Research shows that poor service is the number one reason customers leave (45%), and reliability is the most valued of the five service qualities. In retail or distribution settings, stock-outs are the leading cause of losing business. If you can’t deliver the product when the customer expects it, you will have difficulty making money now and in the future.

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When our consultants find something blocking the process, we use a simple technique to find the hidden assumption(s).  We’re not challenging every assumption, just the ones that create situations that block us from where we’re going.  It does involve asking the question, “Why?”.  Sometimes we ask it 5 times.  But asking “why?” just tells us the “reasons”, not always the assumptions.

A couple of words about assumptions – we’re all familiar with the word game played when someone says “assume” (for those that aren’t aware of that, when you make an assumption, it makes an ass|u|me), but that’s not what I’m talking about here (although I do agree with that statement).  I think of assumptions as a person’s basic understandings of how things work.  This is useful for thinking in terms of cause and effect.  For example, the cause, “I kick you in the shins” will likely result in an effect like, “you will be angry”.  Not very hard, but the assumptions I make in this situation could be, “you don’t like being kicked in the shins” or “your feelings will be hurt by an attack on your person” (actually, this latter statement has another assumption, “when people’s feelings are hurt, they react with anger”.  Each of our processes has causes to create effects.  Sometimes, we don’t like the effects, so, if we want to change them, we should dig into the assumptions around these cause and effect relationships.

In a process, assumptions take the form of management rules (Why are we doing that?  We’ve always done it that way!), understanding of technical process (we have to put a 15 degree radius to allow for a subsequent step), quality requirements (inspection steps), or product specification requirements (dimensions or features).  These are baseline parameters of how the process functions and its boundary conditions.  Most of these are important and needed.  However, over time, these rules and requirements can become like barnacles on our process, no longer needed and slowing down the process.

Our goal is to find the assumptions that are erroneous.  An erroneous assumption is the rule, requirement, or boundary condition that is no longer required. (Why are we doing that?  I don’t know! We’ve always done it that way!).  The only way to find those assumptions is to zero in on the blockages and ask why certain requirements (the ones that are slowing you down) are necessary.

The process we use to find and challenge assumptions is to simply ask why and identify the assumptions that are no longer valid or could be made invalid.  Meaning, not every assumption is a fixed thing.  We can change things around.  Some are not valid in every situation – do we need to take this step for every product or just for specific customers?  Do those policies still apply in this situation?  Can I get the policy changed?  Can I find a different way to satisfy the requirement other than the one in place?

Take, for example, Pinnacle Strategies’ work during the Gulf Oil spill.  When we were working with boom manufacturers, our consultants went to several boom manufacturers to find more capacity.  The companies usually had rigorous specifications from their customers, as the quality requirements were support usage for many years.  However, we wanted as much boom as possible, in as short of time as possible, for a short burst of intensive work.  The companies were building heavy duty products designed to meet a wide variety of situations.  The boom that was needed was for a specific environment, with specific requirements, for a short period of time.  Some features could be left out, thus reducing the time to manufacture and thus releasing extra capacity to make more.

This is our experience over and over.  There is ALWAYS more capacity than you think.  You just have to do a little digging and challenge your assumptions.

Read more about how we achieved great results by challenging the assumptions in lesson 4 in my eBook, Achieving Top Performance Under the Worst Conditions: 7 Lessons Learned from a Disaster.

As always if, you have questions or comments please feel free to contact me by emailing me.

The post Challenge Your Assumptions about the Process appeared first on Projects in Less Time - Mark Woeppel.

In a more practical sense, if I’m a leader of an organization, how do I know my team is doing the right things?  If I’m a team member, how do I know what actions to take?

Every organization is formed for a purpose.  In order to achieve its purpose and goals, organizations develop around sub-organizations (functions) and processes that accomplish them.  These sub-organizations then have their own purpose and goals, for example; accounts payable’s goal is to ensure the bills get paid.  Presumably, each of these sub-organizations is in alignment with overall goals and objectives of the global organization.

As the organization becomes more complex, it becomes more challenging to maintain this alignment, so the organization establishes performance management systems to maintain alignment of purpose and activity among the constituent (local) organizations.  These systems are often referred to colloquially as “the measurement system” or “the metrics”.  Managers seek the relevant measurements to make decisions and drive appropriate behavior in the enterprise; whether to correct a course of action, direct a new course, or even stop.

The performance management system is the formal and informal process of measuring and responding to the organizational process to achieve its goal(s).   It creates and applies uniform standards, quantifying and managing process performance.

Here are a few things to think about.

Establish the standards.  Create a common benchmark of performance.  This can take the form of a database of work to be done, a common set of objectives, or even an agreed upon set of goals. If you don’t know what the objective is, anything will be acceptable.  So be purposeful and deliberate about determining your direction.  Essentially, the standard are the “why” of what is to be performed.

Know the process.  The process is the “what” of your process – the details that determine your progress towards success.  If you have never mapped the process or supply chain, now is the time to do it!   It’s essential to know the behaviors required and the results of those behaviors – you can’t measure what you can’t quantify.

Create decision gates. Now that you have the process mapped and can clearly articulate the steps towards the goal, you can identify where decisions need to be made.  Quantify the decision process – who can make what decisions and when escalation is required.

Identify the constraint. Now that the process is mapped and all steps are clear, you can see where the bottlenecks are and what is holding up the process or supply chain from moving faster – you can focus on the areas that are most critical.

During the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, BP built the largest civilian maritime fleet ever seen (over 14,000 vessels). In the haste of containing the spill, keeping detailed records were not a priority.  Equipment was rented and used with no documentation and boats were commissioned to clean oil with no record of their model or serial number.  This lack of communication and documentation became a big problem when it was time to decontaminate the cleanup vessels.  We employed these lessons to drive the process and completed a task in less than six months that was originally estimated to take years. These lessons worked in the worst conditions, imagine how they could help you now.

Read how we achieved great results by applying uniformed standards in lesson 6 in our eBook, Achieving Top Performance Under the Worst Conditions: 7 Lessons Learned from a Disaster.

Also, have a look at some of our thought leadership on performance management here.

As always if, you have questions or comments please feel free to contact me by emailing me.

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There are lots of ways to make meetings more productive, but I won’t bore you with them.  Rather, I’ll pose a question: why have them at all?  You could also ask, why are there so many of them?

Death by meeting to manage a project is a symptom.  It’s a symptom of a project management process that is out of control.  Most project team members don’t even see frequent meetings as a problem; they are simply a fact of life.  The reality of the situation is hidden.

Meetings themselves are not the problem.  They provide a useful function of forcing communication of important information. They synchronize resources, allocate activities, and highlight the project’s delays. At least, that’s what they’re supposed to do.  We see other things happening in project meetings: status updates, defending turf, defending original commitments, giving reasons why things haven’t worked out – a laundry list of missed expectations.  Projects executed looking through the rear-view mirror.

With this kind of management, the project team never gets a clear view of what’s ahead and what action to take.

There are two (main) reasons for this kind death:

1.  The project team does not know the real status of the project (where we are, where to go)
2.  The project team’s measurements are not in alignment

I’ve written a lot about our ViewPoint visual project management approach that essentially solves the first problem.  Essentially the approach creates a shorthand (visual view) for the project (similar to KANBAN and Agile) and its status, which helps the project team move forward.  You can read more about it on the Visual Project Management page here.

The second issue is a bit more complicated, as there are often conflicting measurements among the players on the project team.  We see conflicting measures all the time, but the biggest are between resource utilization and project velocity.  During the execution, the team is making constant trade-offs between keeping people “productive” and maintaining the velocity of task completion.   I’ve written about this issue before, and will again.

We worked with a manufacturer’s engineering department and discovered that all the designers were working in isolation within their own cubicles, not able to see the big picture.  The projects were not moving.  The meetings were not productive, in turn frustrating everyone involved even further.  By changing the way the team managed the projects, they were able to clear a six-month backlog of work in less than 90 days.  Read the case study here

To read more about the hidden threats that project managers must face, read our new eBook Blindsided! Five Invisible Project Threats Successful Managers Must See.

The post Blind Spot 2 – Death by Meeting appeared first on Projects in Less Time - Mark Woeppel.

When our consultants find something blocking the process, we use a simple technique to find the hidden assumption(s).  We’re not challenging every assumption, just the ones that create situations that block us from where we’re going.  It does involve asking the question, “Why?”.  Sometimes we ask it 5 times.  But asking “why?” just tells us the “reasons”, not always the assumptions.

A couple of words about assumptions – we’re all familiar with the word game played when someone says “assume” (for those that aren’t aware of that, when you make an assumption, it makes an ass|u|me), but that’s not what I’m talking about here (although I do agree with that statement).  I think of assumptions as a person’s basic understandings of how things work.  This is useful for thinking in terms of cause and effect.  For example, the cause, “I kick you in the shins” will likely result in an effect like, “you will be angry”.  Not very hard, but the assumptions I make in this situation could be, “you don’t like being kicked in the shins” or “your feelings will be hurt by an attack on your person” (actually, this latter statement has another assumption, “when people’s feelings are hurt, they react with anger”.  Each of our processes has causes to create effects.  Sometimes, we don’t like the effects, so, if we want to change them, we should dig into the assumptions around these cause and effect relationships.

In a process, assumptions take the form of management rules (Why are we doing that?  We’ve always done it that way!), understanding of technical process (we have to put a 15 degree radius to allow for a subsequent step), quality requirements (inspection steps), or product specification requirements (dimensions or features).  These are baseline parameters of how the process functions and its boundary conditions.  Most of these are important and needed.  However, over time, these rules and requirements can become like barnacles on our process, no longer needed and slowing down the process.

Our goal is to find the assumptions that are erroneous.  An erroneous assumption is the rule, requirement, or boundary condition that is no longer required. (Why are we doing that?  I don’t know! We’ve always done it that way!).  The only way to find those assumptions is to zero in on the blockages and ask why certain requirements (the ones that are slowing you down) are necessary.

The process we use to find and challenge assumptions is to simply ask why and identify the assumptions that are no longer valid or could be made invalid.  Meaning, not every assumption is a fixed thing.  We can change things around.  Some are not valid in every situation – do we need to take this step for every product or just for specific customers?  Do those policies still apply in this situation?  Can I get the policy changed?  Can I find a different way to satisfy the requirement other than the one in place?

Take, for example, Pinnacle Strategies’ work during the Gulf Oil spill.  When we were working with boom manufacturers, our consultants went to several boom manufacturers to find more capacity.  The companies usually had rigorous specifications from their customers, as the quality requirements were support usage for many years.  However, we wanted as much boom as possible, in as short of time as possible, for a short burst of intensive work.  The companies were building heavy duty products designed to meet a wide variety of situations.  The boom that was needed was for a specific environment, with specific requirements, for a short period of time.  Some features could be left out, thus reducing the time to manufacture and thus releasing extra capacity to make more.

This is our experience over and over.  There is ALWAYS more capacity than you think.  You just have to do a little digging and challenge your assumptions.

Read more about how we achieved great results by challenging the assumptions in lesson 4 in our eBook, Achieving Top Performance Under the Worst Conditions: 7 Lessons Learned from a Disaster.

As always if, you have questions or comments please feel free to contact me by emailing me.

The post Challenge Your Assumptions about the Process appeared first on Projects in Less Time - Mark Woeppel.

In my first blog post of this series, I discussed the importance of making the invisible visible to ensure any changes you make to the process will affect the overall system.  Now that you know what is limiting your output, do not accept it as a fact of nature, without the possibility of resolution.  While the constraint is now obvious, the solution may not be.

Here are some questions to find more capacity:

Are some operations being done sequentially that could be done in parallel?

Often, work processes are designed to make it “simple” or reduce labor content.  When it’s the constraint resource, the economics of process design are turned upside down.  Remember, an hour lost at the constraint is an hour lost for the entire system.

Are maintenance operations being done when it is most advantageous to the resource?

Maintenance staff are not omniscient (unless you ask them if they are).  They do not know the impact of doing maintenance during production times.  They do not know that if there’s a breakdown, this is the MOST important machine in the building.  An hour lost at the constraint is an hour lost…

Does the constraint ever wait for work?  Or anything else?

The largest opportunity is eliminating wait time.  Waiting for inspection.  Waiting for material.  Waiting for the engineer.  Waiting, waiting, waiting.  Not making money.  Not serving your customers.  Do what you can to ensure a constant buffer of work – ready work – in front of the resource.  Again, this doesn’t happen by accident, someone must manage it.  It’s a task – an activity.  Not something that you do once and forget it.

BP needed oil skimmers that removed contaminants from the surface of water to clean up the Gulf of Mexico.  These are typically complex machines and are sometimes a specialized seagoing vessel.  During our work on the spill, we worked with a number of suppliers.

The president of one of those companies, said, “Before you arrived in Seattle to work with us, we had a production process in place that was scheduled to deliver fifteen (15) Oil Skimmers to BP by early November.  After your efforts to work with the Kvichak Team and our supply chain we implemented improvements where we were able to build and deliver twice the Oil Skimmers to BP in half the time with no loss of quality.”

Pinnacle consultants saw that the constraint was welding. The production came to a stop while welders came on the vessel, for obvious safety reasons, but these interruptions delayed construction by as much as two days.  The policy was in place to ensure safety, and welders were skilled workers with no extra capacity and also not much extra room on the vessels for additional personnel.  By isolating the constraint, we were able to find a solution while still fulfilling the necessary condition of safety and quality.

Read how we achieved great results by focusing on the constraint in lesson 3 in our eBook, Achieving Top Performance Under the Worst Conditions: 7 Lessons Learned from a Disaster. 

The post Focus on the Constraint appeared first on Projects in Less Time - Mark Woeppel.

Now.  RUN to the floor and ask everyone to stay for an extra shift at the drum.   No, don’t do that.  I’m kidding.

Before you start throwing more money at the situation, first find ways to make more effective use of the resources you have.  Here are a few questions that you could ask to find ways to increase output for FREE:

Do all the resources at the constraint take a break or lunch at the same time?

Often, staggering lunches and breaks at the constraint will give you a big boost.  The numbers work, too.  Let’s say you spend an hour a day for lunch and breaks.  In an 8-hour day, that’s 12.5% more output you could have for FREE.  That’s 12.5% more sales.  For FREE!

Are you able to cross train other resources to help the constraint?

If the constraint is a machine, there is one skill set to run the machine, and another to set it up.  Often running the machine is loading and unloading parts.  How hard is it to do that?  Not very.  Automation is a better choice, but often we can add a person faster.  By eliminating wait time, you get the same economics.  Remember, this is the constraint.  Every additional hour I can get at the constraint equals one hour of SALES.

Do you have existing equipment sitting idle because there is not space to set it up and use it?

Who cares if it is slower?  It makes ZERO money sitting idle.  See notes above for economic justification.  Or read this.  FREE MONEY.

What is preventing the constraint from running the whole day?

This is more of a generic utilization question; if it’s not running, it’s not helping the process.  Why isn’t it running?  What can you do to GET it running?

So you’re asking the questions.  Don’t accept answers that do not offer solutions, such as “that is the way the industry is” or “it wouldn’t work.”  Dig down deeper and find what steps would be required to increase capacity.  Then take those steps!

When Pinnacle Strategies worked with boom manufacturers to immediately boost output (in support of containing the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico), more output was needed to be immediately.  Not the ideal situation to hire and train new people or to order and wait for new machines.  Our teams questioned how to improve output and then pursued the answer until a solution was found.  Read about how the improvements were found at these manufacturers and how improvements can be achieved by examining ways to use existing resources smarter and then implementing those changes in the second lesson of our eBook, Achieving Top Performance Under the Worst Conditions: 7 Lessons Learned from a Disaster. 

The post Rebalance Resources to Maximize Flow appeared first on Projects in Less Time - Mark Woeppel.

Often, when output needs to increase, we learn that this heightened sense of urgency creates rushed decisions and frantic behavior.  This leads to the obvious and time-tested band-ads: adding another shift, throwing overtime at the problem or buying another machine.  As many of us know, the costs of a new machine or the possibility of adding yet another shift quickly adds up costs or may not even be possible.  So how to squeeze more from the system when it seems like it’s maxed out?

Look for the part of the process that dictates the output of the process.  The part of a that is most likely to set the pace for the whole line and impose delays everywhere else.  This is the constraint, or the “drum” of the process, as it set the pace of output.

Identifying the constraint begins with one step – careful observation.  We need to analyze the process to find the bottleneck.  Ask such questions as “why do we feel that it is impossible to increase production capacity?” or “what step holds up the rest of the line?” Observe the process to see what is going on.  Just the act of asking “Why?” will point to a solution.

When there is extreme pressure to make improvements and increase capacity, wait on implementation until the system is understood.  While this seems counterproductive given the timelines we usually encounter, you’ll make more progress stepping back and working from understanding.  By identifying where first to act, you will be able to act effectively to make a bigger, more certain impact on process performance.

When Pinnacle Strategies was called by BP to help increase output critical components to contain the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, we needed to find a way to have the manufacturers increase output even after they had “maxed out” their production.  At each plant we visited, management felt that it was impossible to squeeze more output from their plants.  These manufacturers were under pressure to increase output, and with the guarantee of selling what they produce, there was also strong incentive to increase output.

Read how we looked for the drum and had amazing results in the first lesson of our eBook, Achieving Top Performance Under the Worst Conditions: 7Lessons Learned from a Disaster. 

The post Make the Invisible Visible – Look for “The Drum” appeared first on Projects in Less Time - Mark Woeppel.

That was the opportunity presented to Pinnacle Strategies CEO Mark Woeppel when BP surprised him with a call for help fighting the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The call would lead Pinnacle on an international mission to boost output of spill fighting equipment and then to help organize a historic mop up — the cleaning of more than 10,000 boats, ships and rigs.

As the magnitude of the spill became clear last April, BP put out the order to buy all material that could possibly be of use. But it found the entire U.S. production of critical cleanup resources was not enough. Oil was spreading — often where no workers, booms, skimmers or other equipment existed to contain it.

As with many success stories, Pinnacle’s involvement started with an incidental connection. Clint Wood, the BP executive in charge of supply, recalled a time years earlier when he briefly collaborated with Woeppel to boost production.

Now, Wood needed decontamination suits, boats, detergents, real estate for clean up sites, containment boom, dock space, boats, and other scarce material. More than equipment, Wood realized he needed to mobilize minds.

“I sifted through old e-mails and found one of Mark’s marketing letters,” Wood said. “I’ve always been an early adopter. I wanted to see if we could use Theory of Constraints to increase throughput.”

Within 48 hours of Wood’s Friday evening phone call, Pinnacle launched a marathon of visits through North America and Europe to work with BP’s key suppliers to increase production.

One early visit was to a Walker, Michigan factory. Prestige Products was asked by BP to supply as much oil containment boom as it could…

read the entire article here

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Click below for a listen!

You can also download the podcast to your iPod using iTunes by searching for Joe Dager Podcasts.

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