Tag Archives: Time

Operational Excellence and the Basics

Posted on by
3

In this day and age, there isn’t time to sit and watch what happens in your market. If you want to succeed, you need to take control of your own destiny.  Most CEOs realize this, they often scramble for ideas on how to improve their operations and, too often, jump on the bandwagon of the latest fad with the hope that it will solve their problems or give them an edge over their competitors. They have heard the stories from their peers on the golf course or the tennis club. They have read the articles in magazines, they may even have spoken to a smooth talking consultant; all singing the praises of the latest “revolution” in productivity and lower cost. The more they think about it the better it sounds.

One classic example goes back to the late ‘90s, when the 6 Sigma methodology became widely seen as the Holy Grail of business improvement.  Many people thought: “If companies like GE can be successful with 6 Sigma than why shouldn’t we?”  What a lot of people learned, though, is that there is no point in learning 6 Sigma if you don’t have any data to process. And, of course, that success isn’t measured in the number of, say, trained Black Belts. Success appears as an increase in bottom-line results.

So before you sign up your organisation to the next revolution you need to ensure the right conditions are in place, that the grounds have been plowed and fertile so the seeds you will plant through the new approach and methodology will have the best chance to grow.

The biggest killer of such initiatives is the lack of time. If your organisation operates in fire fighting mode your people are busy running from one emergency to the next. It is very difficult for them to find the time to sit down and analyse a problem to identify it’s root causes. It’s like the story of the lumberjack who was so busy cutting down trees that he didn’t have time to sharpen his saw.

Besides, the reactive nature of the organisational dynamics make it difficult for people to accept the proactive approach of the new methodologies; it goes against the organisational culture of rewarding people who solve problems when they happen rather than rewarding people who anticipate and take actions to avoid problems altogether.

This is why your journey to Operational Excellence needs to start with the basics: Planning, Execution and Follow-Up. By forcing people to think about the future you automatically change the organisational dynamics away from fire fighting to proactive actions.

This may seem obvious, but you’d be amazed to find how many companies operate without one or two of the three.

Execution is a given—without execution, there is no revenue. And every company engages in some degree of Planning, whether it’s in budgeting, sales or logistics. How ‘granular’ that planning is, and/or how much room for improvement is built into that process, are two different questions.

It is in Follow-Up that most organizations stumble. There often just seems not to be enough time to do a proper review of the Planning and Execution, let alone perform root causes analyses on the deviation between what you planned to make and what you really made. People forget that deviations are golden opportunities to learn, improve and save time. But I guess this is also nothing new, most managers will regularly look at deviations to understand performance. There is even a name for this: Management by Exceptions.

Note that it is one thing for managers to practice Management by Exceptions; it is another when operators do it. In my experience, to achieve the next level of organizational maturity, one needs to look at plan deviation, from management to the operators. If you can get your shop floor operators to apply the same techniques, then you will have made a huge jump in organizational maturity. Empowering employees to analyze deviations and make decisions without consulting their superiors (within their freedom box) not only gives employees more job satisfaction, it tightens the control of your operation and produces better results.

Zabok, 12th May 2013

How much baggage do you carry around?

Posted on by
10

As I continue to think through the time question I have realized that there just is so much to cover. So the upcoming posts will be related to optimizing and helping you make the most of the time you have.  The beauty of this is that you decide how you use the tools and what you do with your time. Whichever way you decide, the whole point is to make you aware. If you followed the last post and did the exercises you will now be more aware of how you spend your time. And like every thing in life, some things are relatively easy to fix others require fundamental change. Today’s segment is of the fundamental type, as I believe that building on a solid foundation, ultimately provides longevity and sustainability.

Rule number 1 – the more stuff you have the less free you are. Every material thing, not only takes up storage capacity and effort (cleaning moving around etc.),  it takes up brain capacity and processing power as well. Think about it for just about every thing you posses have it’s own story: where it came from gift bought when where with whom etc. So all that stuff in the attic, although out of sight is not out of mind. It weighs on you without you realizing it. Sometimes letting go of stuff can be emotionally wrenching, I know, I still got stuff from the seventies and I’m a pack rat by nature. Nevertheless sorting through your stuff it’s easy to keep the emotional stuff and get rid of the other stuff. To do the sorting, I have developed the 4 G approach: Good to keep, Give to someone else, Garage sale, Garbage. You should run through the cycle at least once per year and your “Good to keep” pile should not be getting bigger (and unless your income is expanding at the same rate, chances are you are over-consuming). I have shrunk my to good to keep stuff to a large oversea trunk. When I pass away I know that my kids will have a laugh at all this junk that has sentimental value to me and no one else. But one trunk over almost fifty years that’s not bad, I guess?

Let me tell you the story of a client I had and for the sake of anonymity we will call him Fred. He was an engineer in his fifties and having being part of the original new hires during the construction of the site he was now the operations manager in a chemical plant. The man was brilliant and he had a fantastic memory, we could be talking about a subject and he would say A yes, I attended a conference 4 years ago, hold on a minute I’ll be right back. He would then stand up and leave the meeting we were having, only to return 3-7 minutes later (his office was down the hall). Upon his return he would show you the documentation from the conference and get completely off topic. As you reeled him back and got back on the subject, something else would pop up and he would be off again! This guy was a walking encyclopedia but you could not get him to focus on anything. Although he was a hard worker, came in at 6:00 and was usually the last to leave after 20:00. His spent the entire day on the shop floor, something rare for someone in his position. As our project evolved we quickly realized that something was wrong with Fred. His un-ability to concentrate was affecting his work performance, besides something else was weird about Fred. No one had ever been into his office. None of my colleagues, or even clients we asked, could ever remember having been in his office. Ok I know what you are thinking, what about his boss, the plant manager. Well that’s another story, his had an alcohol problem and was fired 2 weeks after we started our project. Anyway I doubt whether he had been in Fred’s office either!  I made it my mission to discover the mystery that was his office. Since he loved to recount memories and look up stuff, I engaged him in this way and slowly broke down his barriers through my curiosity and interest. One night, in early December as we were working late, I noticed the light on in his office and I decided to pay him a visit. As I knocked on his door I heard the shuffling of papers and his voice telling me to wait a minute. He opened the door slowly to see who it was and seemed surprised to see me. I told him I had seen the light in his office and wanted to stop by to show him the new management report I had been working on. With nowhere to go he quickly open the door and closed it quickly behind him before leading me to the conference room down the hall. However he quickly realized by the look in my eyes that I had seen enough off his office to give him away. Even though he pretended to not to notice, I could see I had unsettled him. As we went through the report, he suddenly burst into tears, and when I say burst I mean literally did burst with tears sprinkling all over my report.  I stood up and walk out to go to the washroom for some tissues. When I came back with toilet paper he was gone. That was the last time we saw Fred. He did not come back to work and ended up in a mental hospital. Later we learned that he had suffered from, amongst other things, what was referred to as information overload.  I spend a good deal of time on the Internet looking for a picture that would represent his office.  The one I found does not really do it justice, his office looked worst simply because his office was bigger and the path through the piles of documents was longer and interspersed with the odd plant.

Courtesy of http://www.rentittoday.com/rental-blog/5204/inception-technologies-document-scanner-rentals-us-canada .Electronic document solutions so your office doesn’t look like this!

Most people’s office does not have the chance of getting like Fred’s. His was a particular situation, and living alone he must have subconsciously known this was not normal hence his reluctance to let anyone in his office. In any case, it was a hard lesson on me as I was the one who delivered the wake up call.

Zabok, HR – 5th September 2012

What time is it ? 2.0

Posted on by
Reply

As we have discussed, time is valuable. It’s up to us to make the best use of it. We decide what we do with our time. Now this sounds good on paper and most of you will agree that this statement is true, but why is it so hard then, to put this into practice? If you can remember in one of my earlier post the “duality of individuality” I discussed how our brains functions with a constant struggle between the rider, as the rational side, and the elephant, as the emotional counterpart. You see, when you are faced with a choice, each side will see different benefits and reasons why their arguments are better. This is because the elephant and the rider often have divergent objectives. The elephant is looking for things that feel good; the rider is trying to reach an objective. Each side has different ways to achieve their goal. The emotional side controls the hormones that control our bodies. Just think about all the marital affaires that go on every day, although there may be a thousand reasons and every case will be different in it’s own way, one thing though that they do have in common, they are all driven by their hormones. The rider on the other hand has the ability to plan and think ahead, giving this side the ability to weigh short term pleasure against long term pain; marital affair vs. divorce and lost of family. As this internal struggle goes on, we continue to be bombarded by information from the outside.  Social pressure, religious norms, work pressures, family needs, neighbors, etc.  It’s a tough world! I don’t think there has ever been an era in the history of man when we have been confronted with so much choice and possibilities. Don’t get me wrong I think it’s a good thing; in the end is this not what evolution is all about? As you know, with evolution also comes extinction, we just have to make sure we don’t fall in the latter category. The problem is that with all this choice and opportunities it’s easy to get distracted. It’s a bit like politics and communication today. It doesn’t matter if what you are saying is wrong or a lie, what is important is to brainwash the voter’s into thinking what you want them to think. Sadly that is the reality we live in today, Americans don’t have an obesity problem because they choose to be fat, they have a problem because they are not able to resist the constant appeal of  “getting your money’s worth or a great deal” and the fact that now a days there are not so many alternatives anyway. Everyone knows that eating fast food every day will make you fat. Within the context of the constant internal struggle, the rider loses out to the elephant on nutrition or perhaps the rider is trying to concentrate it’s forces to win the war against the elephant and is willing to lose the nutrition battle, staying focused on the bigger objective. The fact that Americans have gained weight over the last 50 years, evolutionary scale, is what is troubling and give me grounds for concern about becoming extinct in the long term. Could we, as a species, eat ourselves to death?

Ok, I know what you are thinking, this is all nice and good but what can I do about this? This is where we tie this back to time. Eckhardt Tolle talks about time in a different matter. He gives us a different perspective on time, by saying that the only real time is now, the moment. You see most of us will live our lives on auto pilot, what I mean by this is we get caught up in the daily routine and miss don’t live each moment as if it were it’s last. One of his techniques is to observe yourself from a distance. In other word, it would be as if you could detach yourself and observe yourself from a few feet away. This may seem strange but it is like in the movies when you die and the camera rises from your body and you have the impression you are watching yourself, except that in the movies you are usually dying and in our case your rider is arguing with the elephant. This type of visualization exercises are also used in sports, where you can concentrate and run through a perfect jump, run or shot before taking it. What this does is make you aware of what the situation really is; and very often you quickly realize it is stupid to be arguing about such an insignificant thing. When you are aware you are living the moment and that is when you are truly living.  Some people need to sky dive, bungee jump to get their adrenaline kick, others prefer fast driving, whatever your preference the adrenaline kick is just a consequence of your body being aware, it gets released after you have assess danger. Now I’ll grant you that in comparison to sky diving you won’t get much of an adrenaline kick from tee up on the 9th hole on Saturday morning, nevertheless you cannot play golf without being aware of what you are doing and are able to concentrate.  We often find ourselves however just kind of mechanically going through choirs, thinking or wishing we were somewhere else, or reflecting on the past and all the things we could have done differently. During these moments we are not 100% aware of what is happening. These are the moments where, depending on your job or what you are doing, bad thing can happen; like losing a finger on the saw bench or metal press, or simply missing the exit on the highway. A lot of progress has been made in industry to increase safety at the workplace, but nothing can replace awareness and concentration on the task at hand.  The interesting point here is that: when, you are aware and concentrated you are living the moment as Eckhardt Tolle proposes. Awareness is the state in which both the rider and the elephant (to continue on the theme from previous posts) not arguing but are focused on the situation.  It is a kind of inner peace that can also be achieved through mediation and prayers.

So in keeping with our theme of finding out what time it is in your life here is the next level of diagnostics you can perform. In the “What time is it?”  (27/08/2012) there is an exercise at the end called a DILO.  If have taken the time to do it you will know how you spend your day, and will be more aware of your personal efficiency and effectiveness.  The next level of analysis involves assessing how much time in your day are you truly “aware” and concentrated, how much time is spent living the moment. So take your DILO notes and mark each activity with a “0” when you are aware and a “-“ when you are not.  Then you tally up the score. Here are some examples to help you score:

A)   during the meeting this morning, where you aware, concentrated on the conversation, or thinking about your wife’s birthday and the present you haven’t yet bought.

B)   While you made breakfast this morning, were you thinking about your day or were you concentrated on making this the best breakfast you have ever made

Increasing awareness in people generates results. People who have been halfheartedly working along realize that they are not happy and find different work where they enjoy being aware, making them better employees or workers. This is essentially what is at the core or “Kaizen” and operational excellence programs that can release tremendous benefits for all involved.  By discussing and sharing with their co-worker, employees increase their awareness and through their engagement (living the moment) they develop a bigger stake in their work.  How can it be that a machine that run 24 hours a day, on 3 shifts, runs at different performance? The most frequent cause is different machine settings   set by different shift operators, whom each thinks, he has the best way to run the machine. It’s a classic!

So if you are interested go ahead and do the DILO exercise, you may find it?s later than you think.

Zabok,HR – 27th August 2012