Lean Quote: Christmas Spirit Every Day

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.

"I wish we could put up some of the Christmas spirit in jars and open a jar of it every month." — Harlan Miller

Although the Christmas-preparations can put us under stress, it still seems that during the few weeks before and around Christmas we are more caring and loving. We are much more of a family person all of a sudden, we think about world peace, we have more compassion, patience with others and start overflowing with altruism.
  
We take more time for reflection, which leads us to think more of others who are less fortunate than us, and we give a little to charities. We go and buy presents for family and friends and therewith again we naturally spend more thoughts on others. All this gives us the feeling to do something good for other people. This in return makes us feel better, again. 

We do not need jars of Christmas spirit to open every month throughout the year as Harlan Miller wished. Just try the following to keep up the Christmas spirit all year through:

1) Smile at people as often as you can and most people will smile back. 
2) Every day, do something small for somebody else. 
3) Show gratitude. Thinking, saying and writing gratitude helps us to be in the present moment and to focus on all the positive things in our lives, to concentrate on everything we have and our strengths.

Merry Christmas to all A Lean Journey Fans! I hope everyone takes the time to spend quality time with your family and enjoy all the things you have to be thankful for. Lean thinking is a gift to us individually and to organizations empowering and inspiring improvement all around us. This holiday season I want to take the opportunity to thank all those who share the passion for continuous improvement and share in the learning on this blog.

Top 10 Posts of 2016

The end of the year is traditionally a time to look back and reflect. One way to reflect is to evaluate popular blog posts. I have been taking time to reflect on the year that was and as part of that reflection I have flicked back through the 150 blog posts I have written so far this year and compiled a list of my Top 10.

10. How to Avoid 6 Common Pitfalls of Process Mapping

Creating a process map is a relatively straight forward process but some mistakes can derail the process so avoid these most common pitfalls.

9. Sixteen Human Error Modes for Mistake Proofing

When performing a mistake-proofing analysis on a manufacturing, service or business process, it is of course important to identify every human error possible during each process step.

8. 5 Steps for Creating a Lean Roadmap

Lean provides a framework to improve the flow of a process, it is therefore important to create a plan or roadmap describing the improved flow, highlighting changes, and areas for improvement.

7. 5 Benefits of Process Mapping

The path for your improvement journey consists of the work processes your organization uses to create and transport goods and services to its customers, the map you use for your improvement journey must focus on customer value.

6. 5 Reasons 5S is a Good Place to Start Your Lean Journey

Embarking on your Lean journey by implementing 5S is beneficial for several reasons.

5. Seven Best Poka-Yoke Devices

Mistake Proofing is about adding controls to prevent defects, reduce their severity, and detect them if they can occur.

4. Reprise: The Seven Basic Quality Tools

The Seven Basic Tools of Quality is a designation given to a fixed set of graphical techniques identified as being most helpful in troubleshooting issues related to quality.

3. Leader Standard Work is a Management System For Sustaining Gains

Leader Standard Work is the system that provides a structure and routine for leaders and drives process definition and daily accountability.

2. Top 10+ Lean Manufacturing Books

Luckily, there is no shortage of literature on Lean Manufacturing over the last several decades, but there 10 books I recommend on learning Lean.

1. 5 Ways to Improve Employee Engagement

Empowering employees is the ongoing process of providing the tools, training, resources; encouragement and motivation your workers need to perform at the optimum level.

What were some of your favorite Lean posts from 2016? Any recommendations for next year?

Thanks for your continued readership in 2016. I hope you enjoy the holiday season and go on to achieve Lean success in 2017.

Book Review: Lean Health

It’s the time of year when people start to think of resolutions (personal improvement) for the coming year. Many have a goal to reduce weight and improve health. As a Lean practitioner I am always interested to see how people have applied Lean thinking to improve their environment. Paul Akers, well known Lean enthusiast with 2 Second Lean and leader of FastCap, tells his personal story of improved health in a new book “Lean Health”.

In his book Paul honestly and comprehensively lays out his weight loss journey. He describes your body as a Ferrari (or Ford Pinto) which you have to take care of with fuel (nutrition) and maintain (exercise). His personal health transformation shows his commitment to lean principles beyond business but to his mind and body.

In his brilliant and engaging writing style he's taking the reader on his own journey to Lean Health. As with his other books and videos, Paul doesn't come across telling you how to do it but rather how he did it, so it's not a what to do but more of a how to do it. He explains the steps he found for exceptional health and the tools he used to help. It is logical, detailed, and most of all it is simple to follow!

Lean health not only changes the way we think about the foods we eat, it changes the way we think about life in general! Paul Aker’s Lean PD App is quite good and helps to instill new habits in your life. Give it a try along with his tips from Lean Health so you can change your life as well. 

Although it may be hard to make all the suggested changes in your life at once, just do one small improvement every day and try to stick to the things you've changed. 

Lean Health is a simple, quick, inspirational, and motivational read. If you are looking to improve your health, I highly recommend it.

Lean Quote: Success is Buried on the Other Side of Frustration

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.

"All successful people learn that success is buried on the other side of frustration." — Tony Robbins

When things don’t go your way or your team does not accomplish what was expected, you get frustrated. If the tire’s flat, you kick it! If the vending machine doesn’t give you change, you hit it! When your boss does not support a new idea you are suggesting for no apparent reason you complain about his or her lack of support.

When we fail to satisfy our deep desires or achieve important goals, the sense of frustration can be overwhelming at times. If we lose a customer because of a missed deadline despite the team’s best efforts, it’s natural to feel frustrated.

But it’s also a waste of time and energy. Frustration is futile and destructive. These behaviors limit personal growth and success, it’s important to understand what causes frustration and what you can do to minimize it.

Follow these tips to protect yourself from tumbling down frustration’s slippery slope:

1. Take responsibility! Don’t blame people and circumstances for what happens to you. Use setbacks and disappointments as opportunities to learn, not as reasons to complain and criticize.

2. Set realistic expectations for yourself and clearly understand the expectations your department, division, or team has for you. If your expectations are habitually too high, you’re going to be frequently frustrated. Remember, one of the most important rules about goal setting is to set goals realistically high and focus on the results, not just the activity!

3. Striving for excellence is good, but striving for perfection will impede your growth and productivity. If you’re focused on perfection, you’ll fail to make improvements because you’ll be afraid to take risks. You’ll miss deadlines because you’re trying to do everything perfectly. You’ll hinder your personal and professional growth because your desire to be perfect causes you to be overly sensitive to constructive criticism.

4. Set realistic expectations from others. When you expect too much, you set yourself up for disappointment and frustration. Instead of offering encouragement and support, you will tend to judge and criticize.

5. Frustration cannot coexist with a positive attitude. Strengthen your positive attitude by focusing on your goals and on the rewards you anticipate receiving when you achieve them. When you are drifting, frustrations can rise up like mountains, but when you are speeding along toward your goals, frustrations become merely bumps in the road.

6. Emotionally relive the positive moments of triumph from you past accomplishments. Success breeds success. Remembering your past successes will boost your confidence and refocus your attention on your goals.

10 Powerful Process Mapping Tips

Process mapping is often the first step in business process improvement. It is a necessary activity that provides a baseline from which improvements can be measured and is the key to identifying and localizing opportunities for improvement. Therefore, it is important to capture the right information to help steer process improvement initiatives in the right direction.

The primary objective of mapping business processes is to form a common understanding from which process improvements can be achieved. Once your teams have completed mapping their key processes, turn them into continuous improvement teams. Not only do the documented maps serve as the agreed baseline for ongoing process improvement, they also make for excellent induction and training resources. Now sit back and watch your business soar.

The following are some simple but powerful techniques to make your mapping efforts count.

1. Don’t map for mapping’s sake. The goal of process mapping is to learn and improve, so spend time upfront deciding what and where to map and select your “start” and “stop” points accordingly. Define the scope, identify the business processes you need to focus on and concentrate on those.

2. Ensure that everyone understands the benefits of the exercise. Ensuring that stakeholders know what they stand to gain and how the mapping exercise will deliver it is important. You must be able to connect the project to outcomes of business value. Stakeholders should be convinced that the output of the exercise will help them work smarter and better. Be clear on the benefits attainable by each stakeholder group and be willing to sell it to them.

3. Consider training team members. Not all team members will be equally versed in conducting the process mapping exercise. Set up a brief meeting/training session to bring everyone up to speed on what is expected of them. This training should cover the standards to be adopted, the tools to be used and any other unique requirements of the process mapping exercise.Don’t assume everyone knows exactly what to do.

4. Don’t try to map all your processes at once. Some businesses make the erroneous move of documenting all their processes at once. This sort of exercise requires a significant amount of time and man-power upfront with little or no value-add. Focus on mapping key business processes that cut across the value chain where identifiable improvements can be made. 

5. Start with the current state. Once the “ideal” process area is selected, focus on documenting the “as is” state as opposed to the future or ideal state. This might seem obvious but when people are asked to improve a process, their initial impulse is to move right to solution – but they can’t improve what they don’t understand!

6. Walk the process. Conduct a formal waste or process walk prior to building the “as is” map. Engaging in short, structured interviews with process participants becomes a rich source of data, flow and process issues. It also increases external interest in process improvement since people appreciate being asked for their input.

7. Map what the process really is. People often relate what they think the process is – so when mapping the “as is” process you have to push past the SOPs, or Standard Operating Procedures, to find out all the shortcuts, rework loops, cheat sheets and workarounds – nobody thinks of those on the first pass. And keep the steps at the same “elevation level”, meaning don’t combine general tasks such as “generate the invoice” with details like “turn the page.”

8. Keep it simple. Basic tools like flip chart paper or rolls of butcher’s paper and sticky notes are often the best and simplest tools for building process maps with teams. They can be prettied up later in Visio, Excel or PowerPoint but there’s no substitute for jointly building the actual, physical map.

9. Include process data. Process maps are more accurate and powerful when they include cycle times and wait times. Value Stream Maps are designed to include these two elements of lead time, but including this data on any map helps reflect what truly gets in the way of meeting customer demand.  When capturing cycle times in a process with high levels of variation, it’s helpful to include not just the average times, but the ranges as well. Averages hide the real impact of lead time on customers.

10. Apply visual management. When mapping on the wall with sticky notes, try using different colors for the different “lanes” of a Swimlane map and choosing a contrasting color (classically pink) for pain points. Hold off drawing connectors and arrows until you’ve verified the map or you’ll end up with scribble marks – and that’s rework!

Some of these may seem like common sense, but I find it valuable to think through what has made me successful in the past and keep these tools in the forefront of my mind for future engagements. Process mapping is a tremendously valuable tool for improving a process. It’s well suited for a broad range of industries and processes.  However, like other continuous improvement methods, the effectiveness of process mapping is affected by how it is selected planned and carried out.

5 Keys to Effective and Empathic Listening

Listening is key to all effective communication, without the ability to listen effectively messages are easily misunderstood – communication breaks down and the sender of the message can easily become frustrated or irritated.

Applying active listening, allows you and other individuals to engage in a dialogue where you are both equipped with clarity and understanding of the purpose, content and outcome of the discussion.

Nature is clearly telling us that we should listen twice as much as we talk as we have two ears and one mouth. It is impossible to find out what someone is thinking if you are doing all the talking. Listening is a key communication and empathy skill. Keys to becoming a more effective and emphatic listener include:

Take Time to Listen and Be Attentive
Often we are so preoccupied in our busyness that we only pretend to listen. Take time to really concentrate. Listen with both ears. When an employee comes into your office or stops you in the hall, stop what you are doing (if it is a convenient time), make eye contact, and really listen. You will be surprised how much more effective the exchange will be and how much time is saved in the long run.

Be Quiet
You can’t listen if your mouth is moving, so be quiet while the other person is speaking. Wait until they complete their thought or sentence before you begin to ask clarification questions or answer the question at hand. If you rearrange the letters that spell, listen, you get silent! Remember that when someone else is talking with you.

Listen with an Open Mind
Selective listening (hearing only what matches your views and interests) limits your ability to learn, grow, and achieve. Listening with an open mind increases your ability to understand and respond effectively. Your openness will create such noticeable rapport that the other person will be inclined to listen to you with equal sensitivity.

Listen for Emotions
People tend to repeat those things that are important to them. Listen not only to what they say, but how they say it. Voices express emotion through pitch, intonation, hesitation, and speed of delivery. By listening to what people say, and how they say it, you will discover that feelings behind the words.

Listen for Retention
How often have you wanted to tell a good joke or story that you had heard but simply couldn’t remember it? On those occasions you probably wished you knew how to increase your memory retention. Well, there is a way. While you are listening, occasionally summarize in your mind the highlights that you’re hearing. This will increase your understanding and your retention. Verbalizing your summarized to the speaker from time to time will also confirm the accuracy of the communications. The speaker sill appreciate your carefulness, as long as your purpose is to assure understanding.