by Lee Fried, on 20 Jun 2006 04:45 pm
The Journey
Keeping up the Energy
Today I dropped in and spent some time with the team that works in the process we focused on during last week’s Kaizen. About half of the changes have been implemented and many more changes will go live over the next couple of days once people have been trained to the new standard work. Often the week after the Kaizen is a taxing one for a team due to being tired from the Kaizen and fatigue from all of the changes. Walking into the work environment today it was immediately evident that this was not the case with this team. There was a ton of energy in the room and many staff mentioned how amazing it was that “changes they had been trying to make for years had finally come to fruition.” It was energizing to steal their energy. The next couple of weeks will be hard, because the changes are so transformations, but I am confident they will be successful. If the team keeps their energy up there is no telling how successful they will be.
on 21 Jun 2006 at 6:32 am 1.Ted Eytan said …
What’s a specific example of a change they made?
on 21 Jun 2006 at 8:15 am 2.Lee Fried said …
In my opinion the highlight of the new process is the reduction of handoffs. In the old process one team had to send requests to up to seven different departments asking them to do small, easy process steps before the work could move forward. This meant that the work would often have to wait weeks before all the pieces were completed. Additionally, the team had no authority over the other groups so they often felt powerless in supporting the customer. In the new process the team has full authority to complete all the steps required to move the work forward without ever having to send it to another department. This was made possible by standard work! For the customer it will mean turnaround times that are half as long with less resources required.