Project Management Problem Solving

Posted on February 12, 2017 by Walter McIntyre

Project Management Problem Solving by Walter McIntyre

I hear the following a lot. “He (or she) is a good problem solver.” This is a great quality to have, but it is less than half the needed skill. It is better to be known for preventing problems. From both a time and cost prospective, a problem prevented is best, because solving a problem typically adds more time and money to a project, than a solid plan to avoid the problem in the first place.

In my current role I manage a project management team with a portfolio of between 40 and 50 projects. as Project Management Office team, we keep a list of problems we have encountered and spend a portion of our time each week developing plans to eliminate the problems from future projects. We address everything from scope creep, to time and cost overruns, to office politics, to known performance issues with specific groups and individuals.

The result has been a decrease in project cycle times, cost and defects. This, in turn, has increased the volume of projects the group can manage over time. Remember that successful project management means fulfilling the following:

What the customer wants/needs
On time
In budget
Defect free
Safely
Make a profit

We view each project from a value stream point of view. We even value stream map projects in advance, and update the map in the middle and at the end of the project. We can quickly tell what went right, and what didn’t, on every project. Using this information, we can build a control plan for project management.

So, don’t just be a problem solver. Be a problem eliminator.

Culture of Process Improvement

Posted on October 8, 2016 by Walter McIntyre

Cultural Aspects of Six Sigma Process Improvement by Walter McIntyre

Whatever the process improvement methodology used, when properly applied, it produces a change in a business’s culture. Outlined below are some behavioral changes necessary to sustain a customer focused process improvement effort.

View the business as an organization of processes:
• If you view the business as an organization of processes, then managing the business becomes managing processes.
• Processes are interrelated and, as a result, they interact with each other. Changing one affects the others.
• If the appropriate processes are in place, managing those processes is managing people. Not the other way around.

Data driven business decisions:
• Business acumen without data is ineffective.
• Data without business acumen is ineffective.
• Measuring the right things.
• If you are not measuring it, you are not managing it.
• If you are not managing it, you are at the mercy of chance.

Voice of the Customer:
• Customer focused: Recognize that business success depends on customer satisfaction.
• There is a line of site from the customer to each business process.
• Customers see our outputs differently than we do.
• What we value should be in alignment with what our customer’s value.

Continuous Improvement:
• If a business is not continuously trying to improve, other businesses are either closing the gap or passing them.
• Using data to see where improvements are needed and taking action to make the appropriate changes.
• Avoiding change for change sake. Change is good when data indicates a need for it.
• Changes are in alignment with corporate values.
• Change requires empowerment. Both require trust.
• Improvement strategy is focused upon changing the processes. Changing people is a leadership issue.

Employee Culture:
• People change as a result of leadership.
• Employees are the most valuable asset in the business.
• Employee empowerment is the engine that drives process improvement.
• Employees must “buy-in” to the cultural vision.
• Employees need to see leadership “buy in” to the cultural vision.

Listening and Speaking Skills

Posted on September 8, 2016 by Walter McIntyre

Listening and Speaking Skills by Walter McIntyre

A process improvement team is from the beginning a team of investigators. They investigate process performance by looking for improvement opportunities and the root causes of problems. All of us have seen detective programs on TV where a sleuth investigates a crime. They ask questions, listen, set up stakeouts, and eventually discover what really happened. Process improvement teams follow the same strategy. They ask questions, listen, and monitor processes. All of this to discover the root causes of process problems. An improvement team will use all four basic communication skills: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. These skills become the lubrication that allows a diverse group of team members to work through an improvement project successfully.

We are taught early and often in school to read and write while constantly being told, not taught, to listen. The result is that we are generally poor listeners. If you are not a good listener, you will miss much in life. In the case of a process improvement project, asking questions and listening will take up the bulk of your time. In fact, listening skills may be more important than your statistical prowess. Much of the contextual information surrounding a process will be obtained through interviews and simply listening to the “shoptalk” of process owners.

Here is an exercise to help develop listening skills. The next time you are at a group function like a party or meeting, try not talking about yourself. Instead, try to learn specific and detailed information about as many people as possible. This will require you to listen carefully and ask many questions. It will not be hard, because people like to talk about themselves. All you have to do is be quiet and listen. The next time you interact with these people, you will be in a superior knowledge position because you will know a great deal about them, but they will not know much about you.

Getting the support and resources necessary to move forward in an improvement project also requires well-developed speaking skills. This is because of the need to ask questions and to tell the process’ story. The best discoveries and ideas in the world are worthless if they cannot be expressed to others. Here is an exercise that will help improve speaking skills. The next time you have a presentation to make, videotape yourself giving the presentation beforehand. When you view and listen to it, you will see and hear what others see and hear when you are speaking. You will find that you neither look nor sound like you might have thought. With this visual and audio information, you can make adjustments and increase your chances of a successful outcome.

Additionally, successful public speaking involves subject matter knowledge, good diction, projection, and some knowledge of the target audience. All of these boil down to being prepared. You must know what message you want to deliver and what terminology your audience is used to hearing. You must also anticipate the questions that will be asked and what personal motivations will be in play. A prepared speaker will know how to answer these questions and what threshold of value will be needed to sell the audience members. This way, the presentation will speak with its own merits and not be held up by the skill of the presenter.

Good diction and pronunciation are a matter of practice and feedback. Listening to yourself and getting the feedback of a test audience will be of great value. As far as pronunciation goes, make good use of a dictionary. Don’t make the mistake of having your audience thinking about how you mispronounced a word rather than the merits of your business case. It is also a good idea to use words that you are comfortable using everyday. Trying to impress by using big words that are not generally part of your vocabulary will trip you up.

Projection involves two things: speaking loud enough to be heard without being too loud and speaking with conviction. You should know the layout of the room where the presentation is to take place and what audio or visual aids will be available. A strong confident voice will go long way to building and conveying conviction. Not sounding confident or being difficult to hear will be like blood in the water to the sharks that are looking for a reason to not provide the resources you need in order to be successful with your project.

Lastly, the knowledge of who your audience is and what their value prepositions are is critical. Do not forget that you are trying to motivate them to action on behalf of your project. This means that you will need to frame your presentation around their interests. A little research ahead of time before you build the presentation can give you this information.

All of the above is meaningless if you do not believe in what you are doing. Participating on an improvement team for political reasons is unproductive and can hurt your career rather than help it. People can hear conviction, or the lack of it, in your voice. Be engaged, be productive, and have fun with the process. Being a change agent is not easy. You will make friends and enemies. Do not confuse friends and enemies with allies. An ally is simply someone who shares a similar value proposition as you do. Much of your time will be spent building strategic alliances that can help your team succeed.

Government and History

Posted on August 10, 2016 by Walter McIntyre

Government and History by Walter McIntyre

Our current day politicians seem to want to berate Washington, our government and everyone that is there. Don’t be fooled, all of them are trying to become what they criticize, insiders. These naysayers have lost site of the importance of knowing and understanding history. Actually, they should be embracing the history and talent that resides in our nation’s capital. Many decisions that shaped our history, and the modern history of the world, were made by men and women, in desperate times, showing great courage from political office or appointment. There is much we can learn from them. The same cannot be said of any other city in the United States, or any demographic involving corporate headquarters.

The fact is, decision making in a business is simpler, the purpose of a business being mostly two dimensional. The bottom line business metric of profitability and taking care of a small demographic of stakeholders is the focus of a business. Government must consider all demographics, on shore and off shore. Government is about “We the people…” (All the people), business is about “we the stakeholders” (not all the people). You will never see “We the people…” in a corporate mission statement.

Decisions in government are multi-dimensional. What might help or solve one problem can create problems elsewhere, which can be a big problem for government and can impact the trajectory of would events. Business,on the other hand, may want to be disruptive to other businesses for their own benefit. It is a completely different paradigm.

Regardless of your political persuasion, don’t be fooled into following “want to be” leaders that are either ignorant of our history or or want to run the government like a business. History is the map we followed to get here and government is not a business. It is much messier, by necessity, than a business and must represent all demographics. It’s is the government “of the people, by the people, for the people”. That means all of us.

Voice of the Customer

Posted on August 8, 2016 by Walter McIntyre

Voice of the Customer by Walter McIntyre

Typically, there is not a single voice of the customer. They are fractioned into multiple groups, each with their own perspective. Each group may also have different voices in different circumstances.

For the Six Sigma team, identifying the customer involves more than collecting information about who is purchasing the business’s products or services. Those who purchase the products and services are just one of several customer groups. Some other classifications are internal supplier/customer hand-offs, customers of competitors, former customers, and potential customers.

Internal customers are those who are involved with supplier/customer hand-offs within the process. Even though these hand-offs are easy to see in a detailed process map, the process owner often overlooks them. By taking a process point of view, we capture all of these hand-offs and are able to measure how they ultimately affect the end user (customer) of the process. Six Sigma tools such as process mapping and SIPOC (Suppliers, Inputs, Process, Outputs, and Customers) maps are tools designed to capture these hand-offs. We will cover these tools later.

Your competitor’s customers are another important source of voice of the customer data. Some automobile companies, for example, send surveys to their competitor’s customers to learn why they made their choice. The surveyor can use this information to drive changes in products and services. The ultimate objective is to gain market share.

This leads us to substitute customers. These customers use substitute solutions to meet their needs. They can affect your business in one of two ways. They can use your products and services as a substitute for that provided by an indirect competitor. Conversely, they can use an indirect competitor instead of you. An example would be using a passenger train to travel instead of an airline or a rental car. All three of these business segments compete indirectly to provide the same service to the customer, transportation. These potential customers can provide an increase in market share achieved through market development rather than direct competition.

In short, there are many ways to view the voice of the customer. The process improvement team needs a high degree of thoroughness and creativity to collect pertinent and complete information about customer needs and wants. You must view your business or organization from the perspective of the customer. What do they see and feel?

Each group may also have different voices in different circumstances.

Operational Excellence Teams

Posted on July 17, 2016 by Walter McIntyre

Operational Excellence Teams by Walter McIntyre

In Operational Excellence, Innovation teams and production teams have different functions and purpose. They also have an area of overlapping responsibly. Both play a critical role in improvement efforts.

Production teams are typically made up of the production line employees, the doers, and have the responsibility to optimize the existing production process within existing SOP’s. They see the production process at the ground level, in fact, they experience it. It is this closeness to the work that makes their engagement so critical on a daily basis. Their’s is the domain of continuous improvement in small, but critical steps.

Innovation Teams operate outside the lines of the production environment. They are the dreamers, looking for stepwise improvements in performance by way of completely rewriting SOP’s, re-engineering existing processes, or creating new production processes. Their composition is more focused on engineering and financial metrics, and less on the actual nut and bolts that line employees must focus on.

Innovation and production teams need each other to succeed. Innovation teams need the production team’s product, customer and process domain knowledge to succeed. Without the doers there is no way to see if an innovation really works.

Production teams need innovation teams for more complex and cross functional problem-solving, and larger scale changes to the production environment. Innovation teams typically have technical and monetary resources beyond the capability of a production team.

Working together, production and innovation teams make up the continuous improvement effort that make operational excellence a reality. Bringing these two groups together is one of the Operational Excellence Manager’s more important duties. Building synergy, cooperation and engagement has the effect of lubricating the entire continuous improvement process.

Being Fearless

Posted on July 8, 2016 by Walter McIntyre

Being Fearless by Walter McIntyre

The lens we view the world through can lead us to incorrect and destructive decisions. Perspective is everything when we face difficult problems. It is the difference between being fearful or being fearless. This is true in our personal lives and in our professional lives.

If you are going to tackle the most difficult problems and opportunities at work, or face down Iife’s most trying events, you must move quickly from asking why the problem exists to what you are going to do about it. Not that the “why” is not important, just that it is only the beginning, not the end of successful resolution. Asking why is only a lens to see that the problem exists. Asking what we are going to do about it is a different lens that leads to action.

Making this change in lens, or perspective, allows you to be fearless in the face of tough problems. I am not the wisest or smartest person in the world, but I am fearless in the face of difficulties. It allows me to surround myself with people smarter than me, without feeling threatened. It allows me to give credit where it is due and to call out poor performance when needed. It doesn’t make you safe. It may do just the opposite.

You can’t always control what comes your way in life, or its seeming unfairness. What you can control is your response to these challenges. It is simple, when you don’t fear failure, you can dare to succeed.

5S and Lean

Posted on June 25, 2016 by Walter McIntyre

5S and Lean by Walter McIntyre

The 5S tools are associated with Lean thinking. The objective of Lean thinking is to provide a business with long-term profitability by developing a more effective workplace, which is accomplished by eliminating waste in the work environment. The result is a safer workplace, improved product quality, and lower costs for both the business and its customers.

Lean thinking may result in a reduction in work force, but that is not its purpose. In fact, the application of lean thinking for the purpose of reducing the work force is not lean thinking at all. Since some companies have done this, lean thinking has been given a bad reputation and has made waste reduction efforts more difficult.

The 5S approach involves five activities in the workplace: scrapping, sorting, scrubbing, standardizing, and sustaining. Depending upon which book you read, there may be different names for each S, but the intent is the same.

Scrapping means to throw away unneeded material. A trashy work environment, in addition to being unsafe, tends to create a casual attitude toward quality. There should be a strategy for knowing what to keep and what to throw away. Take junk mail for example. It should only be handled once. Look at it, decide to use it or throw it away, and then take the appropriate action. When junk mail is handled more than once, it piles up on your desk making normal productive work more difficult. The same thing happens in a shop with trash and old parts, and in a store with boxes and packing material.

Sorting is the process of placing everything where it belongs. Imagine a toolbox where the drill bits are scattered throughout. If a bit is needed, it will take some time to find the bit. This adds time and cost to work. Now imagine a toolbox with the drill bits organized in a labeled drawer and separated logically by size. The time necessary to find the needed bit and get the job done is shortened, and the cost of the work is reduced.

Scrubbing the work environment involves cleaning the work area. A clean work area is safer than a dirty one and is conducive to higher quality work. It is related to discarding scrap but goes further by including the cleaning up of what is left. Consider a machine shop where cutting oil is left on the floor. This becomes a slipping hazard and indicates sloppiness. If you were inspecting machine shops to see which one to hire, what would you think about the shop with an oil mess on the floor?

Another example of the importance of scrubbing is preventative maintenance. In a manufacturing facility, for example, the machining equipment can be painted white and wiped down each shift with white cloths. It becomes easy to see any unusual oil leaks or dirt. This allows the factory workers to diagnose machine problems before breakdowns occur. The result is reduced cost.

Standardization is about making sure that important elements of a process are performed consistently and in the safest and best possible way. Lack of consistency will cause a process to generate defects and compromise safety. The standardization of work practices increases predictability. Predictability, in turn, allows the process owners and operators to prevent problems before they affect the customer.

Sustain means to maintain the gains. The 5-S philosophy will only work when all levels of the business are engaged. Instead of a program, it becomes part of the culture. Lean thinking is natural and automatic, instead of an add on in our business’s paradigm.

Lean Value Proposition

Posted on June 25, 2016 by Walter McIntyre

Lean Value Proposition by Walter McIntyre

The basic Lean and business value proposition in looks like this:

Profit = Perceived Value – Inherent Value

Lean process improvement projects address the Inherent Value piece of this equation. The idea is to reduce the inherent cost of production and delivery of the product or service. A common mistake that teams make is to assume that inherent value issues are not customer driven. This is a case of being inwardly focused instead of a more balanced focus (inward and customer driven).

The trick is for the Lean team to investigate the down stream and upstream impacts of any proposed changes to the business process(s). Then check those expected impacts against critical to quality concerns of the various process customers.

Remember that all processes in a business touch each other in some way. If a change is made in one, there will be impacts elsewhere. Don’t be a victim of sub-optimization, by way of process improvement.

“I See You” Management

Posted on May 27, 2016 by Walter McIntyre

“I See You” Management, by Walter McIntyre

Connectivity between human beings is the beginning of synergy. It is written in our genetic code and expresses itself in our drive to connect to others and be part of a group. Since this is how we are wired, it only makes sense that the most effective management styles, as far as us humans are concerned, leverages this aspect of our specie’s corporate psyche.

I would call this “I See You” management. I did not coin this phrase, but since I cannot remember who did, I will use it for this post. The way I see things, “I See You” management is based upon three levels of recognition.

I see you. You are here and I acknowledge your presence. This is important to the individual because we all want to be a part of the group or team. Recognition is a powerful fulfillment agent when it comes to our personal emotional bank account. This is consistent with the conclusions from Elton Mayo’s Hawthorne Works experiments from the 1920’s.

I also see you as a person with hopes, dreams, joys and fears. A complete person fills my vision. You cannot effectively manage a person from the perspective of seeing them as an available asset rather than as a person. The ability to motivate someone comes from knowledge of their personal value proposition. Lou Holtz, as a football coach, would require the players on each special team to know their teammates full names, the names of their immediate family members and some special fact about them. Coach Holtz knew that a player would block more effectively for “Bobby”, who they knew, than they would for the “running back”, even though they were the same person.

I value you for who you are, not at the level of your title or your possessions, but instead, at the level of your commitment and effort. This is tricky ground because I am not speaking exclusively about commitment and effort at work. Although these are critical to acceptable performance at work, I also will also value you for your commitment and efforts on behalf of others outside of the work environment. A lot can be learned about someone by how they treat others. I was at a restaurant recently with a business acquaintance who wanted to join my business team. He was disrespectful to our waitress and others he encountered while there. Even though He was very respectful to me, I could see that he only valued people for what he wanted from them. This attitude did not fit our culture and I did not hire him.

In another instance, one f my employees had a habit of badmouthing and undermining others. Just like the business acquaintance above, this employee only valued others as stepping stones for his personal career development.

The result of “I See You” management is trust. Trust is the interpersonal lubrication that allows successful organizations to tackle tough problems and weather the storms of uncertainty. It is also the glue that keeps a team from despair and fragmentation. It keeps an organization in alignment when other forces are trying to pull it apart.

In my daily walk through my business, I try to touch every employee with a message about their value to me and our business journey together. I expect them to do the same. It keeps us sane, focused and successful.

Walter McIntyre Lean Six Sigma