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Tips & Tricks for Efficiently Tracking Lean Projects Recently, we wrote about a couple of problems facing many Lean practitioners. These were problems that hindered their learning process and often caused overconfidence. Amongst the advice to help combat these problems arose the need for detailed tracking and note taking with regards to practice and progress. Being able to accurately track not only the effects but also the process of a Lean project is critical to ongoing success, and is a key to stimulating growth amongst not only the receiving end of your project objectives, but also amongst the employees and Lean practitioners themselves. To start off, let's take a look at the current state of Lean project tracking for many Lean practitioners. A recent LinkedIn discussion posed the very question of project tracking, and sought to understand a few different distinct metrics. In addition to measuring the effectiveness of any program when it comes to completion, tracking can also be about measuring the scope of your projects, so that you can accurately project what the effects will be before you actually reach the stage at which you expect them. Part of this "scope" involves tracking exactly who is involved with your project, who is affected, and how they are progressing in their respective tasks. Where we are now First of all, it's important to evaluate the current methods that are prevalent in Lean record keeping. The LinkedIn discussion starter, self-identified as Ian R., mentions in his opening post that, when he last posed the question about a year ago, the consensus was that most practitioners were simply using excel spreadsheets for their tracking needs. While there's nothing wrong with relying on Excel for the basics, other users were quick to offer up some slicker alternatives, signaling a sharp (and welcomed, in our book) departure from some of the more basic methods. Unsurprisingly, there exist several specialist software applications whose n

Learning About Lean posted an interesting blog post recently titled Organizations Which Succeed: While not a Lean expert, ESPN commentator Colin Cowherd recently made a comment I found insightful. Observing three organizations which seemed to be consistently successful, he found this common theme amongst the San Antonio Spurs, the New England Patriots and the Boise State football program. "Celebrate rarely. Grind always."

The Adventure of Reducing Risks and Hazards in the Workplace Whenever starting a new job, it can be difficult to figure out exactly what you should be doing, and how it needs to be done. When I started working at a new facility as a safety manager, I began my first day with a meeting with the facility manager. The meeting was set up so he could tell me what was expected of me in my new role, and provide other details of the job. I was quite surprised when the meeting took less than two minutes, and the only objective I was given was to 'reduce risks and hazards in the workplace.' I asked for some clarification or guidance in what exactly he was looking for, but he simply said that I was hired to improve safety, and he was leaving the task of finding out how to do it in my hands. He gave me a sheet of paper with some information about what resources I had available, including my annual safety budget and told me to get to work right away. I should point out there that I had several years experience as a safety manager at a large company, which is why I was brought in to this new facility. The facility had recently been cited by OSHA for a variety of safety hazards, and there were even some fairly severe injuries that occurred in the previous months. The facility owners made it clear that safety was a priority for them, and they were willing to do whatever it took to pass inspections, and keep the employees safe. Planning My Safety Program While that initial meeting was unique, to say the least, I was also quite excited about the opportunity. It is quite rare that a safety manager is given such flexibility, and I wanted to make sure the manager wouldn't regret that decision. I got to work right away planning my safety improvement program. OSHA Safety Sign Guide I wanted to make some quick changes to help improve safety in the short term, and then also plan out ways to create a culture change within the facility so everyone would be more safety focused. I kne

Lean manufacturing is a method used in factories to enhance productivity. As part of lean manufacturing, 5S strategies are quite common sense and you would expect the posters to be easily accepted in an organization. However, it is not that easy to change working habits. As a result, factory managers may decide to use lean posters to make the employees understand the need for lean practices. What is 5S? This is a strategy from the Japanese that stands for Sort, Systematically Organize, Shine, Standardize and Sustain. For a successful lean program in any organization, the management must make sure that all stakeholders understand the process. The best way of educating people about lean practices is through lean posters. After the workers have adopted the practice, the posters act as reminders as well. There are many types of lean posters that management can use in factories. These posters are very essential for reminding everybody about the 5S program. Let us look at some of these posters. Management may use strategic lean posters with the aim of encouraging the workers to work towards a common goal. These posters mainly focus on employee behavior; how to change it for the better. For the best results, it is important for management to align such posters with the organization culture. Do you have programs or initiatives that the poster is promoting? If not, you might as well not bother because the poster may not benefit you much. Posters can also be used to motivate the workers as they continue with their duties. These types of posters have been around for many years, and they are quite effective. However, the effectiveness of such posters depends on whether they are relevant to the people. For a factory that is implementing lean practices, using lean posters is a cost-effective way of educating the workers and reminding them of the firm's commitment to reach its goals.

Industrial color codes To minimize workplace injuries and accidents requires the combined input of both the employer and the employees. There are tens of hazards lurking everywhere within the organization and while it is not possible to cover every angle, properly informing the relevant persons of the potential hazards can go a long way towards ensuring safety. Workplace safety is a great concern and immense regulations have been put into place and they are strictly enforced. These regulations have also ensured that the workers clearly understand their responsibilities and their rights. The employer has a huge responsibility of enforcing the set standards and ensuring safety to all. This can be achieved through a number of ways, including using industrial color codes and other appropriate marking and signs. Involving the staff Workers have a major stake in the safety of the organization and they will determine the success of any safety regulations put in place. It is hence important that they be involved right from the start and they be adequately trained to understand the purpose and meaning of each industrial color code and marking used. Sticking to simple and easily understandable colors and signs

Success with AI is heavily influenced by the data maturity of an organization i.e. their ability to procure, clean, curate, store and analyze data to power value generating applications. A data-mature enterprise know what data it has, knows what the data means and can ensure that the data is accessible to whoever needs it. Unfortunately, the past few years, driven by the big data hype, have encouraged enterprises to focus on updating their data infrastructure to leverage new big data technologies. With a lot more data now available, enterprises already stuck with massive data storage costs, are being forced to choose between storing data that might eventually be useful for stabilizing, if not reducing their storage costs.

One of the biggest hurdles to Digital Transformation and Digital Innovation is the organization's inertia and tendency to optimize for self-preservation. Self-preservation can exist in the enterprise at the individual, team, divisional or the organizational level and can have a devastating impact on the organization's ability to innovate and grow. Self-preservation is not a new phenomenon however, it is more deadly for an enterprise now than ever. This is because the speed of technology change has increased geometrically. In the past, self-preservation would automatically get corrected as the technology was generally learned and adopted slowly with enough time for the enterprise to become aware of the change and implement it. However, the rate of technology change has magnified tremendously and the enterprises no longer have the luxury to take their time with the change. Inaction risks getting left behind and other competitors who leverage and change faster stand to capture the largest market shares and customer mind share. Self preservation is the tendency of the enterprise to ignore, undermine or postpone the adoption and integration of new technology in the enterprise to avoid a change in the status quo across technology, products, services and most importantly, day to day operations and organizational structure. Self-preservation can lead to what is termed as "politics" in an org, it can stifle innovation and innovative individuals & teams and it can favor business driver stagnation over risk taking. 5 Signs of Self-Preservation The following are signs of self-preservation Highlighting the Journey of Innovation as Failure Adversarial teams and individuals within an enterprise who are interested in self-preservation often go out of their way to highlight the tough, risky journey of true innovation as a failure citing the cost and the time being taken to address the real problems in a truly innovative manner. While the individuals and teams trying to

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At the backbone of any successful production operation is worker safety. You know it, I know it, and yet it's still talked and written about thousands of times every single day. Usually in the name of ongoing improvement, these discussions and articles namely touch on the technical aspects of safety programs: Writing procedures, keeping signage up to date and code, the maintaining and use of personal safety equipment, the elimination of hazards in the work space, the list goes on and on. However, one topic seldom touched on is attitude and mindset with regard to safety - and this extends beyond the employees themselves. In fact, as a manager, it is YOUR responsibility to first don a mindset that allows you to think openly and improve your operation with the best interests of all of those involved in mind. In this blog post, we're going to go over a few ways to keep your safety operations positive, effective, and constantly improving.

Lean Management - A Guide To Starting Out Right Much like anything over-used and spread before those singing praises have done a lot of research, Lean is a concept that sometimes, despite the best of intentions, misses its mark. Lean principles aren't particularly tricky, but with many offshoots and brands of the ideology, it can be easy for new Lean managers to get caught up in misinformation. At its core, lean is about eliminating all kinds of waste from your business. It sounds simple enough, but one of the biggest problems for many newbies is changing your concept of just what "waste" is. Once you've got a grasp on that, you need to move onto individual strategies that can help you eliminate that waste. In this article, we're going to go over how to accomplish both of these tasks as a manager who may be new to Lean by exploring unique facets of this management type and how they interact with elements of your business. One of the largest differences between Lean management and traditional styles of management is that in a traditional methodology your primary (and nearly sole) concern is the end of the line result. While Lean is of course concerned with achieving superior end results, its focus is on the processes that get you there. In this sense, what you learn and practice as a Lean manager is more about making individual pieces work together efficiently than having a tunnel-vision focus on numbers and figures at the end of the cycle. The Relationship Between Lean management, Waste Elimination, and Continual Improvement "If someone tells you that "lean management is this" and not something else, if someone puts it in a box and ties a bow around it and presents it in a neat package with four walls around it, then that someone knows not of what they speak. Why? Because it is in motion and not a framed picture hanging on the wall. It is a melody, a rhythm, and not a single note." - Lawrence M. Miller, Management Meditations While perhap

A3 image via Reliableplant.com Today, I was looking for a decent A3 problem-solving template for an engineering friend who was planning on implementing a lean program for his company, and I came across a helpful article on ReliablePlant.com by Larry Rubrick and a cool A3 powerpoint presentation at PowerShow.com (don't hit download, just hit play). As many people may know, the A3 format originated around the type of paper (A3, 11″x17″ sheet) that the Toyota Production System engineers used to base their problem-solving templates - with the mindset that using only one piece of paper kept the thinking process focused and simple. The A3 is said to be one of the main building blocks of Lean thinking. On the report, a problem is identified and then it follows a process of successive stages (including objectives or goals) by which it may be solved, or at least lessened. I liked the examples Rubrick offers in his post, starting with the requisite Toyota A3, and moving on to others, including an A3 at Ford in the United States (which is meant for a typical copy paper size, 8.5 X11). Other A3s can end up getting more illustrative, but the gist of it is best represented in the simplicity of the TPS template, I think.

In the business world, there is a constant need and desire for improvement. It doesn't matter whether a business specializes in the market of rare auto parts or in making the best enchiladas. The plain and simple truth is that improving business practices to meet the ever-changing and diverse needs of society is essential to the success of any business endeavor. However, with all this change and improvement often comes a little struggle. Sometimes business processes are changed so radically that employees struggle with the changes if they are not adequately informed about what changes are taking place or how the changes actually benefit the specific process or end product. Furthermore, in some cases the problem is not with the employees at all, but instead embedded within the actual process changes. When looking into making improvement changes, it is important to really take the time to evaluate the changes fully to make sure that they are win-win for both the employees and the desired business objectives. Employee Involvement In the improvement process, there are often many things to consider especially such as metrics, data, resources, etc. However, it is important to make sure that employees are also considered within the grand scheme of things. There are times when businesses make essential changes that are needed to stay current with the changing times, but often neglect to involve the actual employees in the process of determining changes, or in the reasoning why specific changes were made. This can leave employees feeling a bit resentful and also leave processes lacking in certain important fundamentals. For instance, the top managers in a business make the decision to improve a production line within the factory because many of the machines were getting older and not handling the work as effectively as needed. In order to update the production line to new standards, new machines were installed and tweaks were made to previous processes in order to help

A good blog doesn't involve just the content quality but also the audience engagement. Without that reader engagement, the blog won't last. Are you in the same situation? All your hard work in creating great content leads to no readers engagement. You must be blaming your luck for this but it could be your blogging techniques which result in poor audience engagement. So, what does the reader engagement means? It refers to any user interaction with you or the blog in any way possible. Successful Reader engagement is different for every writer according to the goals and purpose, but it's important to have goals for reader engagement. The blogger must keep in mind to track those metrics to make sure that the things are going smoothly.

People naturally expect self-promotion and success. We can do this very easily through a blog site. Anyone can become financially self-sufficient by creating a blog site for free or with a small investment.

To survive in the current competitive times, organizations must transform their cloud strategies to deliver actionable data in real-time and exceed customer expectations.

Project Managers or executives have huge responsibility when it comes to Project Planning. From figuring out the type of the project he/she will be undertaking to its execution, a project manager has to control everything. The role of the managers comprises of many activities and to minimize the uncertainty, we have come up with a full-fledged Project Planning Complete deck to control the risks associated with the project.

Entrepreneurs are responsible for many things, and one of their responsibilities includes building a great team of employees. If you want to be successful in this, then you need to be able to empathize with your employees and put yourself in their shoes.