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.

Lean Quote: Inspection Is Too Late

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.

"Inspection does not improve the quality, nor guarantee quality. Inspection is too late. The quality, good or bad, is already in the product. As Harold F. Dodge said, “You can not inspect quality into a product." — W. Edwards Deming, Out of Crisis, Page 29

Inspection can be useful to gather data on the process. Using that data to see if a process has gone out of control and a special cause needs to be investigated is useful. Using that data to evaluate the success, or failure, of an attempt to improve (via the PDSA cycle) is useful. 

Inspecting to pull out the failed items from the production before a customer sees them is a path to failure. If the process is this bad, the process needs to be improved. If you can actually stay in business doing this now, you are at risk for not being able to stay in business when the market stops being willing to pay you to produce results people don’t want.

I am reminded of how impressed with Dr. Deming’s crediting others. A number of the quotes people credit to Dr. Deming he notes the proper author in his book. I understand that people learn to associate these quotes with Dr. Deming, but I still find it amusing. It also shows his devotion to learning and desire for accurate documentation. 

“Quality can not be inspected into a product or service; it must be built into it.” – Out of the Crisis page 227 (where Dr. Deming again refers readers to Dodge’s quote that Dr. Deming included earlier in the book)

About the Author:
This post was written by John Hunter the author The W. Edwards Deming Institute Blog. In this blog they explore Deming’s ideas on management by examining his works and exploring how the ideas are being applied in organizations today. John Hunter has experience in management improvement (customer focused continuous improvement, process improvement, systems thinking) and related areas. Since 1995, he has used the internet and internet technology to improve the results of management improvement efforts.



 

Meet-up: Management Improvement Leader John Hunter

Today's guest on the meet-up guest is John Hunter. I've known John since I started my own blog.  He connected with me in my infancy. My concept for the round-up came from John's management improvement carnivals.  John Hunter has experience in management improvement (customer focused continuous improvement, process improvement, systems thinking) and related areas. Since 1995, he has used the internet and internet technology to improve the results of management improvement efforts.


Who are you and what do you do?
John Hunter (www.johnhunter.com) 

Author, recently publishing my first book 
Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability 
http://curious-cat-media.com/management-matters/ 

and various blogs 
    http://management.curiouscatblog.net/ 
    http://blog.deming.org/ 
    http://hexawise.com/blog 

I also do some management consulting and I manage over 30 websites http://johnhunter.com/websites.cfm 

Previous I worked for the American Society for Engineering Education, Office of the Secretary of Defense Quality Management Office and White House Military Office.

How and when did you learn Lean?
If you classify lean the way I do (by the principles not the name) I learned about it as a kid before the name existed. I remember my father http://williamghunter.net/ talking about "the machine that changed the world" before the book was published. He was involved with this stuff before I was born and gradually as a kid it started to seep into my consciousness. 

He was a professor and consultant and we would visit factories occasionally, while on our family vacation http://management.curiouscatblog.net/2011/07/13/touring-factories-on-vacation-when-i-was-young/ (the ones I remember were when we lived in Nigeria for a year). 

I learned these ideas first through statistics and scientific thinking, then through the management consulting my father and George Box were doing. Then through Brian Joiner, Peter Scholtes and others in Madison, Wisconsin working on improving management and working with Dr. Deming.
I created the Online Quality Resource Guide in 1996 (which evolved into http://curiouscat.com/guides/ ) and served on the board of the Public Sector Network which then became the ASQ government division. I maintain the Public Sector Continuous Improvement Site http://curiouscat.com/psci/ 

It really wasn't until much later than I was focused on efforts called lean - probably until 2005, or so.

How and why did you start blogging or writing about Lean?
I wanted to increase the adoption of better management practices. When I started there was literally almost nothing on the internet about management improvement at all and I tried to help direct people to those few resources online. Initially, many of the resources were not on the web; they were on dial up bulletin boards and ftp sites and usenet. Also email lists were useful (very few, but at least there was some talk of good ideas). 

Dr. Deming had a personal mission to advance commerce, prosperity and peace. I share this vision. I think it is hard for people in rich countries to understand. Over a billion people today have difficulty getting access to even clean water and electricity. It was much worse 50 years ago. The way to provide better lives to people (especially the poor around the world) requires commerce and prosperity. 

It is hard for those in rich countries to understand how fundamental that is. We are not talking about the commerce of over-abundance and those that claim to struggle living on $100,000 a year. I am talking about commerce and "prosperity" where everyone has clean water, food, shelter, decent education  decent health care, electricity... I see the path to this through commerce, not charity or something else. Charity and other solutions are necessary band-aids to buy us time to develop commerce to provide "prosperity" to everyone. 

The other push for me is joy in work. People should not be miserable in their jobs. We can create what is needed while people have joy in work. 

What I care about it helping improve those 2 things: prosperity through commerce so nearly everyone has basic human and economic needs met and so people have work lives they enjoy and are proud of. 

Peace is also critical. Dr. Deming lived through, World War I, the great depression, World War II and post war recovery in decimated Japan. The importance of peace was very obvious to him. Obviously, peace is a tough goal to achieve. I think commerce and prosperity go a long way to helping the cause of peace (though prosperity and technological innovation also provide great risks of catastrophic weapons). Human nature doesn't change quickly, we have to change systems so that war is not chosen as the course of action to take, even when our human nature leads us in that direction.


When I sought to publish my list of online management resources I started on a dial up bulletin board - you had to connect by dialing a phone number and use your modem to talk to the computer on the other end. Then I was able to find an engineering professor at Clemson to publish my guide on the web (getting your own web site wasn't easy back then). I created my own websites starting in 1995. I started writing content articles on management improvement myself probably around 1997. 

I started the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog http://management.curiouscatblog.net/ in 2004.

What does Lean mean to you?
I think of it in two ways. First the way I see it for myself is in a very broad way as the application of Deming's ideas through the Toyota Production System which was then given the name lean manufacturing. And I see various tools and concepts as fundamental to lean: gemba, kanban, andon, value stream, JIT, single piece flow, A3, 5s... Respect for people is core to lean, but I see that as flowing from Deming's ideas (so I don't see it as a specific lean idea). 

When I hear others talking about lean I need to understand the context (from what else they say) to pin down what it means in their minds. Often, sadly, it is too superficial and missing critical core elements of what I think need to exist for the term "lean" to mean much of anything: respect for people, for example. Sadly I think most organizations saying they are practicing lean are not what I would consider lean. 

I discussed this idea in http://management.curiouscatblog.net/2012/05/03/lean-manufacturing-and-the-toyota-production-system/

What is the biggest myth or misconception of Lean?
That the tools are the totality of lean. The tools are great. The tools are even very useful without adopting a lean management system. But adopting a lean management system is many times more powerful than just adopting tools. The tools fit into adopting a lean system and will be used. They are a necessary but not sufficient component of lean.

What is your current Lean passion, project, or initiative?
Probably my book. 

Also, I recently started authoring The W. Edwards Deming Institute blog so that is currently of extra interest to me. I have been involved with agile software development ideas and lean software thinking and that area also hold heightened interest for me. 

And my work with Hexawise http://hexawise.com/ a software test plan creation system is also on the top of my list now. It ties to many of my interests in management improvement - using tools and statistics to create systems that are efficient and effective http://management.curiouscatblog.net/2010/05/17/combinatorial-testing-the-quadrant-of-massive-efficiency-gains/ The combinatorial (pairwise, orthogonal array) testing concepts behind the power of creating efficient and effective test plans ties to the work of my father and George Box in design of experiments http://curiouscat.com/management/doe.cfm I always have extra passion around things that include ties to my father's work.