by Lee Fried, on 02 Jan 2008 11:52 pm
The Journey
Resolution Time
Happy New Year to everyone! I am back to work after some excellent time off with many great opportunities to reflect during my many hours snowboarding in the mountains. I hope you all had some time off as well.
Since it is that time of the year I thought I would take the opportunity to share my new year’s resolutions. To be honest I have never been very good at living up to my yearly resolutions, so maybe by becoming transparent I will do a little better this year. Last year I had three work related resolutions and only one did I fulfill. I hoped to find more time to spend in the field working one-on-one with the consultants that are working for me, but while I did better then the year before I still missed the mark. I hoped to get more organized and standardize many of my own processes, but only made moderate improvements. Finally, I pledged to improve my coaching skills, which I think I have done.
So this year I have two new resolutions in additions to the two that I did not accomplish this year. First, I would like to greatly improve my Lean technical skills. More specifically I would like to focus on implementing a quality assurance system as well as learning how to put in work leveling and capacity planning systems. Over the last two years I have skipped many steps in my development as Lean has been embraced by our Senior Leadership team very quickly. This has meant that I have not had sufficient opportunity to gain real life experience. If I am every going to be an effective Lean leader I need to role up my sleeves and learn by doing.
Second, I would like to spend more time working with clinical teams that are working in direct patient care. While I have some experience in this area I would like to supplement it. For the last two years I have spent most of my time working with Information Services teams, administrative teams, and ancillaries like laboratory and pharmacy. It is time for me to lead a large scale change in a clinical environment with all of the challenges and rewards that it will bring me.
I hope next year I can write a post about how for the first time I hit my resolution objectives 100%
Does anyone else want to share their resolutions for the year?
on 03 Jan 2008 at 3:39 pm 1.Ted Eytan said …
All right, Lee! As close to the patient is the best place to be.
As far as resolutions go, oddly (or not so when it comes to LEAN), I don’t do yearly resolutions - they remind me too much of walking in a straight line without knowing where I came from or where I’m going.
How about changing a little every day? On days when I see patients I really think about this - I ask myself what I’m going to try that’s new around the patient experience. Sometimes stuff works, sometimes it doesn’t. The outcome is that I learn something new every day (and then I blog about it).
So, when is your first shadowing in a patient care environment scheduled? What are you doing tomorrow?
Happy New year, welcome back!