If Joe want to see his organisation change he needs to make sure:
- He is fully prepared and educated about the principles of lean
- Lean should be applied organically from within the organisation
- He needs as many allies and supporters as possible within the Organisation
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Joe realizes has a small part in deciding how the organisation work. He is a small fish in this big world. There are are many questions in his mind….. Is he ready for the change, how can he educate himself ? Is it possible to change the minds of people who are working the way they are for almost their lifetime? How powerful is a small fish in big world?
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Introducing a new cartoon character (Average) Joe McLean. Joe has graduated from college last year and got a great job at big company in the town.
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Here is a version of Gemba walk check checklist that we used initially when we started with gemba walk. It has helped us to align our efforts to help the flow of products. For this to work you would need following data collection in place for each workstation:
With operators trained to update the data and identify reasons that interrupt flow, we could use following questions:
Gemba Walk Checklist:
For each process and company this may vary and it will change too based on where you are 0n the lean transformation Journey. I would love to hear what others use and their thoughts.KD35XBJEW
I am always interested in how to get people started on their lean journey and also how different cultures and companies behave, learn and progress on their journey. What I have seen working in India and here in US is that many times people get intimated by the change when you throw in all the lean jargon and fancy Japanese words. I learned about lean for more than a year at the beginning of my career without knowing that it is called “Lean”. It was just systematic application of common sense to solve problems and improve every day.
Many people start on the journey and few continue long enough to realize organization-wide transformation. Reasons may vary from place to place. The most common one is lack of commitment to continuous improvement from the top management. Other one which may not be realized by many trying to transform the company is the change in the management from traditional to Lean management. The biggest, and also least known, reason for not continuing is not being able to transform the mentality of the people involved.
Most people start on their lean journey because there is a desperate need. This may be increased cost, very long lead times which ultimately may lose a customer or close the whole business. This is their “Burning Platform”. This is often the motivation that gets many people started on lean journey but if they fail to transform the management to lean management and managers to lean manager, then they will go back to their old ways once the problem is solved. Burning platform is the opportunity to get into everyone’s mind because that is the time it is open for change. This change is possible by changing the habits, one the tools to facilitate this change is Leader Standard Work. You religiously do the right thing every day till it becomes a habit.
This is for anyone who wants to try a standup desk for their office or home office
1. Free to get started
It is very easy to get started with Standup Work station. If you just want to test the idea without investing into any furniture, just stack few books or set a box on top of your existing desk . This setup will enable you to decide if this is will work for you. Standing up may be difficult for you initially, so don’t be afraid to sit every once in a while till you get used to it. It may take a week for you to get comfortable. The limited space on the desk makes it clutter free. you tend to keep only the items you need on the desk
2. I liked the set-up , now I want the real thing!
Now that you have tested your setup and you are comfortable standing you may consider building or buying a stand-up desk. Building your own desk is not possible for everyone so I have included some ready to use Stand up desks below. Click on the picture check them out and find the one that is suitable to your need.
| Option 1 | Option 2 | Option 3 |
|---|---|---|
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3.Accessories that you may need to build mobile stand-up station
This is for the ones who like to be out there on the gemba. If you want to take your desk anywhere on the shop floor all you need is the a stand-up desk with casters and a laptop with wi-fi(optional) connection. You may also consider buying a Power strip (shown below) if you will be out there for extended period of time.
I use a a desk-top computer with UPS which provide about 20 minutes of power when moving around. Since it did not come with a inbuilt Wi-Fi capability I have to use a USB Wifi Network Adapter. You may not need this if you don’t need to log into a network to access your files. It is better to avoid any distraction of surfing the web when you are on the shop-floor.
I hope this will get you started with your own Stand up Desk. Please feel free to share your experiences or pictures of your standup desks. I will keep posting my progress with this experiment on my blog and will try to incorporate suggestions provided by all of you.
You may be also interested in:
After a few email queries and comment received on the on previous blog post “Stand-Up Work Station: After 2 weeks” I have finally decided to reveal what is on that wall. It is still evolving I am just trying to see what works the best for me and sticks to the wall for long time.
I have tried to markup the picture to explain each thing displayed on the desk and the wall. hope this helps to answer all those questions.
For more details about the how this Workstation evolved you may check the following post
1. Stand-Up Workstation
2. Stand-Up Workstation: After Two Weeks
We we try something new often people find out how others have done it in the past to avoid doing the same mistakes . Like in lean transformation we try to copy the path taken by the successful companies and apply tools and methods exactly the same way thinking we can save ourselves the pitfalls of the change process. We want to learn how people failed doing something and then avoid doing it ourselves thinking we are saving ourselves from the trouble. This may help us for short time but is not necessarily the best way.
Each organization, each process and people are different. We cannot expect the same results by applying what others have done. There is a need to experiment, allow failure and learn from it. People learn a whole lot from failure than from a success. Failure forces people to think, by thinking we learn by learning we improve.
By all means get out there and learn from others but don’t stop experimenting yourself. Learning from your own mistakes will make you and your team confident and successful at implementing Lean Transformation and will make you experts specifically for your processes. This knowledge cannot be build within the organization by just learning about what others are doing.
I got some good feedback on my post about Mission Statement from the Lean Community (Link to Discussion). After considering the inputs and some thinking I have slightly changed the statement to the following:
“Right the first time on time by optimizing all resources in safe environment via engaging people towards the goals of our Organization”
Writing a good mission statement is just the tip of the ice-berg. Best Mission Statement could be useless if we don’t have a mechanism to convert it in to a language that is easily understood by everyone in the organization. To achieve the Mission we should be able to know what the objectives that enable to reach our goal are. Consider the manufacturing operation, how does the above Mission Statement relate to key objectives of a manufacturing operation:
Key Performance Objectives
1. Quality: Right the first time
2. Delivery: On time
3. Productivity: Optimizing all Resources
4. Cost: Optimizing resources
5. Safety: In Safe environment
6. People: engaging people
7. Alignment: towards the goals of our Organization
Breaking the Mission into “key performance objectives” help you to understand how to affect various processes. The next step would be to figure out how to measure this performance and ensure we are on right track.
I got inspiration for this after reading the “4-hour Workweek” by Tim Ferriss. His advice on Productivity can be summarized by these two laws:
Pareto Law- Limit tasks to the important to shorten work time (80/20)
Parkinson Law- Shorten work time to limit tasks to the important
We have effectively used this to manage our projects in the past. The bigger the project, it is more susceptible to scope creep and also longer the duration of a project the tasks will unnecessarily expand to fill the time available for its completion.
Our solution was to break down any big projects into multiple small projects which had a time limit of just 1 week.This forced the project managers to focus only on the most important tasks. Also possible issues which affected the scope and cost of the project were realized much earlier and possible counter measure could be put in place. Many times the planing could reduced significantly when were similar type of small projects, the template developed for the first project could be used for subsequent projects.
These laws not only apply to project management , but also help us to be productive outside our professional world.
