How to Get Started: Part Five - Planning I
You're probably thinking..."All this darn getting ready! When do I actually get to do something?"
Here's the thing....the stuff you're going to do is all easy enough. You can do them anytime. But I get to talk with lots of plant managers and the most common refrain is, "Lean seems so simple but I can't get the methods to get any steam behind them or to stick!" And it's because the only thing they do is implement (or attempt to) a few disjointed tools and methods.
Agile methods need to fit with the overall strategy of the company. Making sure that this fit exists takes planning and discipline. This process of getting ready by communicating, gather data and planning helps assure that the fit exists.
OK, so you've learned a lot about agile methods and concepts, you've talked about it with your colleagues, you've gathered some information. Now you have establish some goals and targets and develop a calendar.
Goals and Targets
You should have a pretty clear picture of operational performance after your data gathering. Equipment downtime, setup times, inventory accuracy, inventory turns, scrap, customer service performance, vendor performance, cycle times of all sorts. You need to spend some time thinking about targets for all these performance dimensions.
To tell the truth, I'm actually not a big fan of numerical targets. Deming didn't like them at all. I'm not quite so much a fundemantalist as he is about it, but I know whence he comes on the topic; hard and fast operational targets can actually impede continuous improvement.
Back when I worked for the coal company, there was a daily production target of advancing the face of the coal 20 feet (I'd have to go into a lot of explanation as to exactly what that means but you get the idea, I hope). The supervisors reported their production each shift. The mine engineers, doing their work, found that the locations of the face of the coal in the various sections of the mine (which they determined via surveying) were way out of whack with the production records. In some cases, the face of the coal was far in advance of what production records said it should be. In other cases, it was far behind. A little further study uncovered the cause; in all cases, the supervisors reported an average of exactly....20 ft a day. Oh, they knew enough not to report exactly 20 feet every day. But they also knew that, over a week or so, their production had better average out to 20 feet a day. If it was less, they were in trouble. If it was more....they would find themselves with a new, tougher production objective.
In a recent case, a maintenance manager at a client was upset with me. He said "my" agile initiative was forcing his maintenance techs to hurry their repair work on breakdowns to get it done in less than an hour in every case. I knew the "60 minute" target was not a performance objective for his workers, rather it was the criterion the management team used to decide which maintenance problems to focus on, e.g., if a breakdown lasted more than an hour, let's figure out what happened and how to prevent it but if it last only 15 minutes, we're not going to spend time on it...yet. It was using a Pareto approach to focus attention but he saw it as a hard and fast target.
OK, with all these caveats, why bother to set objectives? Because they do focus attention and, properly developed and communicated, can support continual improvement.
More on this in my next post.
Here's the thing....the stuff you're going to do is all easy enough. You can do them anytime. But I get to talk with lots of plant managers and the most common refrain is, "Lean seems so simple but I can't get the methods to get any steam behind them or to stick!" And it's because the only thing they do is implement (or attempt to) a few disjointed tools and methods.
Agile methods need to fit with the overall strategy of the company. Making sure that this fit exists takes planning and discipline. This process of getting ready by communicating, gather data and planning helps assure that the fit exists.
OK, so you've learned a lot about agile methods and concepts, you've talked about it with your colleagues, you've gathered some information. Now you have establish some goals and targets and develop a calendar.
Goals and Targets
You should have a pretty clear picture of operational performance after your data gathering. Equipment downtime, setup times, inventory accuracy, inventory turns, scrap, customer service performance, vendor performance, cycle times of all sorts. You need to spend some time thinking about targets for all these performance dimensions.
To tell the truth, I'm actually not a big fan of numerical targets. Deming didn't like them at all. I'm not quite so much a fundemantalist as he is about it, but I know whence he comes on the topic; hard and fast operational targets can actually impede continuous improvement.
Back when I worked for the coal company, there was a daily production target of advancing the face of the coal 20 feet (I'd have to go into a lot of explanation as to exactly what that means but you get the idea, I hope). The supervisors reported their production each shift. The mine engineers, doing their work, found that the locations of the face of the coal in the various sections of the mine (which they determined via surveying) were way out of whack with the production records. In some cases, the face of the coal was far in advance of what production records said it should be. In other cases, it was far behind. A little further study uncovered the cause; in all cases, the supervisors reported an average of exactly....20 ft a day. Oh, they knew enough not to report exactly 20 feet every day. But they also knew that, over a week or so, their production had better average out to 20 feet a day. If it was less, they were in trouble. If it was more....they would find themselves with a new, tougher production objective.
In a recent case, a maintenance manager at a client was upset with me. He said "my" agile initiative was forcing his maintenance techs to hurry their repair work on breakdowns to get it done in less than an hour in every case. I knew the "60 minute" target was not a performance objective for his workers, rather it was the criterion the management team used to decide which maintenance problems to focus on, e.g., if a breakdown lasted more than an hour, let's figure out what happened and how to prevent it but if it last only 15 minutes, we're not going to spend time on it...yet. It was using a Pareto approach to focus attention but he saw it as a hard and fast target.
OK, with all these caveats, why bother to set objectives? Because they do focus attention and, properly developed and communicated, can support continual improvement.
More on this in my next post.
You are spot on! From management's perspective it comes down to this:
"Don't Manage People...Manage Attention"
If more managers made the connection between the numbers (objectives) and lens (level of attention), organizations will achieve results and employees buy into objectives. The concept is powerful. When management realizes the sanity of this idea, attention, rather than people, is a heck of better way to get things done.
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