involve team members in the process.

Ask team members for their ideas. Engage small working groups to come up with recommendations for ongoing challenges or needs. Select people to set agendas and lead meetings. Doing this develops your team members for bigger responsibilities and gives them a say in how the team works.

Lean Tip #589 - Connect employees to the greater good.

When employees feel connected to the company mission or like their work is contributing to a goal that is greater than profits, they feel like their work has purpose. A sense of meaning is priceless and costs nothing for an employer to cultivate.

Lean Tip #590 - Invest in your employees’ success by supporting their learning.

Continuous improvement and lifelong learning are important qualities for companies to instill in their staff. What does your company do to help employees improve or learn new skills? Offer in-house workshops or employer tuition assistance for employees to take coursework somewhere else. Show employees you are invested in their success by providing and supporting different learning opportunities to help them reach their goals.

Lean Tip #591 - Don't Stray Too Far From Your Expertise

The closer you can keep your customer and problem hypothesis to your experience and expertise, the easier you will find your Lean journey.

Lean Tip #592 - Clearly Identify Hypotheses & Assumptions

Remind yourself that every phone call, customer visit, or experiment is a test of a customer, problem and/or solution hypotheses. By defining the pass / fail criteria before performing the validation, you will ensure better results from your calls / experiments.

Lean Tip #593 - Stay Close To Your Passion

Most successful new businesses have one thing in common: they are started by people with a passion for the customer, problem and/or the solution hypotheses of the business. Unfortunately you can’t fake passion, and as you execute your Lean process, your passion (or lack thereof) will be clear to the people in which you engage.

Lean Tip #594 - Get Advisors To Help you See What you Don’t Know

Find people smarter than you to provide support in areas where you lack experience / expertise. Having advisors with very different backgrounds also adds some much needed diversity to the process, often resulting in uncovering something you otherwise might not have seen.

Lean Tip #595 – Lean takes a change in mindset of the organization

This is a cultural and organizational issue and is difficult to accomplish. Mindset implies people and it is helpful to bring in an outside look or fresh perspective. One can hire from outside, but the organization can also bring in consultants that have a broad and multi-industry perspective. It can also be done internally by having the courage to collaborate with other departments from within the organization. Collaborative efforts from all parts of the organization should be encouraged.

Lean Tip #596 – Successful teamwork is about knowing and executing on the basics.

To be successful your lean team requires effort:

You need a vision—what are you trying to achieve?
Metrics are a must—you can’t improve it if you can’t measure it.
Goals move you forward—Where would you like to be a year from now?
Execute the basics—Concentrating on flow is the key to lean improvement.
Celebrate your successes…and work on your weaknesses!!!

Lean Tip #597 – Focusing on Safety Fosters Employee Involvement

The initial efforts focusing on safety is a good foundation for fostering employee involvement. Norman Bodek said, “Employee suggestions are not for the company, they are for the employees.” Granted, there will be ideas that save money and increase productivity. But that is not the focus. The focus is getting employees contributing to improvement and the developing a problem solving work force.

Lean Tip #598 – Great Leaders Cultivate Charisma.

The myth of leadership is that it is all about greatness. It’s not only a myth, but a harmful deception. Leadership is all about relationships. Charisma is one of the key ways you develop these relationships. Some people think of charisma as fake or showy. It’s not. Charisma is having the sort of personality that draws people toward you and makes them want to follow you to success. This is exactly what you need as a leader.

Lean Tip #599 – Don't Wait Until All the Stars Align Before You Begin.

There is never an ideal time to start redoing your manufacturing process. There always are reasons you should wait or gather more data, but a ready-fire-aim approach is not all bad if it is applied to smaller aspects of the project.

Lean Tip #600 - Focus on the rate of production, or takt time.

This is a heartbeat measurement for the team. One-piece flow is ideal, but any flow is better than no flow. Pull at the demand of the customer, if possible. Then, pull the material through the process rather than push it along. This may take time. Setting up small work-in-process (WIP) or finished goods inventory (FGI) locations from which teams can pull material through production can be a good place to start. Holding areas also are known as Kanban areas, or supermarkets.

Defining Problems SMART-ly

Accurate problem statements save time and effort by focusing the team on root cause identification. A well-stated problem statement is a clear and concise statement that describes the symptoms of the problem to be addressed. It speeds a robust corrective action process by identifying potential root causes and eliminating bias and noise.

Unfortunately, many don’t take the time to accurately define the problem. Here are three common errors in defining a problem:

1. Stating a solution in the problem statement
Bad – We need a new furnace because it doesn’t stay warm.
Good – The temperature is 20 degrees below specification.

2. Too large of a problem
Bad – The quoting process takes too long.
Good – The spare part quoting process takes 5 business days.

3. Vague problem statements
Bad – Customers don’t like the product.
Good – Customers returns of product X are 35%.

Consider the check engine light in your vehicle. It gives you a warning that there is a problem but it is poor at defining the problem. The light can come on for a number of problems. This doesn’t help you solve the problem and usually means you have to bring it in to a repair shop.

The truth of the matter is that the more specific the statement, the better the chance the team has of solving the problem. Accurate problem statements save time and effort when they contain all these elements:

• Keep it brief
• Avoid technical language
• Quantify the problem – Don’t solve it!
• Explain the costs
• Define the scope
• State the consequences/benefits of possible solutions 

 A simple and effective method of defining a problem and one you can easily remember is to use SMART problem definitions:

Specific – Identifies key issue and process being worked on
Measurable – You have established metrics identifying targets
Avoids solutions – Problem statements contain only an explanation of the problem
Really concise – Contains a one-sentence summary of the issue facing the team
Time-based – Focuses on a specific time period when the problem was identified

Einstein was quoted as having said that “if I had one hour to save the world I would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution.” This quote illustrates the importance that before jumping right into solving a problem, we should step back and invest time and effort to improve our understanding of the problem. The first step is to define the problem and we should do so SMART-ly.

Lean Quote: Empowerment Unlocks Hidden Potential

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.

"Empowerment allows an organisation to unlock the hidden potential in its workforce." — Adrian Guttridge, Manager, Andersen Consulting

Empowerment may not be a new concept to you, but many organisations experience problems because they don’t know how to ‘live it’. It is still too common for ‘delegation’ and ‘empowerment’ to be confused, and for the latter to be regarded as something you can use over somebody else, like having authority. 

Empowerment is not delegation because:  

Empowerment is where the organisation has enabled or coached the employee and now continues to support that person within the scope of his or her own work, as previously agreed

Delegation is about giving away parts of your own job to someone else; it is not about giving people scope within their own jobs 

However, the processes involved in delegating should be similar to those for empowering. With empowerment, accountability and responsibility rest with the person empowered. With delegation, responsibility can be passed on but accountability for ensuring the work is done stays with the person who delegated the task.

An empowered organisation encourages the entire company to believe in empowerment and checks to see that the ‘infrastructure’ for empowerment is in place.



 

Top 10 Principles of Employee Empowerment

Many use the term empowerment without understanding what it really means. A common understanding of empowerment is necessary, however, to allow us to know empowerment when we see it. Empowerment is the process of increasing the capacity of individuals or groups to make choices and to transform those choices into desired actions and outcomes.

So what does empowerment look like? A workplace where empowerment is common place could be defined by:

• Employees make decisions that their bosses and bosses’ bosses used to make
• Ultimately, highly skilled self-directed work teams take over most of the decisions, and there are almost no escalations
• Manager’s role changes from directing and inspecting work to coaching, facilitating, resolving only the highest-level issues, and ensuring that people have the skills, information, judgment, and relationships that allow them to deliver vastly improved results
• Employees have more autonomy because of boundaries which clarify the range within which they can take action, including making decisions
• Learning instead of blaming becomes the focus of every mistake, missed opportunity/goal
• Training and development are a constant high priority

An empowered workforce is something that is highly desirable in an improvement culture. Unfortunately, just because we want it, it doesn't make it so. Here are ten principles necessary for establishing employee empowerment:

1. Demonstrate That You Value People
Your goal is to demonstrate your appreciation for each person's unique value. No matter how an employee is performing on his or her current task, your value for the employee as a human being should never falter and always be visible.

2. Share Leadership Vision
Help people feel that they are part of something bigger than themselves and their individual job. Do this by making sure they know and have access to the organization's overall mission, vision, and strategic plans.

3. Share Goals and Direction
Share the most important goals and direction for your group. Where possible, either make progress on goals measurable and observable, or ascertain that you have shared your picture of a positive outcome with the people responsible for accomplishing the results.

4. Trust People
Trust the intentions of people to do the right thing, make the right decision, and make choices that, while maybe not exactly what you would decide, still work.

5. Provide Information for Decision Making
Make certain that you have given people, or made sure that they have access to, all of the information they need to make thoughtful decisions.

6. Delegate Authority and Impact Opportunities, not Just More Work
Don't just delegate the drudge work; delegate some of the fun stuff, too. You know, delegate the important meetings, the committee memberships that influence product development and decision making, and the projects that people and customers notice.

7. Provide Frequent Feedback
Provide frequent feedback so that people know how they are doing. Sometimes, the purpose of feedback is reward and recognition as well as improvement coaching.

8. Solve Problems: Don't Pinpoint Problem People
When a problem occurs, ask what is wrong with the work system that caused the people to fail, not what is wrong with the people.

9. Listen to Learn and Ask Questions to Provide Guidance
Provide a space in which people will communicate by listening to them and asking them questions. Guide by asking questions, not by telling grown up people what to do.
When an employee brings you a problem to solve, ask, "what do you think you should do to solve this problem?"

10. Help Employees Feel Rewarded and Recognized for Empowered Behavior
When employees feel under-compensated, under-titled for the responsibilities they take on, under-noticed, under-praised, and under-appreciated, don’t expect results from employee empowerment. The basic needs of employees must feel met for employees to give you their discretionary energy.

The Key to Success is Customer Focus

At the center of a Lean culture and key to success is customer focus. The more our daily actions and long term plans are driven by meeting customer expectations, and the more we evaluate our work based upon these expectations, the more we improve customer loyalty and advocacy. This relentless focus on the customer is the path to sustained growth and profitability.

Since the customer is the only reason you have a job, if you are not willing to satisfy the customer…then you might as well go home; you are not needed. Remember that perception is reality with customer service. If your customers don’t see your organization as one that engages in customer-focused behavior, then you are not providing exceptional customer service. Treating your customers as valued individuals is often more important than price.

Focus on the customer means all systems and processes require continuous improvement. These businesses think about what they can do to make customers happy (as opposed to get the most money out of them, signup the most accounts, etc.) all the time and think about how they can make the customer experience better.

In a customer focused organization, Leadership, Processes and People are customer-aligned. This requires that:

• Every action is shaped by a relentless commitment to meeting and exceeding customer expectations regarding product and service quality.
• Customer touch points and supporting internal processes are constantly evaluated and improved to meet or exceed those expectations.
• Every employee understands what he/she must do in order to maintain and add value to every relationship with both the paying customer and those within the organization that rely on them for the work they do.

Customer focus and service excellence is everyone’s responsibility, not just those that have direct contact with them. Organizations that are recognized as exceptional providers of customer service are the ones that have incorporated these customer-focused behaviors into their daily operations.

The Eight Wastes of New Product Development

The first step in eliminating waste from New Product Development (NPD), and thus improving the process, is to learn to identify the eight wastes. By closely examining the entire NPD process from a Lean perspective, the opportunities to drive out waste and increase value will become obvious.

Defects
Defects are the result of executed processes that did not produce value.
• Improper information on drawing
• Missing views on drawing
• Incomplete information
• Product flaws resulting in missing customer expectations
• Reworking product or processes

Overproduction
Waste from producing product that is not currently needed or product that is not needed at all.
• Unnecessary documentation
• Cost overruns due to excessive project time charging
• Overlap of strategic and non-strategic projects competing for limited resources

Waiting
No value is added while people wait for product to process or product waits for people or machines.
• Unbalanced workflow within the team
• Time spent getting approvals
• Dependant on the number of hand offs and task dependencies

Non-utilized resources/talent
The waste of underutilized intelligence and intellect commonly referred to as behavioral waste.
• Underutilizing people’s knowledge and creativity
• Uneven work flow resulting with some team members overburdened while other underutilized

Transportation
While the product is moving, no value is added to it.
• Carrying, mailing, or even e-mailing documents stops the process
• In an electronic system look at the number of hand offs where we pass something to someone else

Inventory
Inventory is the collection of unprocessed documents, data objects, and transactions queued-up between people and processes.
• Drawings and specification - we invest time to make them, update them, and manage them
• Collections of unprocessed information and data

Motion
Excess movement by people or equipment only consumes time and resources without producing value.
• Efficiency of software – number of mouse clicks, number of routines, number of transactions
• Frequently searching for drawings and other information on remote shared services like servers or printers

Excess Processing
Doing more than what is necessary to generate satisfactory value as defined by the customer.
• Using software that has a function beyond what is needed
• Product designs or processes that are too complex
• Unnecessary steps in design process
• Excessive number of iterations
• Over-designed or over-engineered product

The acronym I prefer for remembering the eight wastes is DOWNTIME since it symbolizes lost opportunity. Another one that works well for NPD is TOWISDOM where S is skills. NPD is one essential element in the growth strategy that is so critical in all companies practicing Lean Thinking.