Topics related to post-triage follow-through, 90+ day planning, and host / continuous improvement team work.

What are your ‘Get My Thing Rights?’ (Lessons from our construction trades triages)

Practically every incremental improvement to the Process Triaging experience has come from client observations.

A+InsullationTraigeTeam

A week or so ago we triaged a construction trades company, adding to the our portfolio of case studies.  We’ve triaged a roofing, flat work, electrical (residential dispatch and commercial), post-construction water treatments, and insulation (retrofit and new commercial) companies, as well as a variety of construction contractors who subcontract to them.

While each of these construction trade-based companies provides different services, they follow a similar business model.  Their driveshaft process follows the same pattern:

  1. Win the first impression and reinforce it at every customer touch.
  2. Estimate the job and win the bid with enough margin.
  3. Plan and prepare the crew-day for a have-what-you-need truck roll – skills, tools and supplies.
  4. Complete the work safely, professionally, and  on schedule, with the quality promised, constantly training the less experienced due to high semi-skilled labor turn-over.
  5.  Complete the job accounting paperwork in a timely manner.
  6. Do all the above at a repeatable  top-of-the-Angie’s List® level satisfaction.

What’s remarkable about these six common behaviors in this kind of driveshaft is that every one of these six behavioral indicators can be delegated to someone to get right.  Depending on the size (# of crews) of the company, different team members can keep an eye on each one:

  1. The front desk phone staff and on-site crew chiefs can master the first impression.
  2. The job estimators can master the bidding.
  3. The dispatch manager or crew chief can master the day’s job sheets and crew staging.
  4. The on-site supervisor can master the day’s project work.
  5. The crew chief and the accountants can master the job paperwork.
  6. The customer service and follow-up staff, likely the front desk, can keep an eye on customer satisfaction.

In other words, every driveshaft process has a punch list of  Get My Thing Right’s

So we’re adding this punch list to our 90+Day Process Capability Improvement Plan template.  At least one ‘Get My Thing Right’ for each segment on our triage maps.

What are the ‘Get My Thing Rights’ on your driveshaft?

Now back to listening.

 

 

The Four Fastest Verbs To Communicate What To Fix

We have surveyed our triage workshop participants — we call ’em Triagers, after each triage from our beginning.  We summarize these anonymous remarks in our facilitator’s report to the Sponsor and Host.  One of the questions is open-ended: “What did you like most about the workshop?”

Triagers frequently say they liked the deck of Small Now’s and Big Now’s — the action item-size and project-size improvement proposals, respectively, they nominated and prioritized.  A typical workshop generates two dozen ‘Smalls ‘n Bigs‘ that more than fill a team’s process improvement queue for the next 90+ days (taking nothing off their plates).  First timer’s are surprised how fast they created them.

Empowering at team to nominate this many improvement proposals, together as a team, within a very tight time box demands thorough simplicity.  We do this with the Four Fastest Verbs:

Analyze [something], if you don’t understand the root cause well enough.

Design  [something] if you understand what to fix.

Train [something] if the fix needs teaching and/or

Enforce  [something] the fix.  It’s lead, follow, or get-out-of-the-way time.

We refined our triage protocol to these four words (synonyms are sometimes allowed) because they occurred the most frequently.  This after examining thousands of triage cards over several years.  If the Small or Big Now is something IT must deliver, it’s reduced to Design and Implement.

What surprised me what how these fastest verbs have helped triagers after our workshops.  I’ve had managers and supervisors tell me these four words help them get to the point when talking about what they want their bosses to support or what  they want their subordinates to do.

I knew these four words were right  when when one of my triage sponsors interrupted me mid-sentence — mid-pontification actually, and asked, ‘Rosey, what do you want us to do — Analyze, Design, Train or Enforce?”

Sweet!

Don’t Delay Process Improvements Waiting to Establish Baseline Measurements

Mark Shwartz, a case-study quality triage host at RCF Technologies (Vadalia, GA) raised the subject of base lining some process measurements before kicking off some Small and Big Now process improvements.

To the point, the answer is No!  Don’t hold up the improvement efforts, just start measuring as you improve.

The reason you shouldn’t wait is supported by some now famous, almost 100 year-old organizational behavior research known as the ‘Hawthorne Effect.’

A good summary was published in The Economist here:

The Hawthorne Effect recognizes that workers who perceive their work is being watched are more productive than before the were observed. So if you don’t already have process performance measurements in place, as soon as your staff recognizes they are being observed (by management or their improvement team peers), they will perform more focused. That suggests your original baseline behavior, before observations began, won’t be reflected in new measurements.

Remember, you’re after a TREND of continuous improvement, time period over time period. So just start measuring and focus on consistent measuring. Your ‘Process Manager Voice’ is looking for improving trends until your Process Capability Goal (PCG) is met, then stable performance afterwards.

You should see some welcome improvements early on because of another phenomenon called ‘The Learning Curve’, a subject for another blog.