by Ted Eytan, on 05 Sep 2007 07:22 pm
The Journey
Frequency is more important than duration, part 2
If you could have a leader participate in a planning process for 10 hours once a year, or for 2.5 hours four times a year, which would you recommend?
I have a feeling the answer to this one won’t be controversial for the LEAN community!
I was on a walking meeting with my boss yesterday and he asked me how he (and the organization) could be engaged in and confident of the planning process for our clinical information system as my sabbatical looms very near (more on that tomorrow).
Well, I said, we have converted from a yearly planning horizon in 2004, to a pseudo-quarterly planning process in 2005, to a true 90 day planning process in 2006 and 2007. Each 90 days comes with a set of predictable steps for involvement of the stakeholders for the electronic nervous system for our health care processes. He wondered if we were getting it right, if we would provide enough bandwidth and input to folks who wanted to implement improvements in all of the clinical areas we support.
I felt the answer is in the cadence of the planning event, rather than in the accuracy of any individual one. Everyone gets a chance to make it better if they do it enough times. With frequency, conversation never really ends, it just continues on a schedule.
I ended my appeal with, “It really is our accountability to deliver on the cadence of this process, and if we don’t, then we are not living up to the expectations we’ve set and we should be in trouble.”
He asked how we’ve been doing so far, and I told him - we’ve completed three cycles, each with “greater” success than the one before it, and the next cycle would start soon. I did not know the exact day it would start, just that I was confident that it would start. What I worried about just a little was the fact that we are about to do a major software upgrade, and whether that would throw the schedule off. That would be hard us to experience.
As it so happens, just a few hours later, stakeholders received a well crafted message from our clinical information system manager, announcing that the 4th quarter process was beginning anew. She included a reminder of the steps involved in the process, down to the day, and even a full accounting of the number of work units available for the team to work on. She also announced that through the creation of different sized work cells, the number of work units has increased from the previous quarter, allowing the team to do more work than expected outside of the major upgrade.
And so the cycle did start, on time, and without any special prompting or worry on our part. Great managers (as this one is) know the value of a predictable process, and we will enter into a fourth cycle of planning in the time that we used to only have one cycle. Everyone gets a lot better doing something 4 times instead of 1 time. Thanks, Hoshin strategy planning!