Scope – Keeping the Team Focused

Have you ever been in a meeting or worked on a project when all of a sudden it’s apparent that you’re completely off track and not discussing the reason you gathered in the first place?  What's worse is when the meeting comes to an end you feel like you haven’t accomplished anything.  Even worse yet, the project is taking way too much time and resources due to this lack of scope.

If you’ve experienced these challenges then you've had an opportunity to be better focused on scope, which is defined as the extent of the subject matter that something is relevant.  Said differently, scope is the information pertaining to topic/meeting/project at hand and nothing outside of it.  Anything outside of that requires a new project or meeting.  Think of a telescope, when looking through one all you can see it's what's in the lens, which is how your meeting/project needs to be run.

It’s so easy to get distracted when working on a project that has outside influences or issues, as most do.  Teamwork itself can create many reasons for losing focus on the scope; these reasons could be differences in opinion, certain team members who have common interests/hobbies/history (who chat about these things in the meeting) or sometimes there are people on the team who are louder than others and dominate conversations.  Even things like cell phones, tablets or other devices can lead to distraction from the scope.

Staying on scope for the entire meeting or project will ensure you get to the results you wanted in a timely manner.  Here are a few ideas on how to stay focused on the scope.

Have a plan.  Why are you here?  What are you trying to achieve?  You shouldn’t be doing anything else until you can answer to these two questions.  Moreover, if you’re in a team then everyone needs to agree on the answers then keep it in front of everyone.  To take the planning even further you, and everyone on the team, should also agree on what everyone’s roles and responsibilities are, how and when you’re meeting, and any metrics or goals for the meeting/project.  Covey said it best, begin with the end in mind.

Agree on beginning and ending points.  If it’s a project you’re working on then agreeing on the start and end points of the process is essential.  Said differently from a lean point of view, you have to know the value stream.  Everything is part of a value stream and therefore value stream mapping is a great tool to help you with visually displaying all the steps in a process.  Find an empty wall and grab a bunch of sticky notes.  All the discussion after the process has been mapped should relate to something between and/or including the first and last step of the process.

Strong facilitation is a must.  One of the best bets to staying on scope is to have a strong facilitator; someone who is knowledgeable of the process, sticks to the plan, unbiased, respected by all team members and can keep the team focused on the scope at hand.  The facilitator needs to keep everyone on scope, balance the conversation between all team members, engage and ensure the quiet people have a voice while loud people give everyone a chance to be heard.  If you’re not a facilitator or have not been in that role before then don’t let that stop you from starting, everyone has to start somewhere so start now and keep practicing.  Sometimes, everyone is just waiting for someone to herd the cats but no one steps up.  Take the bull by the horns if no one else does, just remember what makes a good facilitator.

Simple questions to refocus.  When you realize that you’re on a tangent from the topic at hand and are deviating down a new path, try saying, “does this discussion get us closer to our end in mind?” or “how does this relate to our scope?” or simply, “what is our scope?”  In answering these questions the group will usually re-focus themselves back to the proper scope.  My favourite question for getting people focused is, "how much is this meeting costing us?"  When you add up all the salary/time of the people in the room it's usually not a small number.

These steps are going to help you keep focused on the scope but remember that deviations from your scope will never completely go away.  The next time you’re in a meeting and the topic at hand starts to get off the rails put your hand up, call a time out or do whatever is needed to grab everyone’s attention.  Then, as a reminder, re-agree with everyone what the scope is, and don’t be discouraged if this happens multiple times.

Be Continuous Improvement

The Power of Removing Waste

Today I took the Ideon Team though a problem solving simulation using a lot of tennis balls.  The purpose of the simulation is to teach some basic problem solving skills but also to show that you can achieve great results by simply removing the waste present in a process.

Think about the waste involved in tossing a ball farther than you need to be; there's waiting, over processing and motion to name the obvious wastes.  Giving a team the freedom to understand the wastes and find ways to eliminate them is empowering, believe me.  Moreover, the game got a lot of people thinking how easily they got amazing results without working any harder and how they could apply it to their roles.

By the time the game was done and we had gone 4 rounds, the team had quadrupled their output in a matter of 45 minutes.  Imagine going to your team now and asking them to quadruple their output...  What would happen?  They would probably think you were crazy.

Give the simulation a try with your team, you don't have to be or know lean to see the benefits and results.  Over time I will write about the 8 forms of waste to give you better understanding of them, but you don't have to wait for me, Google "Lean 8 Wastes".  I've posted the simulation on my LinkedIn profile, check it out here.  

Be Continuous Improvement!

Mike

Name Writing Simulation

Here's a quick simulation you can do to help teach the value of patience in leadership when introducing a new process, which also helps to teach the importance of a standard operating procedure (SOP) and the ever-important no-blame environment.

You can do this simulation on your own or with a group; it will be effective in both scenarios.  All you need is a pen, a blank piece of paper (Letter size is ideal but doesn't really matter) and about 20 minutes to run through it properly.

Here’s how it works…

1. On a blank piece of paper divide the sheet into three columns. If doing this in a group, give everyone their own sheet and make sure everyone has a pen/pencil.

2. In the first column, give everyone 30 seconds to write their first and last name as many times as they can down the column. They can write their name however they want but they can't start until you say go.

 - How many did they get?

 - Ask the group what they thought.  Was it easy?  Why?

 - Most likely they will say it's easy because they've been writing their name for years and that it's a familiar process.  Good.

3. In the second column, again 30 seconds, get them to write their name as many times as the can. However, right before you say go, tell them they have to remove every second letter from their name, then say, "Go!"  Watch the confusion.

 - How many this time?  Almost always it's less, unless someone has a short name.

 - Ask the group...  Why did you get less, I took away half the steps to write your name? You should have got twice as many!?!  This is what a "blame environment" would do.

 - Reasons you'll get back: It's a new process/standard, the previous process I knew very well, the new one was harder, needed to think about it, etc...

 - As a leader, you can't expect people to get a new process right away; it takes time and training for people to understand new processes. Did I mention training, lots and lots of training.  And remember, people are trained when they're trained, don't put a time limit on training.  If people aren't getting a new process after they've been trained, it's not the people it's the training method that needs to be looked at.  Ask why and truly listen to the answers, it's a process issue.  This is what a "no-blame environment" would do.

4. In the last column, again 30 seconds, but this time (before you start) write your name with every second letter missing at the top of the column.  They now have an SOP and have had some training/practice in the previous round. 

 - Most of the time people get more than the first column in this round. 

 - This is when you explain the value of an SOP and training/practice.

 - Also a good time to discuss the no-blame environment...  In a blame environment, people would be scolded for not getting better results with the new process.  In a no-blame environment, people are asked what the reason is for their performance, if more training is needed, and what can be done (like a visual SOP) to improve results.

Have fun with this.

Be Continuous Improvement!

Solutions - Taking Steps to Sustainment

When coming up with solutions for problems, usually - after you’ve spent a lot of time planning and digging to the ROOT of the problem - you say, “here’s what we need to do, now let’s go do it.”  Then what happens?  Sometimes nothing happens, but most of the time when we put a solution (or part of a solution) in place it eventually falls apart a week, month or year later.

Why is this?  Well, the main reason is that you didn’t put as much planning into the solution as you did into getting to that point.  You got so excited that you’ve developed a solution that you jumped right in and try to make it work.  Moreover, you missed some key steps that would have played a huge role in sustaining your solutions.

Just like the project itself, solutions take a lot of planning.  You have to take the time necessary to ensure the results you wanted are the same results you get initially and then continue to get until it’s time to revisit the process for more improvement, not because people just plain stopped doing it.

Here are a few things to consider when developing solutions that will help you with sustainment.

How will the new results be measured?  If you don’t measure the new results, how will you know if you’re getting the results you wanted?  Ensure a measurement system is in place and it is reviewed regularly.  Post the metrics - also know as key performance indicators (KPI) - and huddle around them, set goals around them and track them for trends.

Have all the new steps been clarified?  Does everyone know exactly how he or she fits into the new process?  Before you start to implement a solution you have to make sure everyone knows what he or she are doing.  Don’t rush to the solution; rushing can make some people feel intimidated and not stick up their hand to ask questions.  The second part to this is to ensure everyone agrees on the steps; if you move forward with people disagreeing with the solution then  

Who will own the process?  If no one owns it, it won’t sustain.  Think of it this way, if there was a garbage can in a room that needed to be emptied and no one was responsible to empty it then chances are it would get filled past a reasonable point and potentially be overflowing.  However, if a process/system with standards was created to empty the garbage and there is someone (process owner) who made sure the process was being followed then chances are the garbage would be emptied.  Process ownership does mean this person is the doer; they are the person who is already a stakeholder in the process who makes sure the standards are being sustained.  If the standards were not being maintained they would bring this up with the stakeholders and do more problem solving.  Ask why?

Are Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) placed where the work happens?  When a new solution is implemented, chances are it will take some time for people to get used to it.  To further explain this point I have a name writing simulation that I will post after this article that demonstrates the challenges of new processes; take yourself and/or team through it.  An SOP needs to be visual (use pictures), have all the steps to the process laid out and be so easy to understand that you could grab someone off the street and they could follow the SOP and get the same result as one of your employees.

What is the training schedule?  Training is usually treated as a singular event, where someone (who is rarely a trained trainer) shows another person how to do a new task once but then can’t understand why the trainee can’t do the trained task later.  Training schedules need to be created; training needs to done daily in the beginning, and then slowly moved out as the new process becomes familiar.  Even once everyone is fully trained in the new process, there should be annual refresher training at minimum.

Your solutions are great; they’re going to eliminate waste (in all its 8 forms), now go make them happen. 

Be Continuous Improvement!

A New Beginning

We all have an ability to improve or not.  It's a choice for you to make.  

Improvement is a process, a process that is achievable for anyone.  However, the improvement process can seem complicated or intimidating to many.  That's where this blog and mikenunn.ca comes in.  This blog is dedicated to sharing experiences from my continuous improvement (Lean) journey, but at the same time I want to break down the tools and methodologies into bite-sized pieces.

My lean journey began in 2010 when I became Lean Blackbelt Certified.  Since then I've been part of many lean projects in many different businesses and industries, all of which have provided me with some great experiences.  I was also fortunate enough to spend a week in Japan learning Lean first hand from a variety of companies including Toyota and Nissan.

I don't want you to believe that Lean is just for business or specifically manufacturing, it can be applied to anything.  Over many decades, Lean (also known as continuous improvement) has proven to be a great tool for improvement by many companies, individuals, teams and industries.

An example of topics that I will be discussing on this blog are:

- The 10 Steps to Problem Solving
- Solutions, Taking Steps to Sustainment
- Simulations to help in teaching continuous improvement
- Scope, Keeping a Sharp Focus
- Problems, The Source of Improvement
- And more...

No matter what your profession is, you have a choice.  A choice to improve or to continue doing the same and continuing to get the same results, and I have a funny feeling that you want to see bigger and better things for yourself.  If so, I hope I can give you some tools and knowledge from my own experiences from my Lean Journey.  Walk with me.

Thank you for taking the time to visit mikenunn.ca, thank you for reading my blog and articles and if you sent me feedback I very much appreciate it.

Be Continuous Improvement.

Mike