An Excerpt from the Ten Essential Tools of Continuous Improvement
The following is an excerpt from Part 15 of my upcoming book. Part 15 will be entitled “The Ten Essential Tools of Continuous Improvement.”
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Tool 7: Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA)
Plan, do, check (or study), act (PDCA) is less of a tool and more of a mindset. When combined with kaizen, instilling PDCA as a mindset into the culture of the organization acts as a natural preventative to stagnation and an elixir to “we’ve always done it this way.” PDCA and kaizen also help hone the skill of critical thinking in your team members because the “check” and “act” portions of the PDCA cycle promotes consideration of alternative courses of action.
The PDCA mindset can be applied to myriad changes within a business or institution—new products, policies, technologies—anything that represents a shift or change in the organization. For each proposed change or step-function improvement along a value stream, apply the following cycle:
Plan: All four elements of PDCA are of equal importance, but bad planning leads to poor results, so spending the right amount of time and effort in the planning stage is critical. Planning tools abound and we’re not going to spend much time introducing specific tools. With that said, essential planning elements include effective forecasting, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats analysis (SWOT), scenario analysis, benchmarking, and contingency planning. It’s at this point that I’ll insert a plug for building the capability of financial modeling into your business. Finance is the language of business and having your plan supported by an effective financial model is an essential part of the planning process.
Do: At the culmination of the planning stage, the proposed change is implemented. I like to think of the “do” stage as experimentation. As a general rule, bigger changes require more experimentation, but even small changes need some degree of experimentation before they’re fully adopted into the value stream. Too often, the decision to implement a change “comes from on high” (e.g., the C-suite) and teams jump into action and move straight to the doing stage of the cycle. In this type of directive management environment, experimentation is neglected because teams make the assumption that the decision to adopt the change is a foregone conclusion and nothing will change leadership’s mind. To correct for this, PDCA and kaizen must be adopted at all levels of the organization and not just in certain pockets. If your organization is on a continuous improvement journey but the C-suite has opted out, believing that its tenets don’t apply to them, beware—the journey is likely to be more akin to wandering in the desert.
Check and/or Study: After implementation of the initial experiment, the change is studied or checked for its efficacy. Here, the benchmarks and key performance indicators (KPIs) that were identified during the planning stage are used as tools to determine the efficacy of the experiment with, or initial installation of the change. Hence, measurement is an essential part of the check/study part of the cycle. In many organizations, skill deficiencies relating to measurement, analysis, and evaluation rear their heads and this part of the cycle either gets ignored or the short shrift. The organization instead relies on a small group of measurement and evaluation specialists that are so backlogged that by the time they get around to measuring the results of an experiment, the window of opportunity for the check/study period has passed. This lack of measurement skills can become a critical choke point for any value stream.
Act: You’ve planned, experimented, and measured outcomes—now it’s time to make a decision. Do we go back to the drawing board or make minor adjustments and run a more holistic experiment? Is it time to weave the change firmly into the value stream? What data and statistics support our decision? Are there any blinking red lights or yellow lights of caution? Thorough planning, thoughtful experimentation, and rigorous measurement are the necessary conditions for good decision making. From my experience, more corporate value is destroyed through poor decision making than from any other source. Poor decision making stems from many sources, but the most likely suspects are hubris, weak ego, and a lack of data and/or a rigorous financial model to support objectivity.
PDCA is a cycle. The larger the change, the more times around the PDCA cycle the team should go. In my experience, for any given change, PDCA doesn’t last forever and over time gives way to kaizen (i.e., the normal continuous improvement cycle) once the change becomes integrated into the value stream.
Tool 8: Managing for Daily Improvement (MDI)
Remember the good old suggestion box? There’s a reason why suggestion boxes are dead. The anonymity of inputs allowed for suggestions that were unhelpful at best and toxic at worst. Also, the suggestion box was rarely opened, and when it was, its contents were quickly discarded and ignored.
MDI is like a transparent suggestion box that actually gets opened and evaluated on a regular basis. It’s a tool for crowd-sourcing ideas from your team for small, incremental improvements to specific points along the value stream.
If your team is physically co-located, MDI is as simple as finding a whiteboard, placing it in a conspicuous place, and letting the fun begin! Please note that MDI is most effective in a team or departmental environment. MDI is seldom implemented at the company level because recommendations for small improvements are best triaged at the departmental level and the opportunity for anonymity increases.
To illustrate the cadence of MDI, we’re going to assume that your team or department holds a weekly or bi-weekly meeting for communication and KPI monitoring. It is to this meeting that MDI will be added to the agenda. To implement MDI in your department, do the following:
Place a large whiteboard in a conspicuous place and ask your most talented artist to write “Managing for Daily Improvement” across the top.
Make ample sticky notes available to all team members.
Instruct the team to write down ideas for small, incremental improvements on a sticky note as they think of them in the normal flow of business.
The team member with the idea then places the note on the whiteboard and writes their name on it. Anonymity is not allowed in this exercise.
During the weekly or bi-weekly team meeting, the manager or team leader pulls that period’s sticky notes from the board and asks the team member whose name is on the note to present their idea to the group for consideration. Nothing needs to be prepared for this presentation—no shiny PowerPoint™ deck, no handouts, just a simple explanation of the proposed improvement.
The team leader or manager then leads a short discussion on the proposal, asking for feedback from the rest of the team.
Finally, the proposal is either accepted, rejected, or tabled for further discussion and/or analysis if warranted.
These ideas should be simple enough to fit on a single sticky note. If the idea is more complex than a sticky note can handle, then the idea is likely too complex for MDI. Also, if an MDI is accepted, then it should be implemented as quickly as possible. PDCA still applies, because depending on the business environment, even small changes to how the value stream operates can have significant consequences downstream. Always consider downstream effects.
Why is MDI important?
It’s an easy way to give your people a voice,
Presentation skills are honed in a low risk environment,
The value of continuous improvement is reinforced by management,
Small changes can have a big impact on performance, and
MDI review sessions are a wonderful opportunity for real-time team coaching.
Warning: Don’t engage in MDI if you’re not going to do anything with the suggestions. Remember, actions speak louder than words.
Tool 9: Gemba and Gemba Boards and Gemba Walks
The word gemba is Japanese and translates literally to “the real place” or “the actual place.” For our purposes, the gemba is where the action happens and where value is created along a value stream. Later in the book, we’re going to talk in more detail about the importance of measurement and transparency, so we’ll reserve a deeper conversation about the practical application of the gemba for Part 17. For now, we’ll focus on the answer to the following question: “Andy, why do we need to add another Japanese word to our business lexicon?”
My response to this question is that managers and leaders routinely get so lost in budgets, KPIs, planning, governance, and external relations that they neglect the true source of value in their business—the gemba. Putting a name to the place where value is created is a useful tool to remind leadership to routinely pull their heads up out of spreadsheets and shiny decks and go to where the action happens.
In a manufacturing or service environment, finding the gemba is straightforward—-there’s invariably a production/assembly line, storage facility, kitchen, maintenance room, or some other physical location where the value stream is in the open and visible. For other business types (e.g., professional services), the gemba can be more difficult to locate—especially in hybrid and/or fully remote working environments. But just because your business is decentralized or utilizes what some would still refer to as “non-standard” operational models doesn’t mean the gemba doesn’t exist and certainly doesn’t give leadership permission to avoid getting their hands dirty (either literally or figuratively) by going to the gemba.
Before we go further, two definitions are in order:
A Gemba Board is a physical or digital board that houses a team or department’s vision, goals, key wins, blockers, KPIs/metrics, hot topics, and an indicator of overall team health. While we’ve provided a stylized gemba board for reference, I recommend that the senior leaders of the organization should agree on a standardized gemba board format that includes required elements for all departments (e.g., the aforementioned list) and then allow for individual team or department customization. That way, managers will have some familiarity with the layout as they move from department to department, but also provide some degree of flexibility to a particular team to make their board as useful to them as possible. This last point is critical. If a gemba board has no real or perceived value to the department that’s in charge of maintaining it, then it will get created once and then die on the vine of apathy.
A Gemba Walk is an intentional visit to a department or team by a member of senior management or other organizational leader to the gemba. In other words, a gemba walk is a visit to where the work happens. In a gemba walk, the leader(s) and select members of the team gather physically around the departmental gemba board and/or another location in the department that either needs attention or should be showcased. In hybrid or fully remote work environments, the leader(s) and team members gather around the department’s virtual gemba board.
A gemba walk is an opportunity for leadership to see how work is accomplished with their own eyes, listen carefully to the challenges and opportunities the team faces, and ask questions with the intention to seek to understand challenges and opportunities so they can be an advocate for and supporter of the team or department.
Gemba walks are also:
Scheduled: Leadership should avoid being disruptive to departmental flow by scheduling their visit with ample lead time. Avoid surprise gemba walks. Note that I’m not suggesting that stopping by and saying hello to your people is a bad thing. I’m suggesting that a gemba walk is not a social visit.
Brief: A gemba walk should be brief and not disruptive to the team or department. If everyone is co-located in a physical space, everyone should stand during the walk.
Focused: Optimally everyone puts their phones on silent and the guests of the walk (leadership) shows the team respect by avoiding multitasking. Give the team your undivided attention.
Value-additive: The walk should bring value to both the leader(s) who are the department’s guests and the department. A gemba walk is NOT a perfunctory readout of results and KPIs.
Inclusive: Gemba walks are a time for everyone to stand (literally) on equal footing. Egos and deference to titles are checked at the door. The manager of the department should allow individual contributors the opportunity to speak and shine. A gemba walk is the perfect opportunity to show through actions that “we’re all in this together.”
In my own personal experience, I found gemba walks to be one of the most valuable things that I did as a leader. I had to check my ego at the door, quiet my mind, open my ears, keep my phone out of my hand, and really pay attention to what the team was saying. I especially liked to hear the voices of employees that I otherwise would not have gotten a chance to hear from! The feedback I would routinely receive after gemba walks is that team members also enjoyed the experience because the usual trappings of hierarchy were nonexistent, I was on their “turf,” and I showed a genuine interest in their work. Gemba walks are your opportunity as a leader to show that you’re an authentic, vulnerable human being who cares about their people and the work they do.
The same warning from our MDI discussion applies here and is magnified because, well, senior leadership is added to the equation. Don’t engage in gemba walks if you’re not going to do anything with the information you receive. Actions speak louder than words.
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