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Gotta Go Lean Blog

Continuous Improvement

Continuous improvement is the art of relentlessly attempting to make people, organizations, operations, and processes better. It is an all-the-time thing. It includes the reduction of costs (primarily through waste reduction), adding more value to customers, and increasing sales by offering better products and services. True continuous improvement has a net benefit on employees, customers, and the business owners. Continuous improvement that harms one of those three to benefit the others is not really improvement. Read more…

By Jeff Hajek, ago

Training Term

Success in continuous improvement relies on many factors—leadership, communication, and employee engagement, to name a few. None of the intangibles matter, though, if employees and leaders are not properly trained. In a nutshell, training is the act of passing usable skills from one person to another. Instructors need two basic things in order to be effective trainers. First, they must have a little more knowledge than the people they are teaching. There is a misconception Read more…

By Jeff Hajek, ago
Standard Work Flow

Standard Work

In Lean, Standard Work is the cornerstone of any continuous improvement effort. It locks in gains and provides a foundation for future advances. It helps companies reach their improvement targets, but also provides a stable, reasonable working environment for frontline employees. Learning how to standardize a process using this tool is one of those things that is easy to do at a basic level. Going beyond that rudimentary understanding, though, is something that few people, Read more…

By Jeff Hajek, ago

Parkinson’s Law

Cyril Northcote Parkinson first published this idea in The Economist in 1955. In essence, the concept says that work expands to fill the time available. This is a particular problem in continuous improvement. By definition, there is always something more to do after the task that you are on. If you create an artificial timeline, and then fill it with incremental work or allow delays to set in, another task will not be started. That Read more…

By Jeff Hajek, ago

Pareto Chart

The Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, comes from observations made by a 19th century Italian economist named Vilfredo Pareto. It simply says that just a small number of causes (the critical few), determines the majority of the effects. For example, several difficult clients might take up most of a customer service rep’s time or a handful of purchasers might buy the bulk of a company’s products. NOTE: Pareto’s original observation and mathematical Read more…

By Jeff Hajek, ago

Job Satisfaction

Job satisfaction is a relatively simple concept. You have expectations about your work. When those expectations are met you are satisfied. When there is a gap between what you expect and the reality of your job, dissatisfaction creeps in. Job satisfaction plays a critical and often overlooked role in continuous improvement. As a general rule, an employee will do what her boss tells her to do, because it is part of her job. In continuous Read more…

By Jeff Hajek, ago

Dirty, Dumb, or Dangerous

One of the basic tenets of continuous improvement is respect for people. A way to do this is to look for and eliminate the tasks that are dirty, dumb, or dangerous. Unfortunately, people have become used to doing tasks that have some or all of these components. Think of the term “dirty, dumb, or dangerous” as a filter. When you look at tasks, try to see if anything falls into any of these categories. Chances Read more…

By Jeff Hajek, ago

Opportunity Costs

Imagine that it is a Friday afternoon. The sun is shining, and you are looking forward to all that the weekend has to offer you. You only have two days off. What are you going to do with your time? You have the option to play—maybe a round of golf with some friends. You could knock something off your “to do” list and replace the grout in the shower. Or, maybe you just want to Read more…

By Jeff Hajek, ago

Communication. Lean Depends on It.

I have spent the majority of my waking hours for the last three weeks or so staring at my computer screen. My bloodshot eyes have gotten to really dislike re-doing any work I have already done once. To prevent the waste of this rework, we at Velaction use a process to go over page designs before making any changes on the website. So, we followed our standard steps, and I made some changes to the appearance of Read more…

By Jeff Hajek, ago

Problems

A problem is an unwelcome situation that has a potentially adverse effect. Another way of looking at this is that a problem is a gap between what you think things should be and the reality of what they are. But problems, unfortunately, can mask themselves. Some are simply not obvious. Think about water damage in a crawlspace. You can have a problem and not even know it. In manufacturing, you might have grease that degrades Read more…

By Jeff Hajek, ago

Audits

The term “audit” generally brings up an image of an IRS accountant knocking on the door. Hopefully at your company, audits don’t bring about such negative feelings. Simply put, audits are checks on that people are supposed to be doing. In most cases, the term “audit” implies some structure to the check, rather than simply walking around and looking things over, though leadership presence like that is important. These types of assessment audits may be Read more…

By Jeff Hajek, ago

Issues

Although this is not specifically a Lean term, “issue” is a starting point for many forms of Lean problem solving. An issue is much like a “problem”. It looks like a problem. It smells like a problem. It feels like a problem. Only, it’s not a problem. It’s an issue. An issue is a politically correct way of calling a problem something that doesn’t hold the same negative tone that the word “problem” carries. There Read more…

By Jeff Hajek, ago