DailyKaizen

Culture change appears to be happening all around now, to the point that I can’t keep track of all that is happening. It’s spreading!

Get something up on the wall and we’ll adjust as we go.

This was the instruction of one of our Information Services Directors to his staff, who he asked to begin using visual systems. I was invited on a tour of their visual systems along with the opportunity to ask staff what this meant for them. If you can imagine that in most companies, I.T. is supposed to be a support service that is never seen or heard from and where expectations for reliability are high. There’s also pressure to always say “yes” - as this Director put it, “You get a hold of us and you have a budget code and we can’t say no.” In an environment like this in most companies, you can imagine that creativity and staff empowerment are not the norm.

I saw just the opposite, in a series of visual systems, that did everything from introduce a team to the rest of their colleagues in terms of what they do and how they serve, to rich descriptions of kaizen and post-kaizen work and their impact on the members we serve.

This director tells his staff that “Problems are Gold” and sets up a goal of 50 problems for each manager. In this department, the reward for problems is a small troll doll. There are trolls visible throughout the department as a result.

On another visual system, a workgroup had laid out their priorities using sticky-notes, a visible representation of what they were going to do, but more importantly what they were not going to do. This would be hard in the I.T. space. I asked how it felt for the team to begin workplanning in this semi-public way. The answer was, “They felt honored by the process. It shows respect.”

In another example, we were introduced to a heijunka system for managing service requests, on line since April, 2007. Using this system, each responder gets no more than 2 hours of work at a time, at spaced intervals. This is a change from previous assigning schemes which simply loaded up boxes until all the requests were taken in.

Here is what the Heijunka looks like, in electronic form:

You can see the intervals, and the effort made to keep everyone at a understandable level of productivity. I asked about this, too, to their manager. What was it like to go from assigning tickets as they came in, to a person focused on leveling the work? Here was the response.

I didn’t want to be micromanaging. I’m not doing that. I’m giving them Clarity.

Finally, I asked what it was like for the manager herself. Any unanticipated problems?

I needed to change my schedule. I could not go to meetings without regard for the need for the box to be managed every 2 hours. Either I cut meetings out of my schedule or I arranged backup.

So the manager added structure and sacrificed flexibility to support her staff. And what did that feel like, I asked?

It feels fair.

All in all, I probably saw 20 different ideas that teams came up with to make their service visible, and make it a little better every day. When we started the tour, the Director said, “Let me show you what we’ve done and then you can give me suggestions or pick it apart.” I didn’t have any suggestions, just appreciation for the ideas that were flowing down the hallways and into every part of this business unit. It’s fun to think that in every part of every company there’s a monstrous capacity for creativity waiting to be unleashed.

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