Reducing people variation in a process

Many companies are discovering that there are disconnects between their people and their executive leadership. For example, one study showed that people are much more aligned with their immediate supervisor than they are with the overall company objective and leaders. Maybe this is common sense, but isn’t the desired behavior to first support the whole company and then to establish how each individual supports that mission? An employee survey could help identify what barriers are in place culturally that impede the progress toward a high-performance environment. Deming put it this way: “Profound knowledge comes from the outside, and by invitation. A system cannot know itself.”

Full article here:

tips-on-using-lean-to-reduce-variation-in-people-processes

Blame is the enemy of progress

Changing culture without resistance or blame

Case Studies

As an IT business process analyst, I was the project lead and implementer for a number of large projects.  I utilized principles of Lean, Six Sigma and Kaizen; and combined them with my own methods of symptom, discovery and redesign.  Below are a few organizations that I was able to improve during my time with Lang.  In all of the following projects, I was the key person during the discovery, sale and install phases.

Hanover College

Through our discovery process we identified several projects that demanded valuable resources needed elsewhere in the organization. I assisted Hanover on a number of technology initiatives. These included follow-me-printing, mobile technology integration, cost accounting and control of student print jobs.  I also helped implement green initiatives to limit print usage and enforce campus policy.  Through these initiatives I was able to provide campus wide print management tools and give the IT department complete control over resources scattered over a wide area.

Maryhurst Alternative School

I identified several broken processes tied to the tracking of grants, donations, and the document management systems within the accounting and human resources.  I provided Maryhurst with solutions tailored to each process and department.  For Human Resources, I provided a system to store documents related to employee on-boarding and certification maintenance, which would notify staff members when an employee’s certifications were about to expire.  In Accounting, I installed a system of storing documents that integrated with an existing accounting software, and also provided a way of tracking information that traditionally “slipped through the cracks”.

Semonin Realtors

I was asked to help find ways to utilize technology to improve agent level support.  This initiative was a key factor in Semonin’s strategic goal of recruiting and retaining the best agents in their field.  I assisted the Semonin IT department to design systems to improve billing times and allow a level of “cost transparency” that agents required. A mobile print strategy implemented allowed remote locations to report accounting data to the main branch, creating significant efficiencies. Agent adoption was a crucial prerequisite.  I designed their systems with a goal of making complicated technical procedures easy to learn and utilize for their agents.

Kentucky Farm Bureau Insurance

With a high focus on creating marketing materials “in house”, Kentucky Farm Bureau needed professional quality printing with enterprise level management of print costs.  I was able to quickly identify their specific needs, and implement a system that tied existing active directory users into a cost accounting system, providing ease-of-use features like using a card swipe at the machine that tied back to their active directory profile.    

Louisville Water Company

With scan security as a driving factor, I provided active directory integration with scan devices that limited each user to scanning only to their email or active directory storage location.  The system was configured for “real-time” active directory lookups, so that when a user was created by IT in active directory, no further configuration was required at the scan device.

Bluefin Seafood

With a fleet of trucks running back and forth to the coastal cities every day, Bluefin Seafood needed help processing the never ending flow of people and data moving through the company.  In addition to providing hardware capable of operating in a cold and wet environment, I also provided an automated solution for taking incoming accounting paperwork and matching it to their existing accounting software, thus saving time and money over a error-prone manual system.

Make your company likable to your employees

Here are some good reasons why:

http://dailyinfographic.com/11-incredible-reasons-to-have-friends-at-work-infographic

Why do we change our passwords every 90 days?

I consider myself the enemy of unexamined practices, and password policy practices haven't been updated since the late 90's.  Here are some articles to read and consider:

http://www.cerias.purdue.edu/site/blog/post/password-change-myths/

http://www.sicpers.info/2010/03/why-do-we-annoy-our-users/

Origin Story

Let's say you found out today that a new Spider-man movie is coming out, and it's a reboot of the franchise, with a completely new cast taking on the roles of Peter Parker, Mary Jane Watson and J. Jonah Jameson.  Now you, being the huge fan you are you talk your significant other into going to the theater on opening night to behold the new spectacle.

Now here's a few things you already know before the lights go dim:  1.  There's going to be a normal teenager and 2.  That person is going to get bit by a spider, an action that will bestow upon them all the positive aspects of spiders and none of the negative ones (they won't, for instance, capture people in a web and eat them, you hope).

How do you know that there will be a spider bite?  Because that's how the process of becoming a spider-based meta-human begins.  The origin story is already ingrained in the minds of people coming to see the movie, and the shared familiarity of the story can lead to more efficient story telling.

To begin an honest assessment of your current business process, you must first focus on the origin.  How do customers find you.  When they go looking for your product, what are the most likely avenues they will take?  You can't always control these factors, but the ones you can control, you should, and this starts with the ringing of the phone, or the submission from the website.  The experience the customer has when looking to engage your company will be a lasting impression, so don't mess it up.

A few business principles come immediately into play here:

1.  Provide a single point of contact for customers and suppliers.
          The more times you pass the baton, the higher the chance that some one is going to drop it.  Eliminate transferring of calls from person to person, waiting on hold, waiting for a callback.  Always work to shorten the 'hops' from customer and his destination.  In this you'll be  optimizing their experience without them even knowing it!

2.  Merge your swim lanes
         Make sure your call center, web submissions and walk ups all get funneled into the same  optimized workflow.

3.  Simplify the steps
          If you take the "0 for operator" off of your incoming phone system, your customers and vendors may secretly hate you.

There are many more we can apply to this step, but we'll cut it short here for the sake of readability.  The takeaway is that you need to nail down your entry process first, because in a 'move data upstream' world, you'll be helping every process that needs to occur after.

Business Design Principle Number 1: Design the process around value adding activities.

Business Design Principle Number 1:  Design the process around value adding activities.
If you've never read the story of Baron Von Steuben you owe it to yourself to at least check out his Wikipedia page.  The man was a General in the Revolutionary War, and the man understood the importance of process.  He was given the task of turning untrained militia men into a force that could stand up the British Regulars.  He implemented changes to the American military structure that be came the "manual" on how the American military operated and trained for the next 50 or so years, and was famously quoted as saying ,"You say to your soldier, 'Do this' and he does it. But I am obliged to say to the American, 'This is why you ought to do this' and then he does it."  Even from the beginning of our country, American's had to know the "why".

In business, value added activities are the "why".  When creating a process, the target is the Cost, Time, and Quality that you deliver to the customer.  Often processes that have been in place for long periods start to pick up activities that don't help achieve these goals.  The most common cause I have seen in this area is when a permanent policy is put in place to address a transient issue, usually because that issue caused a significant headache the one time it occurred.  So the "ounce of prevention" method would be to examine changes before they take place to ensure that it is a VAA, but if that occurred there'd be no reason for analysts to come in later and cut this fat.  As an analyst, I suppose I should be somewhat grateful that these things do occur.

But every activity in your process should be able to stand on its own, and if you find things that were put into place to handle circumstances that no longer exist, or if they take away from VAA's for a minimal return (i.e., making a change that adds time 100% of the time to deal with an issue that only occurs .01% of the time and only costs 10% more time when it does occur is, well, you do the math).  So make them stand, and if the activity can't withstand the criticism, then its time to change the process.