by Lee Fried, on 21 Oct 2007 03:54 pm
The Journey
Quote of the Week
“For the first time I feel like we are starting to really work as a team and not just a collection of individuals. I had no idea how little I knew about what the others on my team do. There is so much opportunity and redundancy. If we all focus together as a team we can do so much more.” –Director
This weeks quote came from a hallway conversation I had with a Director after we had just completed a catchball session this last Friday with a group of forty managers. This session is a big milestone for this team that I began working with about four months ago. When we began the process the team was struggling with focus and they asked me to come in and help them think about how they could align the departments in a way that would make them more effective. The team represents a group of functions that manage the organizations communications, branding, governance, government policy and many other intangible processes. Working with a group that was non-operations focused was exciting to me, because I don’t have a lot of experience working with these types of processes. It would be a great opportunity to learn so I signed up.
For the first few sessions I taught them the basics behind the A3 process and A3 thinking. I then facilitated a series of sessions where the team reflected on their current situation, defined their “True North”, developed a small set of targets and then created a set of Hoshins to guide teams in creating the how. Overall, the team has grown tremendously since we started and it is very clear that they are becoming far more focused on what they need to do moving forward to improve results. We have struggled the most with idenfitying in-process measures for non-transactional processes, but even in this area we are making progress.
Our next step will be to work with the next layer down to identify the “how” of our work-plan that will allow us to achieve our objectives. I have no doubt that the team will make big improvements this coming year. I will also now have a great example to share with future teams when I hear the infamous “lean sounds great, but we are not making cars.”