1 min read
Building Your Team the Smart Way - First Followers and the Art of Creating a Movement
One of the most common mistakes Lean practitioners make is spending enormous energy trying to convince every skeptic in the room. They host...
Lean Green Belt
2 min read
Five Questions to Ask Before You Build a Chatbot
Chatbots are the new shiny object. Many process improvement presentations I’ve sat through lately include a recommendation for a chatbot somewhere....
2 min read
Chatbots: Are We Automating What Should be Eliminated?
A team in HR builds a chatbot to walk hiring managers through a 14-field hiring request form. It takes three months and a meaningful chunk of their...
1 min read
How Backlogs Are Born and How to Make Sure They Never Come Back
The backlog is the great shame of the public service. It fills staff with dread, leaders with pressure and clients with frustration. Every team that...
2 min read
Failure Demand: The Work That Should Never Exist
If you asked most managers where their team's capacity is going, they'd tell you: answering emails, processing requests, attending meetings,...
3 min read
Why Multitasking Hurts Productivity (and What To Do About It)
Multitasking looks impressive - juggling emails, meetings, and deliverables - but it’s a productivity illusion. What we’re really doing is...
3 min read
Root Cause Analysis - The 5 Whys Technique
Over a series of previous posts, we've learned to define problems, understand customer value, map processes, identify waste, measure performance and...
2 min read
Metrics That Matter
We mapped our process and we’ve found waste everywhere, maybe we even have some ideas about what to do about it. Now we need to decide how we will...
3 min read
The 8 Wastes of Lean - Learning to See What's Hidden
Here's a startling fact: studies suggest that only 5-10% of process time adds value1 from the customer's perspective. The other 90-95%? Pure waste.
3 min read
Value Stream Mapping - Seeing the Whole Picture
Now that we've learned to define problems clearly and understand what customers truly value (Voice of the Customer), here comes the game changer:...
3 min read
Voice of the Customer - What Does Value Really Mean?
In the previous article we explored how to craft a strong problem statement. But here's another critical question: how do you know which problems are...
2 min read
What Makes a Good Problem Statement?
Are you solving the right problem? Here's an uncomfortable truth: many improvement projects fail not because of poor execution, but because they...