by Lee Fried, on 05 Mar 2007 06:48 pm
The Journey
Never Enough Consultants
Having management responsibility over part of Group Health’s centralized Lean consultancy I had a lot of questions for other Lean leaders at last weeks conference about how they structure and support their own Lean resources. I spoke to several leaders, all of which had different models that they deploy. Some of the organizations had large corporate teams of internal consultants while others had few to none. Some tied their programs to their leadership development track while others used primarily external resources. The one thing that was common to everyone I talked to was that no matter how you organize and support Lean there was never sufficient consulting support. One thing I found interesting was that the companies that seemed to be the most successful actually had a very small ratio of consultants to employees. Actually, the company I was most impressed with is massive, multi-national, has successfully been deploying Lean across the world and only has a handful of internal and external consultants.
How can this be? The answer is simple. These companies believe that the responsibility for improvement and change rests with line management, thus they expend their resources in developing line managers. This means taking a long-term approach and investing a large amount of time in taking managers off the production lines to learn. I believe this approach is far more challenging, yet in the long term it is the only way to make Lean sustainable.
In the Model Line we are taking these learning’s to heart and are designing a very aggressive learning plan for our leaders. On top of nintymanagers and supervisors going through our Customer Focused Management Training Program (similar to TWI) we are also going to train all nine Directors and fifteen managers on how to facilitate and lead an RPIW. Each of these leaders will participate in one RPIW and then lead two. Our goal is to have this completed within the next twelve months which will require a major investment in time and energy. Once completed we will have a critical mass of Lean leader that are technically competent and are ready to lead change throughout the organization.