August 22, 2013

1:00 pm EST

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Challenge: Not all senior leaders have the vision, understanding and/or have “bought in” to making Lean a priority.

This is one of the critical steps and foundation blocks that must be in place to ensure the success of any Lean Transformation and Organizational Culture Change.

Root Cause: In our brainstorming sessions, the following were identified as some of the possible reasons this occurs.

• Lack of Knowledge/Education about what lean truly is and its benefits.
• Not aligned with Strategic Goals
• No clear metrics or goals associated
• Unclear about the Return on Investment
• Lack of ongoing communication
• Cultural issues internally
• Conflicting priorities
• Control
• Trust
• Resources to support and sustain lean
• Fear of this being just another “flavour of the month”

Each root cause listed above impacts leadership support and each one of those challenges requires an investigation to determine what would need to be in place to most effectively address them.

Possible Solutions:

Some of the possible solutions or ideas that could help to begin to address the challenge of achieving Senior Leadership buy in were as follows:

• Help Senior Leadership understand the value and overall system impact to create the vision
• Learn to speak the language of the Sr Leadership team and what is important to them
• Demonstrate the ROI of Lean through metrics meaningful to Leaders and its Strategic Alignment within the Organization
• Create capacity with staff and allocate resources to support the vision
• Create small wins which tie into the larger picture and work towards winning over naysayers
• Establish Goals and Focused Scope of Project
• Within you sphere of influence, create a pro-active and empowered culture

These are some of the potential solutions that were identified from our session and are worthy of investigation and strategy. Lean Advisors employs senior consultants who are veterans in the industries they serve. To learn more about how we can help you make your organization everything that it can be, contact us.

Lean is a strategy and way of thinking that creates more value for clients by eliminating activities that are considered waste. Any activity or process that consumes resources, adds cost or time without creating value becomes a target for elimination. Lean focuses on the client and what the client feels is ‘value’.

Our approach is to focus on end-to-end ‘system-level’ improvements (as opposed to ‘point improvements’). Improving the end-to-end system-level work will dramatically improve your results – cost, quality, speed of service and flexibility. In order for a process to reach its full potential, it is important to initially understand what is happening from a system perspective (end-to-end). We must transform the selected Value Stream(s) – from request of the product/service to the actual delivery of that service. Not focusing on the end-to-end process will result in only ‘point improvements’ and create what we call ‘Exciting Chaos’. This ‘Exciting Chaos’ will inhibit the process from reaching its potential and could ultimately undermine the success of the organization. With our innovative methodology, we eliminate the risk of obtaining only minimal results and ensure your success both culturally and technically.

Presenter: Steve Withers

Senior Consultant, Black Belt, Lean Advisors, Inc.
http://www.leanadvisors.com

Steve Withers has 30 years of process improvement experience using lean thinking, six sigma, process management, and change management skills.

Before joining Lean Advisors, Steve was the Director of the Lean Sigma Centre at Canada Post, where lean thinking has contributed in excess of $200 M in savings over the last few years, as well as improvements to on-time delivery, safety, and quality. At Canada Post, Steve was responsible for setting the lean strategy, leading and coaching major process improvements, and for deploying CPC’s intensive lean and six sigma training programs.

Steve received his hands-on training while working directly at the Lean Enterprise Institute for three years, and has helped them develop some of their existing educational products. While working at LEI, Steve gained hands-on experience in helping many different types of organization – some examples include, Gorton’s (food preparation), Northrup Grumman (aerospace and electronics), Lockheed Martin, Newmont Mines (gold mining), Trillium Healthcare, Tyco Healthcare, Xomed Medtronic, Kitchenaid, Whirlpool, EMS (NASA and space), Puerto Rico Electronics, Xantrex (electronics), Crane Valve, Hermes Electronics, California Microwave (aerospace), Forethought Insurance, Solectron (electronics), Hidden Hitch (automotive), Eaton Automotive, Fisher Controls, and Thomas & Betts (electronics).

Steve has a B.Sc. from the University of Toronto, and has attended the University of Tennessee’s Lean Systems Design program, Michigan State’s Logistics and Process Improvement programs, Design for Six Sigma training, and is a certified Six Sigma Black Belt. He is a certified Process Management instructor. He has been a guest lecturer on lean at St. Mary’s University, the University of Sao Paulo, Carleton University, Ottawa University, and at the Ministry of Transport in Tokyo.

Steve is known for his dynamic training style, and for his ability to motivate teams to make rapid and sustainable change in any type of organization.

PMI OVOC Saturday Seminar Series – September 15, 2012

They tend to overlook the fact that middle management is already operating in a stressed to the limit environment and the idea of implementing Lean sounds great but they have limited  time to focus on it.  Lean is no different than any other major change, it requires continuous effort from all levels-especially middle management.  So leadership needs to recognize that when they decide to implement Lean to make their organizations more competitive and increase their client satisfaction, they must deal with the fact this is going to take a commitment of time by the middle management.  And if the middle management is already working at 100%, then common sense says some activities the middle management is presently doing will have to be eliminated from their duties to free up time for continuous improvement and training/coaching.

Middle management fills their day, fighting fires, running to meetings, answering communication from above and below while making sure the product/service is going out to the clients.  They do all this, and all the while they are being told to cut costs, improve quality and speed of service.  Add to those pressures, the fact that they have little idea what the priorities should be, quite often it appears they are sent new ones regularly and each one of the priorities is “high priority”.

This type of situation is common in most organizations.  The solution is to adapt and apply the similar concepts and thinking of Lean to the roles of middle management.

Lean Advisors can help…. Once we understand the executive priorities and analyze the middle management activities we can then begin to develop Standard Leadership Roles which will allow managers more time to do activities such as training, coaching, continuous improvement etc. that support and drive the strategy of the corporation.  These Standard Leadership Roles will take the stress level down and allow the middle managers to work at an optimum level.  To learn more about how we can help your organization, contact us.