All Posts Tagged With: "process improvement"
Improving Processes through Observation
When you come across a story that involves process improvement in both education and healthcare at the same time, you have to share it.
The education part is the Executive Master of Public Administration: Concentration for Nurse Leaders program at NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. (Let’s see you fit that on a business card.) For their Capstone project, the six people in the program decided to analyze how much time nurses spend getting the equipment they need to get their jobs done.
They carefully observed nursing staff at New-York Presbyterian Columbia University Medical Center. They wrote down how much time nurses spent with patients. They photographed rooms after patients were discharged. They watched what nurses did when they weren’t with patients and they discovered that nurses had to get supplies for each patient from a central storeroom. It wasn’t a quick trip and it took them away from patients, which meant nurses tended to get everything they thought they might need to avoid return trips. Once supplies are brought to a patient’s room, they must be used or thrown away. If they forgot something or needed more supplies, nurses had to return to the central storeroom. They were often…
8Nov2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Perils of Process Atrophy
A process wants to fall apart. It can be efficient and effective. It can do exactly what you hoped it would do. But you cannot leave it alone, because if you do, it will deteriorate. It will get loose and sloppy, quality will suffer, speed will be lost, and results will decline.
The Baldrige Criteria ask two questions about how you keep your processes intact:
- How does the day-to-day operation of your work processes ensure that they meet key process requirements?
- How do you prevent defects, service errors, and rework and minimize costs or customer productivity losses?
The Criteria also ask how you improve your processes. Managing and improving your processes is an ongoing, neverending activity. In “Embrace Systems Thinking” (IndustryWeek, October 26, 2010), Jill Jusko talks with Robert Martichenko and Kevin von Grabe about building a lean fulfillment stream. Martichenko points out that managing and improving your processes requires developing problem-solving skills across the organization. According to Martichenko, 96% of the initial problems in supply chain and logistics can likely be solved using pareto charts, fishbone diagrams, and the “five whys.” That is probably true for work processes in any part of your organization, and the good news is, developing proficiency in these three…
28Oct2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Value of Lean
The Baldrige model is not prescriptive—it doesn’t tell you how to do all of the things you need to do to run your organization effectively—but if it was prescriptive, it would prescribe lean.
Lean is a perfect fit for a management model that values process. While it is fundamentally about reducing cycle time by eliminating waste, the organizations that have implemented lean have also found that it improves quality, delights customers, engages employees, and lowers costs.
If you want to learn more about the potential of lean to help your organization, I suggest reading The Antidote by Anand Sharma and Gary Hourselt, who have built a stellar consulting practice on their ability to help organizations with lean. The book (click here to order it) uses real-life examples to describe the benefits of lean and how to implement it.
You can read about one company’s experience with lean in “What We Have Learned on Our Lean Journey” (IndustryWeek, Adrienne Selko, September 29, 2010). Correct Craft, which makes boats, started its lean journey in 2007 by making sure top management was on board with the initiative. The next step was to hold Kaizen events where teams of four floor employees took one day to redesign the problematic parts of a…
30Sep2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedResurrecting the Suggestion System
A suggestion system is an idea whose time has come—again. It sounds archaic: Little boxes protruding from the wall in different parts of the building with an invitation to submit your idea and a slot for dropping it into the box. Most gathered more dust than ideas, which is why most companies nixed their suggestion systems.
In “Workers of the World, Innovate” (Businessweek, September 7, 2010), Rachael King introduces the next generation of suggestion systems that, naturally, use software rather than little boxes to solicit ideas. The software collects, surveys, sorts, analyzes, and even helps prioritize ideas. AT&T has 40,000 employees signed up for The Innovation Pipeline, and its senior executives fund a handful of the best ideas each quarter.
From a Baldrige perspective, a suggestion system is a good indicator of the quality of your management system in two key areas:
- Employee engagement. Suggestion systems fail because employees ignore them. If your organization has a suggestion system and it’s getting one idea a week, either your employees are not engaged in helping your organization improve or you’ve done a terrible job of promoting your suggestion system. Wainwright Industries, which won the Baldrige Award in 1994, boasted 54 implemented ideas per employee per year! That’s…
Managing for Innovation
Managing for innovation is a Baldrige core value. According to the Criteria, “innovation means making meaningful change to improve your products, services, programs, processes, operations, and business model to create new value for the organization’s stakeholders.”
It’s not just about being creative: It’s about making creative change. Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Timble spent a decade studying innovation, writing a book that presents best practices for executing an innovation initiative called The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge. They asked thousands of executives at Fortune 500 companies to rate their companies’ innovation skills on a scale of one (poor) to ten (world-class). Generating ideas got an average score of 6. Commercializing them—turning ideas into meaningful change—received an average score of 1.
In other words, most organizations are pretty good at coming up with ideas and very bad at acting on them. To remedy this situation, Govindarajan and Timble devote their book to describing the nature and work of dedicated innovation teams because, as they note, “innovation is by nature non-routine and uncertain.”
You can get a jump on developing processes that solve the execution challenge by improving your responses to these key questions about innovation in the Baldrige Criteria:
- How do senior leaders…
What Differentiates Baldrige Award Winners (Part 3)
In the first two articles in this series, I described five of the seven characteristics of organizations with sound management systems: (1) they think process; (2) they act on data; (3) they know where they’re going; (4) they align activities; and, (5) they blur boundaries. They exemplify all 11 Baldrige core values but one stands out: They have a systems perspective, which, according to the Baldrige Criteria, “means managing your whole organization, as well as its components, to achieve success.”
They also share these final two characteristics:
6. They treat people well. That means everyone the company touches: employees, customers, suppliers, community members—everyone. The striking difference between companies that treat people as commodities and companies that treat them well was captured in the transformation of Wainwright Industries. In the early 1990s, the leaders of this small Missouri-based manufacturer of machined parts listened to a speaker describe how his company thrived because of a sincere trust and belief in people. One of Wainwright’s leaders wondered what that meant. The CEO didn’t have a good answer, and that bothered him. What would Wainwright look like if it sincerely trusted and believed in its people?
The answer changed the company. A sincere trust and belief in people…
28Jul2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedChanging County Processes
What happens when a new county executive initiates radical change? Exactly what you would expect.
Jeffrey Smith came to Santa Clara County to help close a $230 million deficit. He implemented hoshin kanri (policy deployment), which some moronic union official described as “some airy-fairy thing.” Many of the people responsible for doing the planning ignored him and a number of department heads submitted budgets the old way, according to a story on MercuryNews.com (“Santa Clara County new executive’s strategy has fans, skeptics,” Julia Prodis Sulek, May 14, 2010).
Smith has taken a county hospital from the threat of losing $300 million in funding because of a pattern of violence to a national award for patient safety. He’s a former doctor, lawyer, and hospital administrator and he understands that the same old, same old just won’t work anymore.
“We can no longer rely on old processes and procedures,” he says. “My job is to enable the organization to make the dramatic changes, which will be difficult.”
Hoshin kanri, popularized by Toyota, helps an organization focus on a shared vision and goals and involves people in developing strategic and action plans to achieve those goals. I worked with Zytec in 1991 when it won the Baldrige Award…
25May2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
