This is an excerpt from the book "Five Minute Lean", by David McLachlan - a wonderful book that blends teaching of the tools, culture and philosophy of traditional Lean with a modern-day Lean parable. You can get the whole book on Amazon here and enjoy your own copy.
Use Kaizen and Kaizen Events to Help Stakeholder Buy-In
The term “Kaizen” is Japanese for improvement, or continuous improvement.
A Kaizen Event, therefore, means an “improvement meeting”. It often involves a few front-line staff from the process involved, a few people who are not familiar with the process to get an outside perspective, and sometimes a few people from the leadership team. Your team use any of the tools they need to from this book, to reveal problems, discover opportunities and make a solid case for change.
If everyone is already familiar with the concepts (and with a book like this in everyone’s hands, they should be), then it is much easier to get everything down on paper quickly. It could be started over a cup of coffee with someone involved in the process, or integrated into an existing regular weekly meeting with a team of front-line staff.
Ensuring front-line team-mates and leaders are involved with your Kaizen events will also help you get one of the most important and often the most elusive things: stakeholder buy-in. The more input someone has into something, the more likely they are to support it. As you take them through the steps, you are not only building their skill-set, but helping them be a real part of the solution.
This is why Steve was so insistent on Lisa getting her team-mates involved when starting with her current state map.
By itself, Kaizen or continuous improvement should be a regular part of your week, including “every person, every day” in stopping when there are problems (4.2), defining them using the customer driven metrics (1.2), getting to the real cause of the problem (3.3), and checking ideas to fix them. Even small ideas that warrant a “just do it” test (easily done using Agile, 5.3) to quickly see if they work, can get things underway.
Figure 2: A Lean practitioner leading a Kaizen Event, involving people who do the process every day.
This is an excerpt from the book "Five Minute Lean", by David McLachlan - a wonderful book that blends teaching of the tools, culture and philosophy of traditional Lean with a modern-day Lean parable. You can get the whole book on Amazon here and enjoy your own copy.
Selected chapters from the story within Five minute Lean:
- Lean Parable – Where Lisa Makes a Change
- Lean Parable – Where Lisa Discovers a New Way
- Lean Parable – Where Lisa Performs a Balancing Act
- Lean Parable – Where Lisa Pulls the Trigger
- Lean Parable – Where Lisa Sets a New Standard
- Lean Parable – Where Lisa Becomes a Leader
Check out these selected chapters from the teachings within Five Minute Lean:
- Five Minute Lean – The Power of Incentives – What is Measured and Rewarded Improves
- Five Minute Lean – Implement With Agile for Fast Iterations and Feedback
- Five Minute Lean – Go to the Gemba
- Five Minute Lean – Organise Your Process with Five S
- Five Minute Lean: Glossary
- Five Minute Lean – Help Your Process Flow with Line Balancing
- Five Minute Lean – Heijunka: Level the Workload when Demand Fluctuates
- Five Minute Lean – Value is Determined by the Customer
- Five Minute Lean – Introduction
- Five Minute Lean – Make Feedback Meaningful with Kano Analysis
- Five Minute Lean – Build in Quality with Error-Proofing and Autonomation
- The Five Minute Catch-up
- Five Minute Lean – Get Your Map Started with a SIPOC
- Five Minute Lean – Collect and Measure Feedback With the Net Promoter Score
- Five Minute Lean – Work Towards One-Piece-Flow (and Reducing Silos or Batching)
- Five Minute Lean – Eliminate the Eight Wastes to Improve Flow
- Five Minute Lean – Create a Future State Value Stream Map
- Five Minute Lean – Map the Value Stream to Reveal Opportunities
- Five Minute Lean – Use Feedback to Fix and Guarantee
- Five Minute Lean – Create a Pull System with FIFO, Kanban Triggers and Visual Management