The Lean journey at a strategic level requires the courage of senior leaders to challenge the status quo, understand and diagnose the problems and commit to a change for Operational, Excellence, Customer Service Excellence and Continuous Improvement. It is about identifying the strategic imperatives for a business, understanding its current standing, the competitive environment and preparing to commit and set sail towards a new vision identified by key goals and objectives through a clear and aligned strategy with purpose. The Lean journey does not have an end point because it is about the continuous pursuit of excellence and improvement to ensure the business retains its competitive advantage and edge.
Like any journey, the key is to know where you are and where you are going, otherwise any path will do. There has to be some planning, preparation, communication of the goals, a strategy, a plan, and some agreement on these targets as well as who will do what and clear ownership and accountability. Like climbing Everest, you wouldn’t just set off for a walk, it requires some real teamwork and dedicated planning, logistics, processes and a co-ordinated effort to reach the summit safely, with the whole team and within the scheduled time frame. It is not a race but a steady, measured approach and follows the mantra 1 step with a 100 people is better than 100 steps with 1 person.
With any journey there are always problems, obstacles, dead ends, diversions and issues that have to be dealt with, the road is never straight and always bumpy so the journey may be a long way and take a long time but the important part is sticking towards the vision, but always being flexible as the strategy may have to change, take a different path or make adjustments to what was originally thought because no one can forecast every risk.
At a day to day level, it is about ensuring the big goal is broken down into manageable chunks and everyone understands what needs to be achieved each day, to enable the weekly goals, monthly goals to be achieved, this can be tracked and measured daily and any deviations from the plan can be identified early or anything that will jeopardise the big goal can be seen earlier rather than later.
It is also about defining the key processes that add value for the customer and understand the flow of this value and any blockages that cause delays, add cost, time, and utilising the people who work in these processes to solve these issues quickly by having a system that helps identify problems. Looking across end to end from order to delivery or wow to go at a helicopter view is the best way to see and diagnose these problems and engage the team in improving the situation and then zooming into the real big improvements to remove them at root cause level.
All the time, each day, communication and feedback is required to review progress, understand any problems and take any actions necessary to fix. The common one is to ensure that feedback from customers is flowing back to the business to make adjustments as required to either processes or customer service interactions or whatever problems customers are feeding back. This is one of the main key drivers to change and continuous improvement and ultimately why a business is in business, to attract, and serve customers so it is a key priority.
Of course there a lot of other areas of focus in a business as a journey at a more micro level but this is for another day and blog post.