Category Archives: 5-S & Continuous Improvement

Listening and Speaking Skills

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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.

Operational Excellence Teams

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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.

5S and Lean

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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.

Operational Excellence

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Operational Excellence by Walter McIntyre

Trying to define operational excellence (OE) in a way that fits every organization is difficult.  It is also area of business strategy which is sometimes viewed myopically.  Myopically, in this case is an unbalanced approach to everything in the article below.  Remember , no customers equals no profit.

I prefer to break OE down into areas focused on customers, sustainability, innovation, performance, leadership and people. To be effective OE has to be relevant to all aspects of business operation. Therefore, OE may have a hierarchy of definitions as it is propagated throughout a business.  The core values are the same, but there will be differing levels of granularity, all focused on the core business objectives.  For example, an operator working on a turret has the same high level goal as someone from HR, but different granular objectives specific to their tasks.

I intend to keep this article fairly high level.  Future articles will drill down further. For now we can define the focus areas.  Bear in mind that these areas overlap substantially. It is not my intent to silo these focus areas.

Customers

Who are they, what are their needs, what do they want (this can be very different from needs),  how do they feel about your product or service, how do they feel about your competitors products and services (both direct and indirect competitors), and what do they want from your business?  This can be called the voice of the customer.  It is important to remember that selling is not about telling.  It is about listening.

Sustainability

Sustainability includes resource utilization, power and water consumption, waste production and  recycling, etc.  Some of these items are about controlling cost, while others are about being a positive member of the business’s community.

Innovation

Innovation includes advancing the business’s core and peripheral technologies, providing better products and services (customer’s perspective), and modernization of equipment and facilities.  A business must be aware of its customer’s needs and opinions, its competitor’s products and performance, and any gap in these areas.  If you are not innovating, you are probably moving toward business death.

Performance

Performance includes bottom line business metrics and all functions that drive them.  Some common metrics are safety, quality, delivery, and cost. Products and services delivered in specification, on time, at or under budget, and without safety incidents. This is the area where we are most used to seeing pull and flow, yield, visual management, value stream mapping, and continuous improvement initiatives like Lean and Six Sigma.  The picture below is a Gemba Board that is used to recognize a value stream’s performance.  It is one of many tools that tie performance to employee engagement.

Gemba Board Example of Operational Excellence Tool

Gemba Board Example of Operational Excellence Tool

Leadership

This is aligned with the supervision verses leadership dilema. Leaders are almost always more effective than supervisors.  In a leadership based environment, natural leadership bubbles to the surface to become upwardly mobile in an organization.  It is incumbent upon a business’s leadership to make sure everyone keeps the “main thing” the “main thing”.

People

Here we are focused on engagement, alignment, safety, and quality of life at work.  A safe work environment involves more than eliminating work related accidents.  It also includes an engaged environment where it is safe to share ideas and disagree as adults.  I would guess that most employees would rather work in an environment where everyone has each other’s back, instead of an environment where you are afraid to turn you back on anyone.

Dispersed Alignment

Parallel Alignment

A last comment for this article.  Communication is the lubrication that make OE possible.  Folks must know the business’s goals (including division, department and value stream goals), the goals and expectations they are being held accountable for, how they are doing against those expectations, and why all the above is important.

Project Management

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A current project I am working on involves 4 companies. The principle, a web services company, an electronic hardware and firmware company, and a contract manufacturer. I am using a traditional Gantt tool, along with Excel, to manage the overall project. We rely on each of the other companies to have their own internal project management tools. The contract manufacturer uses a traditional Gantt tool to manage their multiple projects both corporately and individually. The hardware/firmware company also uses a traditional Gantt tool. The web services company is using their own in house project tracking strategy. None of the companies involved use Agile tools.

It is better, in my opinion, for software and firmware developers to operate with Agile. Both the web services company and the hardware/firmware companies have had their struggles and would have benefitted from an Agile approach to their project management strategies. The principles’ use of a traditional Gantt tool is adequate for project management on a macro level, but the use of Excel to “break out” tasks, and groups of tasks, on a micro level is necessary for seeing detail. The principle is managing both their own tasks and those of the contractor companies.

Throughout the project we have met weekly as a group. Some by phone and some in person, the logistics of the meetings dictating which. We have also met at least twice a week one on one with our contractors. This was done by phone early on, and face to face over the past few months. It involves some travel, which is why we chose contractors local to the principle.

The meetings are focused on three areas. Where we are now, make work ready (upcoming tasks) and what problems or obstacles may be in our path. This is meant to get everyone on the same page and to share problems and opportunities. Some issues create addition meetings between the engineers off line. All meetings are documented and emailed to the entire team. This way, only those needed at these ad hoc meetings have to attend.

Projects are like funnels. In the beginning, there are more tasks in play at the same time. There is lower velocity and lower friction between the individuals and the businesses they represent. The work is focused on bringing all tasks to an eventual assembly of the final product or service. As problems and setbacks occur you should attempt to evaluate their impact on future tasks and the completion of the project. The objectives are to deliver the desired project results, on time and in budget.

All tasks should have an operation definition that includes what it is, who is responsible, how it is to be accomplished (tools and resources), a start date, a completion date, and a definition of what complete means. This is where most projects fail. Either this operational definition is not fully laid out or it is ignored as pressure to finish mounts up.

Maybe the most important part of project management is trust. As the project moves down the funnel, both velocity and friction increase. As pressure mounts toward the end of a project, all the hedging done earlier will land in your lap. The way to prevent this is to divide the project into segments. We have an “end of the week” focus. It is part of the weekly meeting format. Things are due when they are due, unless the project manager and partners agree to slippage. Slippage is not necessarily failure, unless it is not disclosed. Seeing problems early can control the damage from unexpected negative events.

I find that a master project plan can be difficult to use effectively on a micro level. I find it better to have the project mapped out in segments based upon the master project plan. This makes it easier to use break out tools to manage the project on a daily and weekly basis. It also makes it easier to see and handle the unexpected.

Project management can be rewarding or stressful. Reducing stress requires a good plan, a commitment to stay on track and excellent communication. I have already mentioned trust, which is the foundation of everything in the previous sentence.

Reluctance to distribute bad news, or hedging, will only increase stress and the probability of not meeting project objectives. This is something that senior management can make easy or hard. Shooting the messenger will make it harder for the project to succeed. Move quickly to state both bad news and what is being done about it.

Everyone needs to have a realist perspective on time lines and budgets. In the current project, we took the shortest possible time, plus the worst case time, plus four times the most probable time. This was divided by six to come up with a good faith project estimate. This works pretty good unless someone in senior management only considers the shortest possible time line and builds that into their expectations. The earlier this type of problem is addressed the better.

Remember, it were easy, everyone would be doing it. The bigger the project and its impact, the more difficult it can be. At the same time the more rewarding it can be.

Building Great Teams

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I did some research on team building recently.  What I found were lists of qualities that define effective teams.  The problem is that these lists are typically filled with descriptions of characteristics that are superficial.  I can say, or do, whatever is necessary, when it is necessary, so that I look like a great teammate on a great team.

I believe that building a great team requires great teammates. It is much more personal than a list of qualities. You do not want to build a house on a foundation of sand and you do not want to build a team on a foundation of individuals whose sole focus is on their own personal value propositions.

Dwight L. Moody said that “Character is what you are in the dark”, meaning that you express your true character when your potential duplicity is difficult to discover. You express your character in what you do, not what you say.

I like to associate teammates to shipmates.  This association strengthens the concept of teamwork.  When at sea, if the ship sinks, everyone gets wet.  In the most powerful definition of teamwork, everyone succeeds together or fails together. There are no special cases, unless someone places their own goals above that of the team.  This would be called sub-optimization.

You cannot build a great team from individuals who make excuses, criticize, are too busy to help others, or are unwilling to step out of their comfort zone.  In Warren Bennis’s book “Organizing Genius”, he describes the characteristic of great teams like the Skunk Works, Disney Studios, Apple, and the Manhattan Project.  These teams were built on personal sacrifice, cross functional activities (folks worked on what needed worked on no matter whose job it was), a commitment to each other and the project, a lack of respect for outside authority, an intolerance for individuals who did not fit the culture, and a supreme belief that they comprised the best of the best as a team.

What kind of shipmate are you?  The quote below is from a man who served in every branch of the military.  He was known for his ability to build successful teams in difficult circumstances.

“You gotta stop and think about your shipmates. That’s what makes you a great person and a great leader – taking care of each other. You’ve got to think — team. It takes a team to win any battle, not an individual.”  Courtland R. “Corky” Johnson

Innovation and Creativity in Motion

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Many of the activities and strategies we use to innovate and manage are actually road blocks to creativity and innovation. Certainly, the enforcement of a time line and being cost conscience, are important, but only in respect to their appropriate place in the life cycle of a product or service.  When applied to the creative and innovative phases in this life cycle, they are disruptive and cause sub-optimization.

Innovation is a creative process that requires open-mindedness and a safe environment.  Creativity and innovation are processes that rely upon failure and the ability to learn from failure. You cannot create or innovate where failure is unacceptable or penalized.

Formatted business meetings and project management meetings are not events for innovation. They are events for business management. Important?  Yes, but not in the innovative process.  In these venues, failure is a negative thing and, “when will the project be completed?”, is the primary question. In the innovative stages of a project “what to do?” or “how to do it?” are the main questions.  Other thoughts get in the way.

What I am about to say will make control oriented managers uncomfortable.  You cannot control creativity, you can only feed it or starve it.  When a work group or team is in the creative or innovative mode, just get out-of-the-way. Command and control must give way to facilitation. You are better off guarding the door to keep creativity starving people and systems out until it is time for them.

When a work group or team is working in the creative and innovative phases of a project, questions like who gets the credit, cost, who is smarter, and how fast can we get done,  take a back seat to collaboration. It is an inclusive environment instead of an exclusive one.

Here are some ideas to support creativity and innovation. First, casual dialogue centered loosely around a topic opens up the possibility of seeing things from multiple perspectives, thus eliminating an error in parallax. This is the way great minds like Einstein’s worked. It is also how high-performance work teams think.

It’s not about discussing a specific aspect of the project so much as it is a general meandering dialogue. There is more storytelling and analogies than would take place in a typical development or project meeting.  Meetings away from one’s work desk or controls are great for this type of thinking.

It is a safe environment where people are allowed to get out of the box. People who are not the exerts on a particular topic get to offer their perspective, forcing the experts on that topic to think through a response to their questions and suggestions. It is a movement away from what we think we believe, to true understanding. The result is innovation and creativity in motion.

Second, there need to be creativity/innovation zones in the work areas.  These are spaces where folks can talk, argue and “sharpen the sword” with each other.  Employees do not go there to work, they go there to think creatively.  This space is divided into group “think tank” areas and individual “thinking out of the box” areas.  They are not anyone’s personal space, they are not scheduled spaces, and they are only for the creative/innovative processes and folks.

Lastly, encourage dialog between workgroup/team members that have little format, other that a place and time.  As a line manager, you may want to stay out of these meetings and be informed by way standing project meetings later. This is definitely a “watched pot never boils” situation.  Manage creativity and innovation by staying out of the middle of it.  This means facilitation instead of control.

The Origin Of Things

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Engineering begins with the axiom that there is nothing we can’t figure out.  I used to call this roof top engineering because it requires a shift in the way we view challenges.  Viewing a challenge from different perspective gives us a 3D perspective of it.
Here is an example of this shift in thinking:
When we see the numbers below, we intuitively understand what they mean, but why these shapes? I believe that it is important to know the origins of things.
Our number shapes come from the Hindu-Arabic number characters.  Remember that these characters were used as a universal way to count for commerce.  One need not intuitively know the name of the character, just how it represented a quantity.
Can you figure it out? (Hint: Count the angles on each character)
Numbers

The Fundamentals of 5S

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I coached high school basketball for 4 years.  A significant learning from this experience was the importance of the basics, or the fundamentals.  We won a lot of games because we rebounded better, passed better and had fewer turnovers than the other teams we played.  Every day in practice we worked on the fundamentals of blocking out to improve our rebounding, the fundamentals of passing to get scoring opportunities, the fundamentals of  how to avoid dribbling so that we could overcome trapping defenses.  Because we did the little things right, the bigger things fell into place.

Manufacturing has the same relationship with fundamentals.  Focusing on how we do things will reveal fundamental opportunities.  The idea is to eliminate self-inflected waste. Remember that even though we face competition from competitors who have lower labor costs, our strength is in our innovation and smarts.

  • How much time do you and your direct reports spend doing things that do not directly build or ship units?  By eliminating or reducing these activities we reduce cycle time and cost.  This is not about working harder, it’s about working smarter.
  • Do you know what you need to produce today to be successful?  If you don’t, it’s like driving with your eyes closed.  You are unlikely to reach your desired destination.
  • Have you ever been faced with dirt, waste, or ill prepared tools that you yourself left in the way rather than deal with at the time?  It is one thing to be angry because someone else did this to you, but doing it to yourself…
  • Failure to take responsibility.  Leaving a workspace in a less than desirable state for the next user.  I know that you don’t like it when it happens to you, so don’t do it to someone else.
  • Are you satisfied with your efficiency and effectiveness?  Satisfied people do not improve and grow, and are soon left behind.  Do you want to be left behind?

Think on this.  Excellent execution on the basics and fundamentals will lead to excellent performance overall.  My father told me over and over again to never let anyone out work me, or produce better results than me.  That advice has served me well.  I offer it to you.

Seeing the Big Picture

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Be aware of how much of the “Big Picture” you and your direct reports see. A common mistake in organizations trying to improve is the assumption that everyone gets it.  The diagram below shows how our scope of vision (how much of the “big Picture” we see) can be affected by our place in the organization.  

Top Down View

This phenomenon leads to sub-optimization and silo’ing. For example, one department applies 5-S strategy by moving their stuff into someone else’s area, or throws something important away.  Another group optimizes a value stream at the expense of other value streams, or the business in general. Buy-in is weak at best. 

We overcome this by communicating. Make sure your group understands the relevance their work has on the big picture.   This is a process of adding the “Why” to the dialog.  Take the time to explain why we do the things we do. You may discover that you don’t know “why” either. This is a good thing.  

If you do this, you’ll discover a diversity of opinion.  This is not a problem.  In fact it is healthy.  Leverage the intelligence of the collective.