Touchy-Feely Stuff

by Don Harkey

When people ask me what I do, I tell them that I own a consulting company. When people ask me what I consult, I tell them "process improvement, strategic planning, vision and mission generation... that kind of thing". I usually tell them that I am an engineer at that point, and then they really seem puzzled. What does the "touchy-feely" stuff like vision and mission have to do with process improvement?

Last week, I met with a trainer/coach and we were talking about how different "consultants" always do very different things. A good analogy might be in the field of marketing. A marketing consultant might really be a graphic designer, a product placement expert, a marketing strategist, an advertisement consultant, or maybe a marketing specialist in a specific area like technology. The point is that each field is complex, but rather then try to explain all of that, consultants often over simplify. Almost every consultant "specializes" in something.

My "specialty" is process improvement. I can work with any company to find significant improvements on any process. What is a "process"? Everything is a process, whether it is defined or not. You have followed several processes already today from getting dressed this morning to turning on your computer. Organizations have multiple processes interacting everyday, some deliberate and some undefined. By focusing on key processes, an organization can become more efficient and provide better quality to their customers. What are the key processes? Perhaps even more importantly, how do we make the process improvements not only "stick", but continue to improve?

The goal is to get organizations to understand their key processes and continuously improve them. One of my goals for my clients is for them is to get them where they no longer need me. How do we accomplish this? This is where the "touchy-feely" stuff comes into play.

The first step for any organization is to understand its core purpose. What is truly important? What is it they are trying to accomplish? Without knowing this, process improvement efforts can actually hurt and even cripple an organization.

Imagine a company who applies process improvement to their customer service process. They decide that their goal is to cut down the average call time and the total cost of customer service. They outsource the calls to India and provide them with a strict script designed to keep the call length at a minimum. They figure out that the average customer will wait 10 minutes without getting too upset, so they design their capacity around an average wait of 10 minutes. Now take a step back. As a customer, does this sound like a company you want to buy a computer from?

Zappos was recently in the news for their unusual practice of NOT using average call time as a success metric in customer service calls. They instead looked at whether they successfully resolved the customer's problems. This is substantially harder to measure and doesn't analyze as cleanly, but Zappos has a different goal than the first unnamed company. Zappos has a clear vision of who they are. They know what their purpose is. They remain very connected with their customers (you can even follow the Zappos CEO on Twitter at http://twitter.com/zappos).

When I work with a new organization for the first time, I have to make a quick judgment of whether they understand their own organizational purpose. Some do, some don't. Few have it clearly outlined. Before we embark on significant process improvement efforts, the organization MUST understand what "improvement" means. Does it mean reduced costs? Does it mean improved quality? Does it mean growth?

Once an organization knows where it wants to go, the next step is for them to understand how they will get there. This is where the strategic planning comes in. While the "how" is important, perhaps an even better question is "who". This is the key to "continuously" improving a process. Real and continuous improvement is only accomplished when EVERYONE in the organization becomes involved. Management must understand their role and must utilize the talents (both realized and hidden) of all the people within their organization.

One we have a core purpose, I like to work with front line supervisors and managers to help them see what their people can actually do. I have worked with organizations who have treated their bottom level employees as commodities for many years suddenly discover hidden talents and passions from unexpected places. One hourly floor worker who disliked his job discovered a way to save the company $50,000 per year in waste. This employee was suddenly energized to find more improvements and has gone from an "underperformer" to getting promoted to supervisor. This is when REAL change begins to occur.

Too often, management does not like to focus on the "touchy-feely" aspects of organizational improvement. That is probably because they have never applied it with the nuts and bolts of process improvement. Once an organization knows who they are and acknowledges the talent of their people, I can teach them a plethora of tools they can use to understand and improve their processes. These are the "hard" skills that management loves to jump to, often before they are ready.

This week, we are going to talk more about these "touchy-feely" business principles and how important they are to any organization.

Continuous Improvement - The Humidifiers (Part II)

by Don Harkey

For those of you haven't read "Continuous Improvement - The Humidifiers (Part I), you might want to follow the link below and read this first. Otherwise, skip the link and let's discuss.

http://galtconsulting.blogspot.com/2009/01/continuous-improvement-humidifiers-part.html#comments

There were some great suggestions on improving the humidifier process. Without seeing the process in detail, it is challenging to develop specific suggestions, but I love the variety of suggestions presented. Like any course of action, they all have advantages and disadvantages. Let's review a few of them.

Humidifier in the Furnace
One suggestion was to eliminate the 3 small humidifiers and install a commercial humidifier in the furnace system. This would definitely improve the process as we have it defined. Other than having the humidifier serviced annually, this would eliminate the daily employee interaction with the humidifier. When talking about process improvements, the first suggestions usually involve spending some money. This might be a good idea, but also presents its own set of barriers. Management may not be willing or able to spend the money. The other problem is that it takes the improvement opportunity out of the hands of the employee and puts it back to management. There are probably ways to drastically improve this process without spending money.

Use 3 Volunteers to Fill the Humidifiers
If the work of filling the humidifiers were spread out to 3 different people, the impact per person would be minimized. This would also encourage a team approach to work. However, the process itself is not really being improved. Are we missing an opportunity?

Use 3 Volunteers and Hold a Contest for the Best Improvement Ideas
This idea really focuses on improving the process and tries to get to people's competitive side. I'm sure this will yield some dramatic process improvements, but there are a couple of problems with this approach. First of all, when you have employees competing with each other, you shut down the flow of information between them. That is admittedly not a huge issue for this example, but it is important when talking about larger projects. In short, competing employees won't help each other. The other issue with this approach is that it sets a very narrow vision for the employees (improve THIS process). If I am very competitive, I might spend several hours coming up with new ideas to improve this process. Spending hours on this is really what we are trying to avoid!

Install a Long Hose / Valve
For a relatively small amount of money, you could install a long hose in the janitor's closet that could reach each humidifier. You could also install a valve at the end of the hose so the employee could start and stop the water on the move. This would certainly improve the process, but we have to watch for other problems. Having 50 feet of coiled up hose in the janitors closet might take up a lot of storage space. Also, dragging a long, wet hose through the office gives a high potential for making a mess at some point.

Do We Really Need a Humidifier?
The question from one respondent was simple, "do we really need the humidifiers?". The specific suggestion was to stop using one and see if anyone noticed a difference. If they didn't notice, stop using 2 and see if anyone notices. Repeat until someone notices the difference or until there are no humidifiers. I am often surprised by how many processes I see that really add no value. If a process is taking up resources, it should be adding value. Does filling the humidifier (or filling out that daily report) really add value worthy of the resource? I like this suggestion a lot, although I would suspect that we would find that the office needed all 3 humidifiers.

Small Improvements Adding Up
I have the luxury of actually filling these humidifiers from time to time and my improvements have all been small, but have really improved the process. For example, I found that waiting for the water to fill the tank seemed like a waste, so I made sure the next tank was ready to fill. My goal when I fill them is to keep the water running as much as possible. Also, I found out that I could carry 4 tanks at once and save an extra trip down the long hallway. Finally, I discovered that staging the tanks so they are ready to be picked up without moving them again keeps me from shifting the filled tanks around (they get in the way). These small improvements were developed without a formal process. They were developed simply by thinking about how I was doing it and thinking about ways to make it better. These small changes improved the process from 12-15 minutes to just over 6 minutes!

Thank you to all who submitted ideas for filling the humidifier. Soon, I will include a YouTube link showing a video of the filling process.

Continuous Improvement - The Humidifiers (Part I)

by Don Harkey

Everyday, every single of one of us engages in multiple processes. We drive to work, make our breakfast, open our email... there are countless processes throughout the day. At work, this is especially true. Many times, these processes are repeated over and over again.

Have you ever thought about how much time you actually spend on a process? If you spend 5 minutes per day doing something, you will spend 1825 minutes doing it per year, which is over 30 hours. That's almost a weeks worth of work! Most organizations would really think hard about offering their employees an extra week of vacation, but few think about adding 5-10 minutes or more to a process that is repeated.

I want to give you a simple example of continuous improvement. Our office has 3 large humidifiers located down a long hallway. These humidifiers must be filled at the start of each day. I am at work pretty early, so I am often the one who fills them. Each humidifier has 2 tanks on it that can be removed. At one end of the hallway is a janitor's closet with a hose where the tanks can be easily filled.

The first time I did this, I went to the far end of the hallway, picked up both tanks, then carried them to the janitors closet. I then collected the 2nd humidifier's set of tanks, and then the 3rd set. I removed the cap on the first tank, placed it in the closet, and filled it with water. I stood and watched as it filled. When it was completed, I took the tank out of the closet, placed it on the floor and secured the cap back onto the tank. Then I took the next tank, removed the cap, placed it in the closet, and filled it up. I again waited as it filled (takes about 30 seconds). Once it was filled, I shut off the water, removed the tank from the closet, placed it on the floor, and replaced the cap. I then grabbed the 2 tanks, walked to the farthest humidifier, and installed them. I then repeated this process two more times for the remaining sets of tanks.

One problem I ran into early on was involved the fact that there are left-handed tanks and right-handed tanks. The difference can be seen easily, but its not overly obvious (especially to someone who is a little sleepy!). One morning, I wasn't paying attention and I carried two left-handed tanks to the farthest humidifier. I realized my mistake immediately, and carried the wrong tank to the other humidifier and then returned to the closet to fill up two right-handed tanks.

While I didn't time the process (although I plan to soon as a great example), I probably spent 10-15 minutes filling the humidifier each morning. Considering that the humidifiers run for 6 months of the year, this means that company employees will spend 25 hours per year filling the humidifiers.

So how do we improve this process? It is too easy to say that we purchase self-filling humidifiers (let's say we don't have the capital). In a future entry, I will share some of the simple process improvements I made. Meanwhile... any thoughts?