DailyKaizen

I had an interesting talk today with a Lean leader from another organization about how best to structure a Lean consultancy within an organization.  They are a couple of years into their Lean journey and are now at the point where they need to become more disciplined and strategic.  It seemed to me that their organization is where we were about a year ago when senior leadership began to become engaged and the demand and sophistication of work surpassed the ability of our consultancy to support it. 

In my opinion there is no single answer on the best way to organize a Lean consultancy.  It really depends on a lot of different factors including:

• The level of senior leadership engagement
• Is Lean still just a set of tools or is it a management system
• The organization’s culture
• The organization’s structure and geographic distribution
• Etc.

In our organization we have had to adjust our Lean consultancy’s structure several times over the last couple of years and we have learned a lot.  Recently, we have begun to move toward a centralized/decentralized model.  In this model the centralized consultancy supports the overall setting of the organizations Lean strategy, supporting the executive team’s development, ensures that standard methods and language is being followed and acts as a catalyst to get Lean improvement started in our Divisions.  The decentralized consultancy’s are assigned to each value stream and are in charge of developing people and executing tactical change.  Our goal is to have small centralized consultancy and the right size decentralized consultancy’s.  We believe this is the best way to deliver on our goal of building the thinking back into the teams doing the work, but it might not be the right model for others to follow.

 I am wondering if others can share the models that they have found effective?

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