Lessons from the Basketball Court: Three Expectations for Improvement

(Image courtesy of free clipart images)

I am head coach for my 3^rd grade daughter’s basketball team this season.  For most of the team members, this is their first year playing the game, and there is room for improvement for each person (coaches included!).

On the first day of practice, we discussed the three expectations that us coaches have of the girls as players. Ruminating on these expectations, it occurs to me that they have parallel significance in the workplace when trying to make improvements.  These are:

1. Respect
2. Always Try
3. Play as One Team

I asked the girls what each of these meant to them.  In their case, “Respect” meant to listen to the coaches, treat each other with kindness and be encouraging to themselves and each other.  This seems to be pretty similar to the baseline expectation in a workplace.  Treat each other with professional courtesy and respect; which extends beyond being “nice” into things like being punctual, considerate of new ideas, trusting others to do their job, holding people accountable for their work, and following the golden rule (i.e. do unto others).  One client recently asked me what the client needed to do in order for an engagement with AJC to be successful.   The first thing necessary is to want to change and improve.   Consultants help catalyze change, and when a client actually wants to change and improve, they are demonstrating respect for the work the consultant is being hired to do.

The next expectation is to “Always Try.”  For the girls, this means active participation:  to try to do every new skill or play being taught them.  They may not be perfect, or even very good, especially the first few times, but only by trying will they master the skills of the game.  The parallel here is quite apparent, and brings to mind that Shakira song from Zootopia:  Try Everything!  As was discussed in a recent article about The Beauty of the Pilot, we have to try things in order to find out how/whether they work, and as a very necessary step towards success.  In the case of consulting, for both the consultant and the client – active participation and trying to make things work, providing feedback on areas to modify and improve, and trying again.  Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good – always try!

Finally, “Play as One Team.”  We will win and lose as a team or as a company.  It is of no use to the whole group to have a ball hog; this is not sustainable in basketball or in business.  Like the adage that “a team is only as strong as its weakest player,” everyone needs to work hard to improve.  Naturally there will be differing skills, complimentary and growing; but having a single person assume everything, or worse – optimizing in a silo when the functions or processes up or downstream lag, will not help the company’s bottom line.  AJC worked with one client this past year who was unsure of which of their six main process steps were holding them up in their overall timeline to complete a process.  They were experiencing a lot of personnel “pain” in one area, but when we collected duration data for which step took the longest, it was a totally different area than people expected.  We were able to address both areas; the first to find a better way to minimize the manual work that was causing people “pain,” and the second by changing their capacity and allowing the backlog at the bottleneck to flow more quickly, thus enabling the overall process duration to improve. 

In this way, playing as one team is akin to looking at the overall end-to-end value stream; considering the big picture to delivering a product or service, and using data to ascertain where the weakest area is.  Once we know that, we can improve there, and then move on to the next weakest area.  Always, however, we are working to improve the company or team as a whole.

After explaining the Three Expectations, one girl asked me why I didn’t say “Have Fun!” as an expectation.  Of course, I sincerely hope each girl enjoys basketball and has fun on our team!  However, this is something I cannot require or expect.  It seems to me that this is also true in business.  Sure, it would be great to have fun!  But we can’t make that an expectation as “having fun” is an individual perception.  If we follow our expectations above, it is definitely possible that all of our team members, on the ball court or in a business, will not only change and improve, but have fun too.

Happy Holidays from AJC

How to be both Confident and Humble: Follow Through

Yes, this is yours truly (more than 15 years ago  - boy have digital cameras improved since then ...)

Much has been written on confidence, and especially in regards to confidence in women.  Of course, overconfidence can be a very bad thing; especially when perceived of as arrogance by colleagues or peers.   In fact, much has also been written about humility, and especially with regards to leadership.  Turns out humility is a primary factor in strong leaders, which is actually not all that surprising, considering.  Everyone makes mistakes and it is much more inspiring to follow someone who acknowledges that, learns from his or her mistakes, and moves on.

However, in the workplace there is definitely a fine balance between demonstrating enough confidence to assure others that you will get your work done on time and well; and enough humility to recognize when you need help to accomplish these things.  Furthermore, if you want to be a leader, others need to trust you and your abilities.  This is where follow through comes in.

I googled “confidence humility follow through” and got about 1.3 million hits.  In the first page, however, nothing came up on the strategy of follow through.  Google suggested a similar search on “how to be humble and confident at the same time” which yielded approximately 1.6 million hits, but still did not have anything on the first page about using the strategy of follow through.  Not to be overconfident here, but I’d like to offer a potentially little-discussed strategy that may help one toward the ever so delicate balance of being humbly confident: the strategy of follow through.

Follow through, as the phrase suggests, is the act of admitting you don’t know something or are not done with something, but offering to either find out or complete the work and get back to the requestee/group with the results or confirmed action closure.  It is so simple that it is often overlooked; “Have you done XYZ?” “No, but I’ll do it this afternoon and confirm to the group that it is done.”  “What do you know about ABC?” “Not much, but let me look into it and I’ll get back to you.”  These types of conversations happen daily in a workplace.  The key to instilling trust as a leader, of course, is in actually closing out the follow through cycle.

To illustrate:  when I was just starting out in my career as a Process Engineer at a very large semiconductor company, one of my Ph.D. colleagues asked me how it was that I always knew the right answers for the floor technicians who asked me for direction.  I distinctly remember saying, “I don’t always know the right answer, but I have confidence in my ability to find out.”  I went on to describe that when I didn’t know something, I would look the technician in the eye, admit that I did not know right then, but that I would get back to him or her with the answer or course of action soon.  Then I went about learning whatever I didn’t know and – you guessed it – got back to that person.  Over time, technicians, engineers, and even managers would come to me more and more with questions or requests, and I gained a reputation for getting things done.  Rarely, however, did I actually have all the answers immediately. 

Indeed, even now as a consultant offering process improvement services – I don’t know exactly what to recommend for any given client without research, learning, analysis, discussions, and a lot of collaborative effort.  What works for one company won’t always work for another; it is part of the fun to learn and explore new situations, devise strategies and use tools, both old and new, which will work for each unique circumstance.

To summarize, this is my humble advice: be honest and humble when you do not know, have confidence in your ability to find out; and always follow through with those around you.  Over time, this will help you become a true leader.

Stocking Stuffer Trials, or On the Beauty of the Pilot

 

All Our Stockings In A Row

Christmas is around the corner, and like many people, each member of my family will get a stocking full of goodies from Santa.  As the one who procures the items for Santa to generously impart to each person in his or her stocking, the trick is to ascertain exactly how much “stuff” will fit into each stocking so that it is full, but not overflowing to the point where the integrity of the mantle hook is in jeopardy!

After buying a few things and hemming and hawing about whether it was enough or not, I had an epiphany (no pun intended):  Why not just fill the stockings with what I have and see how much space is left over?  Then I can decide how much more, if anything, I will need to procure for each person, and/or if I need to return anything.  Queue the audio: Duh-duh-DUUUUUUMMMMM!!!   It seems obvious:  Instead of imagining how things will fit, why don’t I just TRY IT? 

Parallel this concept to our professional lives.  Trial and error is one of the BEST ways to determine what works and what does not!  But we don’t want to try things on a large scale initially, because of the risk that they will not work.  If our new ideas fail, we want them to fail on a small scale, and most importantly – in a way that does not affect the customer.  Therein lies the beauty of The Pilot.

The Pilot is a trial period for a new idea, process, or methodology.  It is to be undertaken on a small scale and under increased scrutiny.  It is to be done for a pre-determined amount of time or quantity of trials, with the expectation that changes will be made based on the results.  Speaking of results, the desired results need to be hypothesized (what will success look like?), and actual results measured or compared to the desired result; driving modifications before full implementation.

Piloting a new idea, process, or methodology is not to be confused with continuous improvement, which encourages us to always find ways to make things better in small incremental steps.  Pilots, on the other hand, are typically used for new concepts and/or complete “re-engineering” (kaikaku) of an existing process.

One recent AJC client is a services company that collects information from their customers to begin their internal workflow.  Each information collector had his or her own methodology for what to collect, and how to collect it.  They generally asked for the same information eventually, but often requests were afterthoughts, and “custom” each time, even though 80+% of what they needed was standard for all of their clientele.

We designed a process whereby template letters introducing the required information were sent to clients at specific points in the collection process, inclusive of standardized checklists that could be expanded or contracted based on the specific situation.  The standard content of the templates and checklists were modeled on a few internal best practices, which helped provide credibility to others in the company. Though this methodology may sound simplistic, it was different than anything most people in the company had done before.

Instead of rolling out the templates and checklists to all the employees at the same time, however, the project team decided to instigate a Pilot.  We worked with 25% of the personnel and trained them on the new templates and lists, and asked them to Pilot them for a period of 6 weeks.  Over the course of that time, the project team checked in with the pilot personnel regularly.  We had a cloud-based “issues” list where people could input their real-time feedback or issues with the new materials, and improvements were evaluated and made immediately when possible.  We tracked completeness of checklists for required information at the point of submission to the next internal step, and rework if the recipient found errors and had to return the form throughout the Pilot, and setup internal visual cues to prompt completeness within the checklists themselves.

At the end, the data was reviewed and baseline metric established, and I met with each pilot team member personally to solicit feedback on the new templates and lists.  The overwhelming consensus was that the templates were helpful, but the lists were too cumbersome.  I received lots of practical and specific recommendations and requests for simplification, which were made and re-tested on a shorter timeline.  After the Pilot team felt comfortable with the new materials, we updated the training and rolled out the new process and materials to the entire company.

Piloting is definitely a sound, tried and true practice which allows companies to test new ideas, processes, or methodologies in a safe environment.  Often it is difficult to predict performance without actual experience, and in general, people feel more comfortable knowing that they can always “fall back” on the old way of doing things if the new way doesn’t work.  And by soliciting and incorporating feedback from the pilot group, the change agents instill trust and a sense of ownership resulting in “champions” of the new idea/process/methodology with the rest of the company.

Hopefully this testing idea will work as well for my stocking stuffing activities this December.

Rip Off the Red Tape Band-Aid!

“Red Tape,” according to the ubiquitous Wikipedia, is “an idiom that refers to excessive regulation or rigid conformity to formal rules that is considered redundant or bureaucratic and hinders or prevents action or decision-making.”  What amazes me is that many companies forget who put on the red tape in the first place.  “We can’t do that, it doesn’t follow our protocols!,” “We have to do it this way per our procedures,” or “This is what our process requires us to do.” 

When asked if these protocols/procedures/processes are required by some external regulatory body, most of the time the answer is no.  The company themselves wrote the protocol, procedure, or process; there is no external governing body which holds them to maintaining a legacy practice ad infinitum (or who even cares in the first place!).  Yes, sometimes companies are ISO, SQF, or certified by some other body – but guess what?  Even those certification bodies mainly care that the company does what it claims to do.  They just hold you to your own standards.  Effectively, the company itself decides how much red tape to put on any given process or procedure.

So why don’t companies just CHANGE their outdated/ineffective/excessively complicated/disorganized/ambiguous (etc.) “red tape” methods of doing things?  One reason is that they are stuck in a “fixed mindset,” where they cannot even conceive of making changes.  Change is never easy; we human beings tend to fear the unknown.  Many of us have heard the proverb that it is better to choose the familiar but unpleasant situation rather than the unfamiliar one because that may turn out worse.  But guess what… it also may turn out better, and there’s only one way to find out.

One very exciting company that AJC works with has really embraced the “growth mindset” as described in the book Mindset by Carol Dweck.  This company is ready to embrace change; they recognize that putting processes in place and writing out protocols and procedures does not bind them forever; it just binds them until they recognize a better way of doing things, then they make (and effect) improvements!  A few months ago, we conducted an internal audit of their laboratory.  The laboratory does not use large amounts of hazardous chemicals, but they do use small amounts occasionally, and they have an eyewash station in the lab.  Their safety shower, however, is in a different room and there is a door between the lab and the shower which is typically shut while lab personnel is working.  I pointed this out as a potential safety issue to the manager. 

Within minutes the manager had created a sign and hung it on the door stating that the door was never to be closed when a worker was in the lab alone.  Additionally, she verbally informed all the lab staff of this new rule right away.  By the next week when I arrived, the sign had been printed and laminated on both sides of the door, and all the surrounding personnel in every department had also been trained on the rule.

Needless to say, I was super impressed!  Not only did this company push back on their “protocol” of how they typically operate in the lab with the door closed, but they had made the change within minutes and formalized it within a week.  Everyone recognized that a change was needed, and embraced it without reservation.  This is just one example of the many improvements being made at this company where almost everyone has a growth mindset.

Since the only constant is change itself, we may as well train our mindsets toward growth and Rip Off the Red Tape Band-Aid!  What will it take your company to do this?

Five Whys of Thanksgiving for Process Improvement

Five Whys of Thanksgiving for Process Improvement

Many people have heard of the Five Whys of Lean; the point being to keep asking “why?” about an issue until you come to the root cause.  If there is no real reason (classic: “because it’s always been done this way”) or no one seems to know of a good reason, that is indicative of potential room for improvement. 

For example, in a process improvement Current State Mapping session I conducted with a client last year, we discovered that the QC team was measuring something which the technicians at the equipment had already measured and passed on.  I asked a technician “Why do you measure this parameter at the equipment?”  The answer: “Because rework is required at the equipment if the parameter is out of control.”  Seems like a reasonable answer (though ideally we’d push for no defects at the equipment at all).   

Moving on in the process, however, I then asked the QC team why that parameter was measured again just after the employee already passed the measurement at the equipment.  In that case, the answer was that the QC team didn’t know it was being measured upstream of them; they had always taken that measurement.  Then the production manager spoke up that he instituted the parameter check a few years ago at the equipment, but never told the downstream QC team.  This resulted in a duplication of effort at the subsequent QC step which gated the product moving to the next stage of production and caused unnecessary delays to the overall process.  Needless to say, the team was pretty thankful for the Current State Mapping session highlighting this issue so they could stop the duplication of effort and save time in getting the product to the customer.

In the spirit of the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday here in the United States, it is worth exploring five reasons why teams are often thankful when external consultants are hired to facilitate process improvement efforts such as the example above. 

1)      Hiring a consultant demonstrates that Management recognizes employee “pain” and is willing to spend money to help

2)      Employees are relieved that someone else will guide their improvement efforts since they don’t have time, given their “real jobs,” to take on this added responsibility themselves

3)      Peers do not feel like the “bad guy” for exposing inconsistencies or waste in other areas of a process (and consultants typically maintain neutrality as they consider process problems, not directed at individuals)

4)      Exposure to an entire end-to-end value stream or process is enlightening for individuals and facilitates understanding and empathy between departmental “silos”

5)      An outsider will often ask questions that an insider wants to understand, but is afraid to ask for fear of being perceived as ignorant

As the owner and Principal of AJC, I am thankful that my clients recognize the value of hiring an external consultant to facilitate process improvement efforts.  Why?  There are at least five reasons (of course J) but the main one is because I feel good when helping others in a meaningful way – just like most of us, I suspect.

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.

One Quality of a Great Project Manager: The Buck Stops Here

There are so many qualities of a great Project Manager that this article will likely be the first of a number “too numerous to count” (TNTC*).  *Shout out to everyone who has ever grown cultures in a petri dish!

One aspect of being a great Project Manager is embracing the concept that “The Buck Stops Here.”  Another indication of this concept is that great Project Managers find they love the word “done.”  As in “Done, done, and more done.” Good Project Managers may not always know every single minute task associated with completing the overall project at the outset, but they can identify milestones, or gateways, and then articulate the steps required to accomplish each one.  As the situation changes, which so *rarely* happens J, a good Project Manager ascertains the new things which need to be done in order to remove roadblocks, complete enablers, or just plain move the project to the next phase.

Here’s an example, hearkening back to when I was a Project Manager on a large construction project.  We had to put in a major gas and liquid supply system where the tanks would be leased, but the piping was built and owned by the client.  Part of the lease deal was that the supplier would provide design services for the filling station and pipelines to the tanks themselves.  However, the supplier was busier than just our one project, and the entire design creation and approval, not to mention starting the actual work itself, was in danger of becoming delayed!

What is a Project Manager to do?  There are two choices:  One: talk and try to push the supplier to do their job, or Two: act (remembering that “the buck stops here”).  I chose the latter option.  First, I documented the history of requests and responses for the design that I had facilitated with the supplier.  Next, I discussed those with the Project Director, who was my boss, and obtained his support to act.  Third, I took action. 

Now, I am not a design engineer, but I did have one on my team.  I also had several representatives from the client who were the ultimate users of the building available for consult.  And I managed to get the supplier’s representative out to site for a meeting.  Together, we walked the site and I took notes and took pictures of the site while the engineer sketched what the users wanted while providing input as to what was feasible from an engineering standpoint.  The supplier representative basically just tagged along, happy for someone else to get the design work completed.   The meeting took less than an hour and at the end, we all agreed to the sketched design.  I documented everything and sent it out to the team for reference.   We were then able to move forward with the General Contractor and Subcontractors to complete the construction work. 

This type of situation has happened many times in my experience as a Project Manager.  Someone has to take responsibility and accountability to be the point person and get the work done.  That person rarely gets any glory – after all, she didn’t design the great layout, make the actual product, test it or approve the results.  Yet, without the diligent Project Manager striving for the ultimate “Done,” that buck has a funny way of not stopping.  

AJC helps in a myriad of ways in the Project Management space.  We can act as Project Managers, coach client teams to becoming independent project managers, or work with client individual project managers to hone their skills and support them as they then facilitate their team’s work.  The ultimate quality we stress the most is that the Project Manager is the person who embraces the adage that “the buck stops here.”

What is in a Form?

Clients often find they are buried in paperwork – often in the form of, well, forms.  “Why do we have to fill out all this information?”  “Can’t we streamline all this work?” “I can’t get any real work done because I’m always copying and pasting into yet another form.”

All of these very real pain points.  Before we delve into form complexity, however, let’s consider why forms exist in the first place.  Not in the sense of a historical research project on when forms were first used, by whom, how they developed and evolved, etc. (though that would be interesting), but rather for what use are forms helpful in a process?

IMHO, the main function of a form is to collect specific, necessary information in a standardized fashion from one source of knowledge to the next as a tool to provide value to a process.  When you go to the doctor for the first* time, it is valuable for that physician to understand your medical history in order to properly diagnose and treat you, as well as to understand your individual risks regarding future health considerations.  (*Aside:  different from redundant and repetitive collections of medical history via forms!)  When you apply for a loan, it is necessary to provide your financial situation to inform the bank about your reliability to pay interest on the principal.  Within an organization, it may be necessary to provide specific information about particular outputs of one process as inputs to the next that is handled within another department, or for entry into the System of Record.

The problem is that often we abuse the basic tenet of value-added form use by adding more or expanding forms without thinking why we need the information contained within them at all.  Just the other day, I was with an engineer who complained that the sales team did not list a negotiated customer price in a form passed on to engineering.  When I asked for what the engineering team used that information, the engineer faltered.  “Well, I think we copy and paste it and just keep track of it,” he said.  “Okay, but what value-add thing do you do with that information that renders it necessary to you?”  “I don’t know,” he admitted.  We went on to discover that the quoted price was listed in a Quote Letter that was available in a common shared folder for all team members to access. 

What’s wrong with this picture?  First, the receiving party did not even know for what they needed that information – only that there was a field on the form for that price, and in this case it was not filled in.  Second, the form had redundant information– the value in the field requested was available elsewhere.

“I’ll go to bat for you, (Engineer),” I said.  “If you can tell me why you need that information, we’ll make sure that it is always provided to you in this process in a standardized way.”  The engineer agreed, and we also discussed how the overall process is being overhauled in our Process Improvement project anyway, so this particular form is being replaced with something else that is scrubbed for value-add, as well as considered for direct entry by the initial knowledge owner to the system of record to eliminate the need for manual entry into the existing quagmire of forms fields.

If your organization is experiencing the pain point of too many or too cumbersome forms, step back and review the following:

• Why is each form needed?
• What value does each field in each form provide to the recipient?
• Is there some way for the knowledge owner to pass on that information into the ultimate “system of record” or resting place for the information directly, without using a form in the first place?

These are the types of things AJC considers in Process Improvement projects via our Current and Future State mapping methodologies.  If you need help, we would be happy to be of service!

Welcome to AJC!

Welcome to AJC and our new blog.  Here you will find pertinent information that we hope you will find helpful to your business, especially as it relates to Process Design, Development, Improvement, and Documentation, as well as Project Management tools and techniques.  Stay tuned for more content to follow.  - Andrea Jones, Principal, AJC