Daily Kaizen

Recently I was hired to be the new Director of our Improvement Promotion Office here at Group Health. Many of you know about the lean journey here from reading this blog, attending LEI conferences or coming on site visits.  It has not been easy but continues to be an amazing and inspiring adventure.  I am excited about the future, our continuing development as a lean organization and the improvements we are trying to achieve on behalf our patients. Some are huge and transformational, many are small. They are all important. And the only way we are going to get there is through the amazing people that work here.

Right now I am looking to fill a senior lean consultant position. I was in this role before coming to my current job and it is an amazing, challenging and fun position. The job requires a unique mix of skills; strong lean thinking and technical experience, ability to consult with senior and executive leaders to help shape improvement work and coach on their lean development and management sytstem, the ability to work collaboratively with teams but also challenge the status quo. I will give particular attention to the candidates that have lean experience in the health care industry. I am also interested in a person that has supply chain experience (although this is not a requirement).  You can read the details in the job description.

If you are interested in applying for this position or know someone else who is please feel free to look at our jobs website. Use the job number 112415 to search for the job description and to submit an application.

Popularity: 83% [?]

Several years ago, a sensei challenged me to convey an idea on one page, with 90% pictures and 10% words  – “If you can’t explain it through pictures on one page, you don’t understand it” she said. Continuing to practice this skill has been incredibly valuable; increasing my understanding of lean principles, and my ability to make them come alive with clients.

This is the first in a series of blogs intended to share ideas through this medium

Popularity: 85% [?]

Like many organizations when things do not go as planned we often react in ways that are not constructive and lead to additional problems.  I remember a couple of years ago we joked that the firestorm always started in the executive conference room and burned downhill.  A simple question by the CEO would lead to people scrambling all over the place to try and find an answer, which quite frankly we often had no capability of providing.  Our processes were not stable, we had very few standards (no daily management) and our leaders lacked standard work (far from the gemba).  Nobody had bad intent, and everyone wanted to do the right thing for the company, but our systems were not set up to tell us if a problem really existed and if it did they did not encourage appropriate problem solving. 

Fast forward a couple of years and we still are challenged in this area, but we are much better.  The entire organization speaks a common improvement language and has common methods.  Instead of special teams of analysts being deployed to find answers our operations managers work through simple A3 thinking.   We have taken the time to define standards at each level and defined how they connect between levels.  While not perfect, we now know when a problem is occurring or about to occur (no standard, no problem).  Additionally, with leadership rounding (gemba) and standard work the escalation process has greatly improved and problems that used to have to go all the way to the top are being solved at lower levels in the organization. 

The truth is that we have a lot of variation in our management processes.  The divisions/departments that have had the discipline and taken the time to put in place the system described above are far more effective then the ones that have not.  I believe that reducing this variation is our biggest opportunity as an organization over the next few years.   As problems continue to come up you only need to watch how management responds to know where we still have work to do.

Popularity: 72% [?]