DailyKaizen

Next week I will have the opportunity to facilitate the beginning of a Hoshin Strategic Deployment process.  One of the goals of the Model Line is to find new and more effective ways to plan and deploy improvement efforts and resources for the organization.  We are starting with a single business line, but hope to take our learning’s to the greater organization for adoption. 

In preparation for the event we have asked the Model Line leadership team to identify key outcomes they would like to achieve over the next year through Model Line implementation as well as to list all of the improvement projects that are currently in queue for 2007.  Our goal is to gain agreement on what work is required to reach the desired outcomes and then everything else comes off their plates.  This is the only way that we will be able to have enough support and operational resources to realign the organization to one that flows horizontally.  As the homework has trickled back in it has blown me away how much work is currently underway within each of the functional areas.  Some departments have dozens of projects underway or in queue, most focused on optimizing vertically, few focused cross-functionally.  Priorities are constantly changing and the time to just manage the inventory of partly completed projects must be huge.

Moving forward we will encourage departments to continue to improve on their own, but supporting resources will be focused on making improvements across the departments along the Value Stream.  We will down the number of projects to a handful, and focus, focus, focus.  Hoshin will be a powerful tool and I can’t wait to learn.