Tweddle Continuous Improvement

Office Waste

How many handoffs are there within each process? How visible are the key performance indicators - cost, quality, delivery, and safety - to each person working in the department? Does each process have a clear owner? How much and how often do people have to rework the information that they receive from their upstream colleagues? How often and how long do people (or customers) have to wait for information? How many different ways are there of doing a job (i.e., do you have standard work for each function)?

Operating systems, government programs, established non-profits, teachers with tenure, market leaders, businesses with long-standing customers--these organizations are all facing an uphill battle in creating a culture where there's an urgency to improve. Just because it's uphill doesn't mean it's hopeless, though. One of the most essential tasks a leader faces is understanding just how much the team is afraid of making things better (because it usually means making things worse--for some people).

Lean as a habit.

Great article on habits.

Of all the skills I've learned in the past 7 years of changing my life, one skill stands out: Learning to be comfortable with discomfort.

Phenomenal article / idea! I love it.

Please go out and fail at something today. And then figure out how to do better and then do it again.

A 2 second improvement

Use this in 5S Class

Use these in our CI Class

With the process interface in mind, we must ask why one more time to cascade from operator error, down to specific actionable topics. Here are some examples of these actionable topics

Great list! Let's take this advice to heart each time that "human error" comes up.

It's often easier to describe what lean isn't than what it is. Lean isn't about being spartan, skinny or stingy. It isn't about slash-and-burn cost cutting, reducing headcount or beating up suppliers to get the lowest price. Being lean means systematically removing anything impeding the free flow of value to the receiving party. Lean innovation isn't about doing more with less; it's about doing better with less. That might sound like a nuance, but think about it: You've undoubtedly said "no more" many times, even about something good. When was the last time you said, "Let's not have better"? There's no limit on better.

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.

Good primer on PFMEA's

What's the point of the morning meeting? Paul Akers says it is about building a team. You can not build a team when the leader is talking. The leader must ask employees questions so they talk. When employees talk you are building a team.  What do you ask? Ask them "what bugs you?" Problems are not the employees fault. Management is to blame.

We are all faced with problems to solve in our workday. There are many problem-solving methods, and the six-step method is just one of them. The problem for most people is that they do not use one process to solve problems and issues or to make decisions. Another problem is that people are not consistent in how they solve problems. They do not find something that works and then do it the same way over and over to be successful. 

One of the foundational principles of kaizen is that one takes many small steps toward the ideal condition, continually. The strength of this approach is that by keeping the steps small it is both psychologically and physically easier to take action, causing a positive feedback loop as people are encouraged to take more small steps. However there are also weakness with kaizen as improving in small steps.