by Lee Fried, on 07 Nov 2007 06:57 pm
The Journey
Step One in Creating Management Standard Work
We currently have a meeting problem! Between oversight sessions, committees, planning events and other across functional coordination activities leaders throughout the organization don’t have time to spend in the gemba, participate in kaizen or develop their people. I recently spoke with an executive that had collected data on the activities of their calendar and it was staggering how much time they were spending in meetings trying to coordinate across functions. There are many causes for our problem including multiple layers of management, complex products, lots of silos, and a lack of management standard work.
We have begun the work of implementing a new management system and there is a great need to free up time on managers calendars to support planning, deployment, checking and improvement work. The good news is that this problem is very visible to all of leadership and they are committed to starting to take some steps to improve the situation. The first step will take the form of a design workshop that will include our most senior leadership team with the purpose of starting to build standard work for management. The scope will be small, yet, still very challenging. During the event we hope to be able to set email policies for the organization, standardize our meeting processes to make them more efficient and to standardized the checking process at the highest levels. Most importantly, we are going to focus on standardizing the organization’s calendar so that “meeting free zones” are created, and a cadence for meetings links the top to the bottom of the organization.
While many of these changes may seem small, I believe that if they are successfully implemented we will be able to free up a significant amount of time for improvement. Additionally, since the standards will be set at the highest levels of the organization we will also be setting a great example for the type of behaviors that we want to promote moving forward.
on 07 Nov 2007 at 11:51 pm 1.Jon said …
Amazing as always guys. Way to go.
on 17 Nov 2007 at 5:46 pm 2.Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog » Management Improvement Carnival #23 said …
[...] Step One in Creating Management Standard Work by Lee Fried – “We have begun the work of implementing a new management system and there is a great need to free up time on managers calendars to support planning, deployment, checking and improvement work.” [...]