by Lee Fried, on 05 Apr 2008 03:57 pm
The Journey
What a Difference a Year Can Make
A year seems like a short period of time, but in my world it seems like an eternity for some reason. Things are moving so fast, yet, we all feel the pressure of how much faster things needs to move. Often it takes a milestone event to judge progress and yesterday I got the opportunity to attend one. Each year the management team of about eighty people of the supporting service department I am part of get together to share best practices. The theme of last years event was process improvement. Teams learned some basics from their peer early adopters and then took them back to the work place to try things out. A year ago hardly any of the teams had any Lean experience, but everyone was eager to try something new.
Yesterday we all got back together to share best practices and to learn more advanced improvement techniques. It is staggering how far many of the team have improved in just a single year. Managers from web services, Information Services, Human Resources, Software Development, Data Warehousing, Quality, etc. all shared their visual management systems, demand/capacity planning systems and Lean/agile improvement efforts. It was amazing to see. In one year the level of knowledge had grown so much higher. It was even more impressive to step back and realize that most of the improvement in process and thinking was self-initiated. In other words teams had not waited for a Lean consultant to come to town and teach them to improve their work, they had instead gone out on their own and learned through experimentation. From their own work and from others. What an incredibly powerful example of what can happen with the right mix of leadership, competition and urgency from the market place.
On my way home I took a call from the VP of oversees our Model Line work, which is in a different Division of the organization. He was calling me to share what he had learned on his Gemba walk that day. In the first set of work cells we put in place a year ago in his largest production area a new process had been created by the teams for daily improvement. Staff with improvement ideas submit a proposal to test a new idea during the morning huddle through a standard process. The team leaders then work with the person that submitted the idea to structure an experiment to test the idea that day with the hope of bringing the results back to the team the following morning to share in the huddle and if successful for adoption by the entire team. The process had created quite a buzz across the teams and was a positive surprise to the VP. The teams had not asked senior leaders to help figure this out or for permission. They had done it on their own! I can’t tell you how different this is from the norm. A year ago when we put those work cells in place this would never had happened. I love it. What a difference a year can make, I just cant wait to see what I find next year!