by Lee Fried, on 27 Nov 2006 06:45 pm
The Journey
Learning From Those That Have Gone First
Yesterday I got a call from the Director of Quality of a very large health system. I had originally met this Director about eight months ago when I presented at their annual quality conference in Colorado. At that time almost nobody in the audience had ever heard of Lean, but our presentation was received well. After the talk a small group came up to me including the Director of Quality and we talked a while about how to get a Lean Department started. They were really excited about the potential of Lean. They had been dabbling in Six Sigma, but had begun to run into some of the systemic barriers that can not be overcome by simply applying process improvement tools. I sent them some of our standard materials and toolkits to help get them started. Since that time I have talked with the Director occasionally when he needed a consult. It has been fun to watch an organization follow in our foot steps, and it has been equally fun to provide consultation to someone that I really respect.
When I picked up the phone yesterday I could tell he was really excited. They have been working on two large Value Stream transformations in their lab and pharmacy ancillaries. After some initial success senior leadership had begun to take notice. Over the last month their CEO has participated in three separate Kaizen and has become a zealot. The Director was excited because he had just left the CEO’s office where he was just told that the organization would be committing to making significant investments in Lean and wanted to take the next step. The Director had been reading this blog and wanted to know more about how to start a Model Line in their organization. He sincerely thanked me for sharing our work in this medium. It felt good to know that our efforts at Group Health have helped influence good work at other organizations that will lead to better and safer patient care for thousands more. I hope others are also taking advantage and find these pages useful.