by Lee Fried, on 31 Oct 2007 08:59 pm
The Journey
Hoshin Change Over
As I have dicussed recently I have a new role working with the leadership team in transitioning the organization from our current planning system that is a classic MBO (management by objective) to a Hoshin Kanri system. The challenge is huge and its not as many articles characterize simply a exercise of changing to a new set of tools and methods. Hoshin Kanri is a management system that will bring discipline, new thinking and most importantly a new set of behaviors to our organization.
If we stay the course and continue to hold leaderships engagement it will eventually result in a very different culture, but loosing this engagement is also our greatest risk early on. Our countermeasures are fairly straight forward to ensure we balance the short and long-terms needs of the organization so their is a willingness to stay the course:
- We will need show results quickly. Thus we need to focus the organizations energies on only the most important few areas for improvement. This means that in many parts of the organization improvement needs to be strictly limited to stabilization and standard work in order to properly support the Hoshin changes.
- We need a heavy dose of Lean leadership, technical training and Sensei support for our Executives to continue to learn lean thinking and behaviors. We need to work very closely with our CEO and his team to help them guide them in determining the “how”
- We need to organize our consultancy in order to best support the behaviors and thinking that we are trying to create. It will be our job to always help, but never do!
- We need to treat this work as one of the pillars of the Lean Management system and thus it needs to be implemented with all of the other parts to work effectively.
- Finally, we need to communicate, communicate and communicate so that everyone in the organization comes along on the journey with us. In order to engage staff we also need to communicate primarily through story telling, a very different way of communicating then how it is currently done.
Any one else out there want to add to the list?
on 27 Nov 2007 at 1:16 pm 1.Jeff said …
Lee,
Don’t forget the scientific method! That’s what PDCA is after all. And especially in health care, people understand the scientific method very well, so your challenge is connecting it to PDCA and Lean.
I usually use this form of the Scientific Method (Wikipedia goes into all the detail):
1) Observe Problem
2) Develop Hypothesis
3) Conduct Experiment
4) Analyze Results
5) Take Action (implement and standardize, start over, etc)
Connecting this to PDCA:
P=1&2 (hence 80%)
D=3
C=4
A=5
I often take groups of all walks of life through this, and rarely does someone not recognize it from previous learning, maybe back to middle school. That’s the skill in people you need to tap! You’ve already got a head start if you chose to invoke it!
Hope this helps…Jef
on 28 Nov 2007 at 10:58 am 2.Lee Fried said …
Hi Jef,
This is very helpful feedback and I agree 100%. The wonderful thing about PDCA is that it can be applied to any work at any level of an organization and the thinking and process is the same. Simplicity.
Thanks for reading,
Lee