DailyKaizen

How often we assume we know more then we really do. That was the big learning for me over the last six weeks. I have been working closely during this time with a Sensei to do some very complex value stream analysis. The area we are mapping is made up of around 20 separate and specialized departments. Any given piece of work could have one of a thousand potential routings through the system and the complexity of the processes is mind numbing. The purpose of the work it to determine the common pathways and product families so that we are able to design a future state that is simpler and more efficent.
Going into this work I had already done a significant amount of analysis in the area from a prior project. As a result I thought I had a pretty good grasp on where we needed to go. Working with the Sensei I started to become frustrated. She insisted that every piece of information that I brought to the table be verified. She dove far deeper into the detail then I thought was nessessary at the time. She allowed no assumption to go uncheck. She also pushed me hard to support everything with evidence and data. I am not a detail person and often have to force myself to slow down and focus. As you can imagine this was torcher for me.
When we first started with this work it was very dauting. The complexity made it hard to imagine that it would ever be possible to gain clarity around the current state. Through this work my Sensei taught me a great lesson: Huge problems can be solved by breaking them down into very small, detailed pieces. As the work progressed the value of her methods really started to surface. The route cause of many problems started to surface, many of which did not match my original assumptions. Now, six weeks later we still have a lot of work to do, but we have much greater clarity on the why, how, and when.

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