Lean Consulting Tips: How Do We Fail?
Posted on Thu, Jul 22, 2010
This week our Blog deals with a probing question from a client...
An executive at a company working to reinvigorate its Lean Six Sigma efforts recently asked a very perceptive question. After explaining that many Lean Consultants had been telling him about the critical need for management commitment, he was interested in some deeper insight. “I understand that commitment is essential to succeed,” he said,” but what specifically will make us fail
His question caused me to pause. In the past, our firm has been askedto pick up the pieces after some ineffective attempts to implement Lean Six Sigma. As a result, we certainly can point to some case studies of what not to do. But it is thought-provoking to find the underlying themes in these “worst practice” examples. Here are our top three candidates:
One more “rock in the pack”. If you are not familiar with the rock in the pack analogy, it originates from a story about an unmotivated manager who felt that his job was to handle an endless series of problems. Since nothing was ever completely resolved his work felt like carrying a load of meaningless rocks. Another assignment became just one more rock in the pack.
If Lean Six Sigma simply becomes an additional assignment to middle managers, without displacing something else, it can become a rock. Too often the message is “you need to improve safety, quality, costs, market share, efficiency and customer satisfaction – oh, and by the way, fully implement Lean Six Sigma”. In this situation it is easy to know which of those assignments will get the least attention. It would have been much simpler to say “here’s another rock”.
Allowing Lean Six Sigma to become just one more task is almost a guaranteed way to fail. On the other hand, the successful approach is for Lean to become the method to accomplish business objectives. This also positions Lean properly within the organization. After all, no company has (or should have) the mission statement to achieve Lean Six Sigma excellence. An appropriate mission is some combination of serving customers, providing innovative and quality products, satisfying stakeholders, making a profit and so forth. The rightful role of Lean Six Sigma is as the system to accomplish this.
Using this logic the message to managers is not to simply add Lean onto the list of things to do – but to utilize Lean methods to achieve the measurable business objectives.
Focus on the mechanics. Many of the Lean tools and techniques can be taught fairly quickly - but using those tools to actually transform the business is much, much harder. A good example is Value Stream Maps. A team can be taught the mechanics of VSMs in a few hours and can create one in a day or less of effort. However, using the current state VSM as a starting point and then actually driving improvement is much more difficult.
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