Author Archives: Walter McIntyre

About Walter McIntyre

I live in Buford, GA, with my wife. Please check out my website, leanmeanprocessimprovemnt.com. I am the author of "Lean and Mean Process Improvement".

Keeping the Main Thing the Main Thing

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One of the challenges that we have as leaders is to keep our eye on the ball. Since we are responsible for driving our organizations to the finish line using the least amount of resources possible, and at the same time achieving the greatest value possible, we cannot afford to get distracted by non-core issues.

When the boat is sinking, the color of the bailing bucket is not all that important. Yet, all of us have seen leaders get caught up in issues that do not move the organization forward. Examples of issues that get in the way of progress are office politics, finger pointing, whose job it is, etc.

This is related to a leader’s ability to do only what they are uniquely to do and delegate the rest. A leader who is busy making decisions that should be made by others is, by definition, not busy making decisions that only they can make. This inefficiency leads to mistakes, demotivation and re-work.

Let’s apply some management 5S to the problem.

Sort: Separate what takes you to the finish line and what does not. Get rid of tasks and decisions that do not need to be dealt with right now (or ever). Remove politics and finger pointing. Reward those who take responsibility. Have meetings only when meetings are necessary and keep them short.

Straighten: Every task is assigned to the person or group most qualified to complete it according to the demands of the business environment. Don’t play favorites, just work on getting the best qualified people focused on what they do best, and get out of the way.

Shine: Re-assign tasks to appropriate individuals or groups. Delete tasks from all individuals and groups that are not essential to their core mission, or need to be given to another person or group.

Standardize: Document the decision and task matrices. That is who should be making what decisions on what criteria and who should be completing what tasks according to what criteria. Use these matrices going forward to avoid backsliding into inefficiencies in the future.

Sustain: Audit the team’s task and decision matrices frequently enough to maintain organization effectiveness.

The 5S principles can be applied to just about any business process. I encourage you to get out of the box and think like a champion.

Walt’s Incomplete Guidelines to Success in Life

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Can you remember when you graduated from high school or college? The feeling that you could change the world and that you could be and do anything you choose? Can you also remember the day you realized that maybe you were not going to change the world and that you were limited to what you could be?

I can. I can also remember feeling disappointed in myself when my dreams for success did not immediately come true. Fortunately, I had a wise advisor in my life that helped me put things into perspective.

My dad would always tell me to keep the faith and keep moving forward in my life. Dreams are what they are because they are not easy to achieve. They require hard work. He was right.

He told me a story once about his first job out of high school. It was a manufacturer with seven assembly steps.  When hired, he was trained to work one of the assembly steps. What he did next was the difference maker. On his breaks and weekends he would have the other operators train him to operate every piece of machinery and every assembly step. His goal was to become the most knowledgeable and most valuable employee at the plant.

The result was that two years later he was the highest paid non-management employee in the facility. This was due to the fact that he out worked everyone. He became the MVP to plant management by paying a higher personal price than others in the facility.

I have had to re-invent myself three times during my career. One was by choice and two were forced on me. In all three cases I had to take a step back in pay and prestige in order to keep forward momentum in my career. Also in all three cases, I worked to learn and grow in the new field and eventually found myself with better pay and position than the earlier jobs.

Challenge is not to be feared and neither is change.  These “C” words should be embraced because they are opportunity in disguise. If you are not facing challenge or change in your life, you are not moving forward. Consider them blessings.

Here are Walt’s Incomplete Guidelines to Success in Life:

  • Do not seek money as a goal. It has no staying power. When you spend it, it’s gone and so is its value.
  • Set goals around things that have lasting value no matter what happens to you or the economy. Knowledge, reputation, and character are good choices.
  • If you don’t ask for it you won’t get it. Not asking for help when you need it is one of the biggest failures you can have. We always stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before us. If you don’t know something, ask.
  • Seek to be the “go to” person in your organization.
  • You will reap what you sow. Invest in your growth.  Learn everything you can, seek opportunity and challenge, become the person you dreamed of being.
  • If success is where preparation meets opportunity, then you better focus on being prepared. You cannot always control opportunity, but you are totally in control of being prepared. Don’t be the person who just saw the best opportunity flash by them, but were not prepared to seize it.
  • Big successes are made up of small successes. Pay attention to detail and the “small stuff” so that the “big” stuff is cut down to size.
  • Know your tools and use them. When I exercise on my treadmill, I will watch YouTube videos to expand my knowledge.  Recently I needed to help a client with a software development problem.  I found several videos that specifically covered how others had dealt with the same issue. The following week, when talking with my client, he stated that he didn’t know I had that level expertise in software development.
  • You cannot claim greatness. Greatness is attained by accepting the challenges life gives you.

There is more to this discussion, but I will leave to the reader to continue the discussion.  The list is incomplete because your life is different than mine. What we have in common are the true north principles of life. These are the things that do not change with the ebb and flow of our lives.

Don’t be discouraged with where you are now. Instead have a vision of what you want to be and what you want to do. Then set out to make it happen.

Net Promoter Score

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Net Promoter Score is a metric that gives an external scoring of the quality of your internal processes. It measures your performance in the eyes of the customer. Like all other quality measures, NPS is only useful when kept in context.

For example, if you survey every shopper that did not purchase from you or every customer with a bad experience, you will have a negative NPS. Conversely, if you survey only successful shopper interfaces, you will get a positive score.

Let’s drill down further. You can obtain an NPS on you sales process by surveying both shoppers who bought from you and those who didn’t. You can obtain an NPS on your overall product or service by surveying all of you customers at various times in their experience with your business. You can also obtain an NPS from your employees.

As in any survey, the quality of the questions used lead to specific results. The vast majority of surveys are flawed in this respect. You can control the outcome by asking questions that lead. Political surveys conducted by the respective parties are particularly bad in this respect. If you are not willing to be brutally honest with yourself and open the door to direct and potentially painful customer comments, you are better off not traveling down the path of establishing an NPS program.

If you are the brutally honest type and you have sampled your shoppers/customer properly, here are some tips for improving your NPS.

  • Low scores can come from shoppers/customers not understanding your product or service.  Educating your shoppers/customer can help to mitigate this.
  • Low scores can come from over promising to the prospect before they are a customer. Actually, shoppers like honesty. It leads to trust and predictability. Promise only what you can reasonably deliver and then deliver it. Winning a sale by hedging, then failing, is not a win at all.
  • Low scores can come from under delivery. The corrective strategy is based upon delivering what you promise. Customers only care about what they experience. The one customer out of 10 that received a late delivery does not care that the other nine customers received on time delivery.  Of the 10 customers, the one that experienced late delivery is more likely to have stronger feelings about you than the 9 who received what they expected.
  • Expectation is the mother of all success and failure. Corrective strategy is to manage expectations.  This comes down to communication.  Don’t make the customer contact you to find out there is a problem. Control the message and expectations by being a “first strike” communications person.

Actually, I don’t like metrics like NPS very much.  They attempt to qualify customer information without statistical evaluation. Additionally, some senior managers will use NPS as if it were telling them “why” customers feel the way they do, when NPS actually only indicates the “What”.

Let’s finish with a story that relates NPS to a compass.  A group of men went deep sea fishing one Saturday.  They motored out 25 miles and began to fish.  At about three in the afternoon, they decided to head back.  Using the boat’s compass the captain pointed the boat eastward and began the trek back to shore. Four hours later, they still had no siting of the shore.  By the next morning, panic had sat in and the captain called the Coast Guard. Using the boat’s locator, the Coast Guard found them150 miles off shore. They also found a soda can with a magnetic lid sitting next to the boat’s compass, rendering it useless. The moral of the story is that a biased measurement is useless (and don’t sit magnetic objects next to your compass).

Learning From Others

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I don’t believe that we can advance our knowledge and skills in a vacuum. Can you imagine telling a child that the way to learn to ride a bike is to read a book on it? Or maybe have a doctor perform a surgery on you that they had read about in a book, but had never actually performed live?

Certainly, reading about how to do something is a part of the learning process, but there is more. Several years ago I decided that I would like to coach high school basketball. I read books and watched videos on coaching techniques.  These efforts helped me, but I had no experience in applying what I had learned.

I found that a local high school had hired someone who had coached a college division one basketball  program before moving into the area. I introduced myself to him, told him what I was after, and volunteered to help him with his team in exchange for the learning experience. He agreed and asked me to keep game stat’s on his players. One year later he got me into a head coaching position in another school.

Let’s be honest and admit that we all stand on the shoulders of others. Once this concept is embraced, we are free to evolve in our knowledge and skills. It is OK to admit that other individuals helped you along the way in your career or hobby.

So here is the plan. If you have an interest in a particular skill or knowledge area, you should certainly read as much as you can about it. The internet is a great place to find both text and video information. Next, find someone who is the most talented and approachable person you know in that skill or knowledge area, and hook up with them. Offer to help them in exchange for learning and experience. Then be diligent in fulfilling your side of the bargain, while at the same time learning as much as you can.

The result will be personal development and a friendship.  Sounds like a win/win situation to me.

One last story and a question. A current professional, and successful golfer, began his career by carrying another more experienced golfer’s clubs for an entire season. Two years later, the one who carried the clubs beat the more experienced golfer in a PGA tournament. Do some research and see who I am referring to.

Lean Six Sigma

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We don’t have control, we have choices. The best we can do is improve our method of making choices and hope for good results.

This is the rub. We generally set ourselves up for disappointment and failure because we make emotional choices and don’t get the results we want. We assume that our environment is predictable and that the universe behaves according to a fixed process that coincides nicely with our expectations. The plain truth is that you don’t know what you don’t know. And sometimes, you are not even aware that you don’t know.
This may seem like a bunch of idle chatter, but the concept impacts businesses everyday. This is why Six Sigma and Lean are so important in our global economy. Reducing variability and making processes more predictable improves the quality of our decision making. Less emotion and more critical analysis.
I did an experiment while participating in a March Madness Basketball Pool this past year. I entered three different brackets. One bracket was based upon selecting my favorite teams, one was based upon my “gut feelings” about who would win, and the last I did using statistical data from experts in the college basketball world.
These are the typical decision making strategies seen everyday in business. The emotional decision, the gut feeling, and the critically analyzed decision. In the case of my brackets, the one based on my emotions (favorite teams) fared the worst. The Bracket based upon my gut feelings did marginally better. The bracket based upon statistical research did really well.
This is the point behind Six Sigma and Lean. Moving toward data based decisions.  It doesn’t  mean that using gut feelings is always bad. There is a time and place for everything. When properly implemented, Six Sigma and Lean will reduce variation in your processes and make them more predictable. This in turn increases the quality of our choices.

Replace Yourself

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A gentleman named Wilber Margol used to say that to move forward you have to replace yourself. In other words, develop someone to take over your work so that you can move forward to other things. This seems simple at first. I don’t believe that anyone would disagree with his wisdom.

Carrying this out, though, is a different story. Whether it is pride, or fear, or both I don’t know. There is typically a reluctance to turn work over to someone else who may do things differently or better than you. The result is that you never really replace yourself and you fail to move on.

I have always wanted to surround myself with people smarter than me. The way to further my career is to have a staff that makes me look good. This is not about taking credit, because that will blow up in your face. Instead it is about giving credit for a job well done, which demonstrates leadership.

I want to share two stories with you. I led an engineering team designing a small power station on a military base. In one of our status meetings, a high ranking member of the “Brass” was in attendance. The Captain who oversaw the contract work taking place on the base began the meeting by discussing all of the active projects. Nearly every sentence began with “I”.

The Brass interrupted the Captain after about 5 minutes by saying “Mr! Your are one busy SOB”. He promptly walked out. He told me later that he was disgusted with the Captain’s failure to recognize the efforts of others.  I wonder how the Captain’s career progressed from there?

Second story. Recently, I found myself in need of a firmware engineer. I made it a point to hire someone who was significantly more knowledgable than me (relatively easy to do). I am not interested in be the “emperor in his new clothes”. The result was a new employee who immediately found a better approach our our development problems. I gave him free reign and he help us accomplish an important milestone in our project.

I gave him the credit and was rewarded with a pay raise. Zig Ziglar would be proud of me.  I wonder how my career will progress from here?

The moral of the story, and my personal philosophy, is this. Immediately, begin the process of replacing yourself with the smartest people you can find. It will take courage and confidence, but in the end, the reward is worth it.

Change Leadership

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All management strategies and paradigms, from old school to Lean, have one element that is the same. That element is people. People are not pawns on a game board, they are not machines and they don’t always follow management’s vision.

In fact, the people side of management is never clear cut, and is nearly always messy. Everyone has their motives for doing the the things they do. Not everyone has the same goals in mind.
Failure to address the human element will undermine any effort that management may take to change the culture in a business. The reason is that culture is all about the human element. You can’t dictate attitudes and motives, nor can you just ask for change.
Here is the secret. All change, all improvement, Lean or otherwise, must be lead. It is experienced together with others. Let me give you an example. Years ago, when hurricane Hugo came through South Carolina, I was managerially responsible for an industrial waste treatment facility. All retention ponds were filling and the plant could not keep up.  The state had given me permission to by-pass the rain water directly to the river in order to keep other contaminated water contained.  This required the re-routing of a 12 inch fiber cast pipe while the hurricane was in full swing. I had a staff of 5 technicians on duty that night. All had families in the storm’s path and all were worried.
This was a time for action, so I  said what needed to be done, grabbed my tool bag, and headed out the door into the weather. I didn’t ask anyone else to go, but everyone followed me into the storm. We fought the weather for more than two hours and got the job done.
After that night, I had a minimum of 15 to 20 workers from around the company volunteering to work with me on a daily basis. We had a reputation for action and a “can do” attitude. In this case strong leadership resulted in strong follow ship. The culture began to change because the employees saw the management team change.
My point is this. If you want to change the culture in your work space, let the change begin with you. If you want to implement a Lean movement, let the change begin with you. Exercise strong leadership and you will get strong follow ship.
Strong follow ship leads to a shared vision. A shared vision leads to less resistance to change.

Entitlement

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We live in a culture of entitlement. All of us. We believe that we are owed something. An easy life, success, wealth, respect, etc. We believe these are owed to us because of who we are, who we know, or maybe from some consideration of fairness. When we do not get what we believe we are entitled to, we get angry and defensive. If there is a demise in store for our culture it will find its roots in the sense of entitlement that both the “haves” and the “have nots” carry in their hearts.

The problem is that entitlement is an equation not an absolute. This is where we go wrong. The word equation means that there is a balance, of sorts, between each side of the equal sign. When we believe that we are owed something, we are not in balance because we have not taken the other side of the equation into consideration.
Consider that respect is earned, wealth is earned, and success is earned. No one would argue with this. Earning balances the equation of entitlement. With that in mind, don’t get caught up in what is fair and unfair. The concept of fairness is tied to entitlement in a way that unbalances the equation. Let’s face it, life does not owe us fairness.
So how do we reconcile the way we view entitlement with the reality of the world in which we live?  First we must change what we think we are entitled to. I believe that we accomplish this with the realization that we are entitled to strive to be our best, to achieve success through effort, to earn respect by being respectful.
My father taught me that the road to success and prosperity was by way of out thinking and out working the competition and the expectations of others. An athlete understands that success on the field of play comes from long hours of hard work in practice, which in turn comes from a commitment to excellence. You, in your professional life, must understand this also.
You want that raise or promotion, then make it easy for your employer to offer it to you. Set out to exceed expectations, and to out think and work the competition. There is no guaranty that you will get that raise or promotion no mater how hard you try. Rest assured, though, if you don’t put forth the effort you will not be rewarded and it will be your own fault.
One last thought for this post. Whereas someone who expects reward without effort is a fool, so is the person who does not reward effort. Both leave the equation out of balance.

Project Time Estimates

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Why is it that projects more often than not come in behind schedule and over budget? This question drives business executives crazy. Why shouldn’t there be an even split between on time project delivery and late project delivery? These are valid questions.

The answer lies in statistics and human nature. Let’s deal with statistics first. When events are independent, like in rolling a pair of dice, all possible results are independent of each other.  For example if I roll a set of two dice 20 times, I will get 20 results that range from two to twelve.  If I plot these results in a frequency plot, I will get a normal distribution (a bell curve for you non-statistical types). If I roll the dice another 100 times, I will get the same distribution. Why? Because the probability of getting a pair of 2’s on roll one of the dice is exactly the same as the probability of getting a pair of 2’s on rolls two, three, four, etc.  I could bore you with a discussion of the central limit theorem at this point, but let’s not.

Instead, let’s change the rules of dice rolling and magnetize the die so that if die one comes up 2, die number two will come up 2 also. Now the result of each roll of the dice is no longer independent. Instead the resulting sum is dependent upon whether one of the die comes up two or not. The resulting distribution of 100 rolls will be skewed instead of normal. What does this have to do with projects meeting time and budget goals?  Let me explain.

If you look at a project map, a Gantt chart for example, you will see that the tasks in the project are not independent.  They depend upon each other. For example, let’s say that task three cannot start until task one and task two are finished. This means that task three’s start time is not independent. It is dependent upon the finish time of tasks one and two. So, a delay in either task one or two will result in a late start of task three. Since there is dependency between the successful on time delivery of these tasks, the central limit theorem does not apply. Additionally, the dependency tends to push the time line to the right (late delivery).  If we were to run through tasks one, two and three 100 times, the distribution would be skewed to the right (late delivery).

The reason dependency, in this case, skews the time line to the right is related to human nature. Estimators tend to over promise to satisfy the requirement of a bid process (work is rarely awarded to the bidder with the longest delivery time).  Workers tend to wait until the exact start date to begin work rather than start early. Surprises in the task schedule nearly always delay the completion of a task or schedule (how many times have you observed an unforeseen problem shorten the delivery time in a project?).

So what is an executive supposed to do? Most look at a schedule and apply a 70% efficiency factor to it. In other words, assume the time line will be 30 % longer and more expensive than planned. Of course the more you know about a project, its customers, and the quality of your delivery processes, the better you can estimate.

Lean Readiness Assessment

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One of the problems with Lean applications, Six Sigma, Kaizen, 5-S, etc., is that they get applied without an adequate understanding of the target business. The result is a failure of the tool to “take”, and any improvements gained are short lived. Within a few days, things start sliding back to what the “normal” used to be.

The missing step is a readiness assessment. A thorough understanding of the business and its culture must be coupled with a thorough understanding of the Lean tool being used, in order to provide the best chance of success. This readiness assessment takes time to develop, requires good listening skills, and business acumen.

I worked with a business recently that wanted me to lead a Kaizen event at one of their facilities. As part of the agreement, I asked for time to do a readiness assessment before plans were finalized for the event. What I found were two fatal problem areas. First, the management culture was top down, command and control. The employees felt very little empowerment and the senior management team agreed with that assessment. Second, the employees at the target facility did not know what Kaizen was and were only vaguely aware that “some kind of event” was going to take place.

I advised that the senior leadership involved at the targeted facility be trained in shifting from a supervisory management approach to a leadership model of management. I also advised that all employees at the facility be trained in what Kaizen is and what it would mean to them.

These adjustments took three months to complete, at which time I did another readiness assessment. This time all that needed changed was the Kaizen strategy. It needed to be tuned to the targeted business and culture. So we were ready to go, right?

Right! But with one significant development. Of the 10 items that senior management had on their list of needed improvements, only 2 remained.  The other 8 corrected themselves naturally through cultural change and the training that had taken place. Little did this business know that they had just gone through a 3 month Kaizen event that changed both processes and culture.

Here is the clincher. This whole three month process only required about 8 hours of my time as a consultant. The business itself did the heavy lifting. It doesn’t always work out this way, but given the opportunity, most businesses will at least try to make necessary adjustments.  If they don’t, nothing you can do as a consultant will make a difference anyway.