Roadmap Archives - Dumontis

Setting Targets: Control, Tighten and Shift

Nowadays, you almost trip over the whiteboards scattered around the shop floors of many organizations. In most cases, these boards show data on a set of indicators linked to themes like safety, quality, timeliness, speed, productivity and team morale. The idea is that through this data, teams can track whether they are achieving their objectives. To do so, these indicators should not only show the data on actuals (i.e., the voice of the process), but also specific targets reflecting the area’s objectives. Unfortunately, this is much less common. So how then do we track the team’s contribution to the organization’s goals? And even when I do see targets, I sometimes wonder how they were set. A post on setting targets. (more…)

Shikumi: System-Based Lean Transformation

On the web, there is a palpable buzz of failed or unsuccessful Lean initiatives (or organizations that fail Lean if you prefer that point of view). No wonder, to be honest, as many of these initiatives can at best be characterized as programs. And more often they are even no more than a collection of disjointed projects.

Staff is trained, external consultants are brought in – often trained by another external consultant in another company going through a similar “program” – and off we are. We start identifying waste and we might even create a current state value stream map. Enough potential to fill an action list covering several pages, and so our Lean program is born.

What a joke! In doing so, a Lean initiative will never transcend the character of being only a program: a collection of projects and actions to eliminate problems. And calling these projects and actions “kaizens” really doesn’t make it more Lean. And this is only further emphasized by pursuing the apparently required “quick wins” to win over the company’s management. What is the alternative? A system-based Lean transformation, sometimes referred to as Shikumi. (more…)

Using Rubrics to Assess Your Lean Progress

Hoshin kanri involves the identification and deployment of various initiatives (or countermeasures) to eliminate major obstacles to reach the organization’s goal and to further improve the organization’s performance. Typically, organizations subsequently track their performance to see whether they are actually improving. In hoshin kanri these performance indicators are called “control items”. But what organizations track less is whether they are actually deploying what they set out to deploy. These so called “check items” are often missing. And exactly this is one of the key aspects in which hoshin kanri differs from traditional management-by-objectives or MBO. (more…)