DailyKaizen

Sorry to all the readers of this blog that I have not written very much lately.  The last month has been really busy and I have not had much opportunity to step away and reflect on everything that is happening.  We are in the process of defining our enterprise Value Streams, starting the second cycle of our strategy deployment process, redefining our budgeting process, etc.  The pace of change seems to grow daily. Walking out the door this Friday evening I was chatting with my Sensei and we were both really tired, yet, full of optimism.  She looked over at me and asked “did you every think we would get the company to go this far?”  Honestly, I am a pretty optimistic person, but I would be lying if I said yes. 

Our biggest challenge now as a Lean group is helping senior leadership bring it all together.  This marks a real and substantial change in our focus.  For the last couple of years as a team we have been working opportunistically to identify leaders that could become Lean champions and to support them in driving business results.  In many ways a “proof of concept” effort.  In the last seven to eight months this has changed as senior leaders have embraced Lean as a business strategy and management system.  The conversations are far more exciting and often challenging now then they were in the past.  Its no longer about “if” we do this, it now about “how” we do it.

A year ago a senior leader in the organization described our organization as collection of “900 management systems”, one for every manager in the organization.  So when I say we need to bring it all together what do I mean?  Basically, starting last year with our strategy deployment work we began to define and standardize the management system of the organization.  It was just a first step, but it gave us a foundation that we can now begin to systematically build out from defining management practices one at a time and ensuring that the entire system works effectively together.  There are countless examples of management practices that we need to standardize and bring into alignment.  Many of which we are already working on.  This includes our budgeting process, compensation, job design, measurement, etc.  The best current example is our work over the last month with Value Streams.  Value Streams as a management system and not just and improvement tool. 

We are simply taking the same thinking and practices we use to improve our work processes by implementing standard work and PDCA and applying them to our management practices.  We believe that by creating a single system that can be describes as the “way we” manage at Group Health we will create a strategic advantage that drives business performance.   This will not be easy, but a year ago I would have never believed we would even be starting this work.  Progress!

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