Tweddle Continuous Improvement

Simple visual to determine status of the workplace.

Great Kaizen in the POD Area

We should try this. Any takers?

So is anyone here at Tweddle using Basecamp or Highrise? If not, why not?

I am not aware of anyone using either Basecamp or Highrise at the moment. However, TGT used Basecamp for a long period of time. They eventually abandoned it. We would have to ask them what the reasons were. If I recall correctly... It was that Basecamp lacked features, but I am not certain which ones.

The Laws of Subtraction provide insights and lessons towards removing the clutter and honing in on the essence in order to awaken the creativity and innovation that generally gets buried under a deluge of non-essential information. Through a series of excellent stories that serve as examples for his laws in action, May highlights the unique features of these laws and their applicability to everyday life, both professional and personal

"Keeping it simple isn't easy. By exploiting subtraction in innovation, we've been able to create an environment of freedom and creativity that allows us to thrive." - Brad Smith, CEO, Intuit

Some recent pictures of CIs in the Distribution Center.

It was impressive to watch this evolution.

More from our team in the Distribution Center.

A simple 5S improvement in the Pressroom

Good team effort to come up with this one.

A couple of great visuals from the Program Management Dept.

As you facilitate lean improvement events, I hope the distillation from a few recent experiences below benefit you as they have me

A simple improvement to make their work a bit easier!

A push system, where work is foisted upon a department from the outside, by its very nature will lead to overloading a system and exploding lead times. A pull system, where work is taken from a pile of projects by the people doing the work when they're ready for it, ensures that the department matches inputs and outputs for maximum efficiency. Interestingly, this approach is rare. There's a tendency in the office environment to treat "production" capacity as infinite. Partly this tendency is due to people's willingness to work late into the night or on weekends. Partly this tendency is due to the difficulty of calculating how much time a particular project will take. Inherent in knowledge work is the inability to take a project to completion in a smooth, uninterrupted flow.

Pick a process to start and "pull"

How about JT production. JTs are currently pushed into the Planning Dept from Program Mgt. Let's see how we would install a pull system.

And so we look for innovative, unique, breakthrough improvements and overlook seemingly mundane, simple ones. Here's how simple it can be. A few weeks ago, I was in Derby , England, at Pride Park, home of the Derby County Rams. While in a conference room overlooking the football pitch (or soccer field, for Americans), I watched one of the groundskeepers painstakingly but quickly laying out orange cones very precisely on both ends. Once I saw what he was doing, it was so simple yet effective.

Watch the Neuroscience of Deming video - pretty interesting. Makes me want to re-read Deming.

Inspired! I love it. This is terrific reinforcement of the Learning Organization ideal.

I can attest to this from personal experience. Small & simple rules the day!

I think, in looking at the total of Deming's work, that the point he is trying to make is that looking to blame people is not a good strategy for improvement. The impact due solely to a person's direct action (not including their interaction with the system and with others) is small in comparison to that of the system within which they work. So, Deming (and I) want people to focus on improving the system; which will achieve better results than searching for what people did wrong.

In my talk, I argue that we should forget about "change management." Instead, we should involve people in solving business problems. Human beings are problem solving machines. We love solving problems. Someone invented the bow & arrow when she realized that the fastest human carrying a knife wasn't going to outrun the slowest gazelle. The brilliance of Angry Birds is that each level requires a new round of problem solving - which birds to use and where to aim them.

Targets are useful because they let you measure something specific. Target conditions are useful because they help make sure that your targets don't blind you to the big picture.

The same goes for the four basic questions around the daily accountability process - the process by which leaders facilitate effective follow-through. The follow-through that I am referring to is about the countermeasures necessary for what some refer to as (team-based):

Super fast document creation.