Tweddle Continuous Improvement

Very simple things to do while in Gemba

Before rushing ahead with a process mapping and improvement effort, consider some of the following questions. Some of these may seem basic, but yet I see people not thinking these basics through. If our process was much better than it is today, would it yield the performance gains we desire? How much better is today's best process compared to ours? What else besides our process might be holding us back? How much better could we get just by executing our current process with more discipline? Please understand that one of the last things I want to do is give people excuses for not doing process improvements. But since the objective of process improvement is to improve results, then we better be darn sure this is what we are going to accomplish.

In this post I am going to show you how you can use these same concepts that you use to manage your workspace to save your inbox.

A good test of whether something is overproduction or overprocessing is to question the reason why the waste exists. Overproduction is often a conscious act of producing more than necessary in order to hedge against future failures, maximize the output or utilization of a resource, to keep busy when there is no other work to be done, or just because you had a pot that served 6 when you were making dinner for 4 people.

Here are a few of my favorite Bruce Lee quotes that I find helpful as a source of inspiration: "The less effort, the faster and more powerful you will be." "It's not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential." "If you always put limit on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them."Obey the principles without being bound by them. "Fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times." "Knowing is not enough we must apply. Willing is not enough we must do" "Those who are unaware they are walking in darkness will never seek the light."

"A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer.""To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person." "A goal is not always meant to be reached. It often serves simply as something to aim at." "To grow, to discover, we need involvement which is something I experience everyday, sometimes good, sometimes frustrating."

"There are four purposes of improvement: easier, better, faster, and cheaper. These four goals appear in the order of priority." Shigeo Shingo

Lean Tip #406 - Clearly specify all Activities Standardize work Content (what is being done?) Sequence (in what order?) Timing (how long should it take?) Outcome (what clearly defined measurable results are expected?)

As Ohno says in The Birth of Lean: "If you're going to do kaizen continuously, you've got to assume that things are a mess." Brilliant.  If everything is OK, I have no need to improve.    Why is this hard for us to do??  Is it our culture of self-esteem, holding "feeling good about ourselves" as a supreme value? Do we simply compare ourselves to ourselves, so we always look OK?  Are we all from Lake Wobegon, the ficticious Minnesota town where all of the children are above average? A view of a zero-waste state will shake us out of this arrogant stupor.  With that perspective, things are indeed a mess.

Great post on standard work

When you are at the gemba, you are watching the work. We like to say you are "looking for waste" and list seven, or eight, or ten different categories of waste that you are supposed to look for. I think it is simpler than that. An ideal workflow is smooth. The product moves smoothly, without starts and stops, without sudden changes in momentum. The people move smoothly. Each of their motions engages the product and advances the work in some way. Machines do not interfere with the smooth movement of product or people. Information flows the same way. There is nothing in how it is stored, retrieved, or presented that causes people to break their smooth rhythm. When you watch the work, try to visualize what smooth would look like. Smooth has no wasted motions, no excessive activities. Anything that doesn't look smooth is likely the result of an accommodation, an awkward operation, poor information presentation, poor computer screen layout and workflow. Just another way of looking at it.

Within virtually any serious lean transformation effort, there are moments of truth. The "truth" represents not the orthodoxy of lean tools and even systems, both extremely important, but lean principles themselves. Violate the principles and fail that moment of truth. Do it consistently and the lean transformation will be nothing more than a lean charade. Effective lean leaders must be unbending when it comes to principles. See figure below for the lean principles as identified in the Shingo Prize Model. So, why do lean leaders waffle on lean principles?

I recently reviewed a new webapp call Pomodoro Daisuki on a tip from Jim Benson at Personal Kanban. Pomodoro Daisuki is a chrome app that combines  a simple digital personal kanban board along with the the basic functionality of the pomodoro technique.

A good article on the basics.

So, the Lean takeaway from this? Always ask yourself if hitting the metric will make you get closer to your goal, or further from it. There will always be a cost to hitting metrics. If it was easy, you would not be measuring it. Don't let a local cost override the big picture purpose of tracking the data in the first place. When you tweak your data collection methods for convenience or cost reasons, ask yourself if the customer is better off because of it. You are better off eliminating a metric that has been twisted around than to pretend that it is indicating success.

"We don't know what the problems are…..that's why we make them visible. We don't know what the root causes of the problems are….that's why we ask 5 Whys? We don't know what the evidence is….that's why we collect data. We don't know what is actually happening….that's why we observe. We don't know what solutions will succeed….that's why we experiment."

I think there are some applications here for our electronic processes.

Or you can show this 47 second video! In "real time", you can see how quickly the customer receives their order. You can see the reduction in inventory. You can see less work in process. And you can see the order fulfilled in 29 seconds vs 60. Half the time! Imagine how much time you save with a longer chain of processes. Because the video's so short, you can easily work it into your session, between phases of a lean game or after a more intensive sit and listen session.

Skip it. Avoid it. Leave it out. Never touch the stuff. Don't be tempted. Stick to the story. Succeed through subtraction. This man is a lean thinker. And he bears an uncanny physical resemblance to both John Shook and James Womack, after they borrowed some hair from Mike Rother. If Elmore Leonard cared what a gemba walk was, he might say something like this:

In this article, he shares a simple and effective application of Kaizen and the Kaizen frame of mind to a common activity in business meetings: drinking coffee.

I'm putting each of these on my Amazon wish list.