See Beyond the Horizon

  Lean Nation, In the spirit of sharing process improvement knowledge, I am offering a small blog series explaining important pieces of a lean management system.  To begin this discussion, I should share the key elements of an entire improvement system.   It is sometimes helpful to break the improvement system down into two parts, although I want to emphatically state that both elements are essential to delivering sustainable, operational improvement change in both performance and culture.  The two elements of the improvement system include the operating system and the management system. The operating system is used to generate breakthrough improvements through the application of the scientific method.  When discussing breakthrough improvements, think 10% plus improvement.  The management system is used to maintain standards, provide data, insights, and behavior to sustain gains, and can be used for incremental improvement of existing processes.  ...

  Lean Nation, In the prior blogs located here See Beyond the Horizon ,   I commented on how data shows that 98% of all institutions stop their transformational efforts in their entirety after eighteen months.        History has taught me the following lessons as to why this is the case. As discussed in previous blogs in much more detail, the four common reasons why organizations abandon transformation are as follows: 1) Organizations waste the first six months of their improvement efforts 2) Organizations fail to monitor the breadth and depth of change 3) Organizations failure to get everyone involved 4) Organizations operate in two systems One of things I frequently ask organizations is if they do not want to use process improvement as a structured approach to improving operational performance, reducing product development cycles, and strategically growing their business,   what is their plan B? Since everyone is trying to perform better a...

    Lean Nation, Welcome to part four of a four-part series. This month's topic is a continuation of a series that was spawned from a LinkedIn posting on failing transformational efforts. For your reference, the link to the posting is here:  (2) Post | LinkedIn .   In this posting the writer suggested that Agile and Change Management efforts are finished within industry. Within the post, there are several thousand comments arguing for and against the hypothesis.  Soon after this posting, I received an article with the hypothesis that 98% of the organizations that embark on continuous improvement journeys  completely abandon their efforts within 18 months . I do not have any data to support or refute this hypothesis either, but I do not think it is a coincidence that several people are writing about this topic at the same time.  I can confirm, from my consulting practice of nearly 20 years, that many organizations start off strong and...