Chapter 9

Sustain Your Progress

Building for the Long Term

By now, you’ve put in place the vital systems and tools that create a functioning lean IT environment. However, they are not nearly enough to sustain organizational change. Lean systems require constant care and feeding—more so than traditional work systems. Without consistent reinforcement and monitoring, all the hard work you have invested to build the foundational elements of your new system, such as visual management, standard work, and A3 thinking, will lack staying power. Examples abound of lean transformations that were off to a good start but somehow couldn’t quite stay the course. In this chapter we’ll discuss how to create sustaining actions that will assure that your new lean system operates effectively and continuously improves.

Why do we need to worry about sustainability in lean systems? All of the visuals, daily huddles, focus on process, and continuous improvement we’ve put in place is enough, right? Wrong! Think of building your lean system as the initial months of a new healthy routine. In the very first days it is hard— you don’t want to go to the gym, you don’t want to wake up early, and you certainly don’t want to skip dessert after dinner. But over time, you get into a routine and eventually your muscles become stronger, you lose weight, and you have more energy. This is the point where many people slip up, thinking that a day off here or there won’t matter. And they don’t—until the days off become greater than the days spent maintaining your new physique. Those strong muscles quickly atrophy when not exercised.

Lean systems are similar. The initial days are tough, then some gains are realized and habits start to form, and soon it feels easy. Huddles are happening, visuals are in place, managers and associates are empowered to bring up problems and use PDCA thinking to make their work better. But over time, maybe the visuals are no longer updated every day, perhaps schedules

are tight and managers no longer make time to be in the team spaces every day. Soon, just like the muscles of the relapsed couch potato, the lean system is not functioning. Without a system in place to ensure that the lean system sustains and improves, over time it will naturally degenerate.

Sustainability behaviors are the critical foundation in the lean house, holding up the frontline and management systems. They apply to both management and associate functions and act as the infrastructure to ensure the system is functioning as designed. This is important for a few reasons:

1. Lean systems require discipline. A constant, never-ending focus on process improvement and problem solving is tough! The sustainability system builds in a routine mechanism that ensures that what is supposed to happen actually does happen.
2. Your new lean system is highly visible. Stale visuals and disinterest by management send a strong signal to the organization that this is just another waning improvement program, one that any determined associate can wait out. Sustaining actions ensure that the visible elements of your system stay current.
3. Sustainability processes ensure that associates are able to get the support and coaching they need, when they need it. There may be nothing more damaging to sustainability than not providing associates the support they need to successfully reinforce new behaviors. Coaching must be frequent and planned to clear barriers and build capability.
4. Sustainability reinforces validated learning and timely course corrections as needed. Learning and discovery require practice. This can only be accomplished when the right environment is maintained while new habits are developed, shared, and eventually make their way into group and organizational culture.

The Five-Part Sustainability System

The Lean IT Sustainability System can be divided into five parts:

1. Accountability
2. Interlocking leader standard work
3. Cadenced gemba walks
4. Assessment and reflection
5. Continuous learning

Accountability

Accountability systems leverage many of the same tools and techniques we’ve discussed in past chapters, such as visual management, process focus, and problem solving. In this case, though, the focus is on the system itself— how it is functioning, what behaviors it is influencing, how it is improving, and how it is delivering.

Oftentimes the word accountability is seen in the negative light that someone must be punished for an action or problem. Holding someone accountable for a mistake at work may seem like the appropriate thing to do, but rarely does it solve the problem. In a lean transformation, accountability is not synonymous with blame. Accountability is the result of authentic respect for people—ensuring that the lean system continues to deliver value to our associates, customers, and stakeholders. Most often when expectations are not met, it is not something that people have done wrong; rather, it is the process and system that have caused the problem. Lean accountability focuses on fixing the problem—missed expectations and root causes—rather than on fixing blame for the problem. And when a problem is encountered that the team cannot solve, it is the manager’s or leader’s responsibility to escalate it to a level where it can be solved and to get an answer back to the team. Undesirable outcomes and missed expectations are opportunities to dig into the reasons why they occurred and develop countermeasures to improve. For someone to be held accountable, two things are requisite: a capable system and the skills, tools, and knowledge to adequately perform the work. Holding someone accountable for the performance of a broken system is the antithesis of respect for people.

In David Mann’s Shingo Prize-winning book, Creating a Lean Culture ¹ a primary feature of the daily accountability system is the tiered daily huddle, with corresponding accountability boards for visual management. A series of three daily meetings—one with the frontline staff, one with the manager and team leads, and one with the value stream or senior managers—are conducted and linked in order to drive understanding of the work, escalate issues, and focus on process improvements. Let’s extend the idea of the daily accountability system to the foundation we built in Chapter 4.

Linking the Systems Together

The concept of the daily huddle, or standup meeting, is a familiar term to many in IT. They are a central feature of scrum or agile teams developing software. These are quick, 15 minutes-or-less meetings in which participants stand for the duration and rely on a visual management system to hold an engaged discussion. In the lean system, they also have a prominent role, and we’ll expand on their use beyond the frontline and management standups you have already put into practice.

Let’s take a look at an example through the incorporation of a set of linked standup meetings covering our daily activities.

• Tier I standup—the team standup used so often in agile software development teams. This meeting is used for what Mann calls run-thebusiness activities—those things the team needs to discuss to move the day’s work forward. Topics include personal work commitments for the day, what was accomplished the prior day, and impediments to the day’s work. These standups should occur at a visual management board that tracks the work flow of the team.
• Tier II standup—a standup meeting with the team leads or frontline managers (who have attended the Tier I meetings) and their direct managers (Tier II). This meeting focuses on escalated issues from Tier I standups, performance trends, and driving process improvements.
• Tier III standup—a standup meeting with the Tier II managers and the senior managers or executives (Tier III). This meeting is similar to the Tier II meeting in that it focuses on escalations, performance, and focused process improvements. The primary value of this meeting is in leaders taking swift action when teams encounter barriers to performance that are beyond the control of the managers. An equally impactful benefit is that managers and leaders are more actively involved, resolving issues on a more timely basis.

Notice the interaction between the tiers: There is always someone at the Tier II and III standups that participated in the standup at the previous level. This creates human connections that carry forward escalated problems and other concerns to higher levels of management. The highest-ranking person at each level of standup meeting, be it a team lead, manager, director, or executive, is responsible for escalating problems that cannot be solved at the level where the standup is happening. This person is also responsible for reporting the status and resolution of the problem back to the originating team. Make sure that your accountability process runs both ways—escalating issues up and reporting resolutions back down. The clarity, focus, and alignment generated from these daily meetings are priceless! Figure 9.1 summarizes a system of tiered daily standup meetings.

The advantage of this system is that, in three short meetings, issues can be escalated from the frontline associates all the way to the executives. Each of these standups uses visual controls to track items discussed in the meeting. Ideally, the level of the discussion moves from a micro to a macro level as the discussion moves from Tier I to Tier III. Depending on the size of the organization, as you move from your model line to other areas of the organization, your situation may require more than the three tiers used in this example.

Adding Visual Accountability

Key to each of these standup meetings is visual management, with a specific focus on accountability. We’ve already described the importance of visual management as a cornerstone in your transformation. The lean management system has a series of reinforcing mechanisms to ensure that what is supposed to happen does happen. Visuals are an important part of this reinforcement, bringing to the surface problems, commitments, and other information of significance that might otherwise remain hidden.

Focus on getting started rather than perfecting the board before beginning. You should expect changes over time. WIP items will regularly come from the problems that are escalated and promoted by the management team. Many are items that can be solved quickly and do not require methodical problem-solving process such as an A3. Others will require formal problem solving; in those cases be sure that an item is placed in WIP to keep the problem in focus and visual while the A3 is being worked.

In Chapter 7, we added dedicated space on the frontline and management boards for problems and the A3s used to solve them. Problems and A3s are not solely the domain of management; use care to ensure that problems are not overescalated with the new system of tiered visual management. The job of the lean manager is not to solve problems; it’s to teach others how to solve problems. Ideally, problems should be solved at the level closest to where the problem’s cause is occurring. Keep this in mind as you experiment with your new system. Escalate problems when needed, but in many cases the frontline staff simply needs coaching and the authority to solve problems.

There are still other components that can be added to your board over time. Start with these suggestions and let the teams determine what other elements are needed to effectively run your accountability sessions. Don’t overdo it at first—you’ll be tempted to put too much on the board. Standups still need to be short 15-minute meetings; too many things on the board will take too much time to cover as well as cause the management team to lose focus. The primary purpose is to ensure that process improvement is happening, problems are being identified and resolved, and associates and managers have an effective system to escalate issues, ask for help, and get answers. You can see an example of the use of these concepts at a senior executive level in Figure 9.2. This is the board for Nationwide’s Chief Technology Officer and his direct reports (including Tom!).

Interlocking Leader Standard Work

The concept of leader standard work was introduced in Chapter 5; we’ll expand on the concept here by exploring the features that sustain the transformation.

Leader standard work represents the value-added work that management does on a regular basis—those things without which the operations of the organization would suffer. It ensures that people focus on the things that will make us successful for the long term, rather than constantly getting pulled into one urgent distraction after another. The phone calls, e-mails, fire drills, and other interruptions over time can prevent us from doing the work that enables our success. One of the secrets of leader standard work is that, when implemented successfully, it actually gives us more time—it is not an additional work load, but rather reserves time for leaders to focus on things that matter most, like strategy and innovation. It creates time for leaders by placing attention on developing our people and building problemsolving muscle in our organizations so that when the inevitable problems occur, these people are empowered and equipped to solve them.

Sustainability requires the introduction of checks and balances into leader standard work. Each successive layer of management must have activities that verify the actions and standard work of the previous level. It is critical that you not think of this verification as trying to catch someone doing something wrong. In fact, we prefer to think of this as catching people doing things right ² while reinforcing focused continuous improvement. Leader standard work is directed at those activities that ensure that each layer of managers and associates is focused on what drives the engine of lean: problem solving and continuous improvement. Standards, including those for leaders, are simply a baseline on which we can (in fact, on which we must) improve on a routine basis. This is a subtlety that many people miss: Lean focuses on process, but for the purpose of improvement rather than adherence to the way we’ve always done it. The standard is just the starting point.

The methods to implement these checks are as varied as your imagination, but all should have a common element: the review of each leader’s standard work with his or her manager. The specific needs of the organization as well as the level of the leader should dictate the frequency. For example, the review might be every 2 weeks for a frontline manager and his boss, but only once a month or quarterly between the CEO and CIO. The focus of this session is on the person’s ability to execute standard work and to review and respond to improvement suggestions, as well as a discussion of anything that is proving to be a blocker to the shared objectives of the team. This review should be explicitly entered into every leader’s standard worksheet as well.

The purpose of the review is continuous improvement. If it is used to punish staff members for not adhering to standard work, it will kill collaboration and prevent sustained change. Look for improvements and use a questioning mindset: What is preventing focus on value-added work? Who can provide coaching and help? 136

Cadenced Gemba Walks

We discussed earlier the importance of gemba, where the value-added work happens. It is the activities witnessed where the work is taking place that will ultimately determine whether your lean transformation is successful. It is the associates developing the software, writing the requirements, manning the support desk, and working in the trenches day in and day out that have the most direct impact on your customers. It is also the associates who amplify the culture of the company. It’s puzzling why so many managers and executives avoid the gemba, feeling they have risen above the need to get into the details. Lean managers are in the details—not to micromanage—but to coach, inspire, support, and serve on a daily basis.

One challenge we often hear in IT departments is that you simply cannot walk the gemba because everything is bits and bytes and there’s nothing to see. True, in many knowledge-work settings, work processes and outcomes are hidden. People often work in sequestered silos and the only way to know what is going on is to look in the system (or, rather, the only way to think you know what is going on is to look in the system). This is a key reason why visual management is so important in IT: to make the work flow visible and easily accessible. By now you have implemented a visual management system that serves to keep everyone up to date on current status and to create a transparent workplace of accountability. If so, you have set the foundation for constructive gemba walks that will allow you to develop a deeper understanding of the work and become a better manager and coach.

We are often reminded of the famous words of Toyota Chairman Fujio Cho, ³ “Go see, ask why, show respect,” as a great model of how gemba walks should work. Many of the concepts applied to your transformation come through in Chairman Cho’s words:

1. Coaching—the act of asking why and moving toward incremental improvement is critical to coaching. Effective coaching is less about telling than it is about listening and asking effective questions. Coach for improvement, not correction.
2. Respect for people—simply going to the gemba and asking a bunch of questions is not respecting people. The questions must be phrased in such a way to respect the contributions of associates, build trust, and drive continuous improvement. Great coaching focuses on the process: what should be happening versus what is happening, rather than on who is to blame.
3. Disciplined management—associates see and emulate the actions of management; if the lean system is not important enough for the management team to review and examine on a regular basis, it will soon lose importance for the associates team as well.

Gemba walks are focused activities with a specific purpose: to scrutinize and deeply understand work progress and process improvement activities. They are not management by walking around or a chance to gather all the associates to listen to the management team—what we call shaking hands and kissing babies syndrome. The gemba walk is all about the associates and their work and not about the executives or the management team. Perhaps the most difficult thing for leaders to do when taking a gemba walk is to leave their egos behind. As a general rule, if leaders and managers are doing more than 30%-40% of the talking, the gemba walk is not effective at engaging people to create a culture of daily team-based problem solving.

The specifics may have to be adjusted based on your organization’s structure, but in general, structure your gemba walks in the following way:

• Level 1: Daily—local-level manager with his team leads or a subset of the team. The purpose is to review the visuals, coach, and allow issue escalation. Care must be taken to ensure this is an empowering activity for the team and not micromanaging.
• Level 2: Daily or weekly—senior manager or director with each of his or her managers. The purpose is to study the performance visuals, coach, and follow up on improvement projects.
• Level 3: Weekly or monthly—executive with each of his or her directors/ senior managers. The purpose is to scrutinize the visuals, coach, and follow up on improvement projects.

You can see a repeating pattern at each level, with focus on visuals and coaching. The gemba walks serve to reinforce the clarity and communication of the daily standup meetings. The difference lies in their focus: The daily standup is a general report in, lasts about 15 minutes, and primarily focuses on daily issues of work and improvement. The gemba walk centers on assessing the depth of engagement of the teams, the degree to which lean systems are being actively used, and opportunities for leaders and managers to support and coach.

The point of the gemba walk is to see things as they really are—not in a report, not in a status meeting, not in a conversation with the project manager, but from where the value-added work is occurring. The essence of a great gemba walk is to see things from the perspective of the associates! This can be at an agile team space, functional work area, data center—anywhere within the IT organization where work is being done that is creating value for customers. Within our world of technology, the product or service being created cannot always be easily observed. This is why the use of visual management is so important. It is a representation of the work that is happening, a proxy of sorts that stands in for the product. Without it, oftentimes both management and associates fail to get value from the walks and they degenerate or stop altogether.

Gemba walks should be scheduled and posted on the manager’s cadence calendar (e.g., leader standard work). These walks must be held as sacrosanct; they need to occur as planned and on time. This is one of the most visible lean management practices and reinforces the importance of the lean system to frontline management and associates, acting as a reinforcing mechanism. The manager responsible for the area being walked should lead the walk and take notes on improvement actions.

To ensure that the management team stays on task with the walks, we recommend the use of a gemba walk checklist. Provide a checklist, or standard work for gemba walks, to guide the management team as they participate on their walks. A simple checklist will go a long way to ensuring that managers go to the gemba with a purpose and make it an empowering process for everyone involved.

Assessment and Reflection

Some tough news for all of us: Over 70% of these types of transformations fail. ⁴ A great many of these failures could be avoided if lean leaders took a step back and applied the same principles they deployed in their organizations to the transformation process itself: namely, problem solving and continuous improvement. One way to do that is to regularly assess, reflect, and apply countermeasures to the transformation.

Personal Reflection

A critical element of any lean leader is hansei, or self-reflection. Taking the time for introspection to understand the impact that we, as lean leaders, have on the people, processes, and the systems around us is critical to improving our personal leadership capability and our capacity for coaching others. The same applies to the lean transformation as a whole. We should always be on watch in our daily jobs, with kaizen eyes, watching out for waste and opportunities to improve, learn, and teach. But we often fail to step back and look at the big picture of the transformation—asking what the ultimate purpose is. Are we moving toward our True North? What changes are required to continue improving? Each transformation is situational in context, and the tools and principles that apply and work best are different in each one. Further, as you progress and mature, the focus of the transformation will shift. A lean transformation is never complete; it merely adapts to the current challenges and opportunities of the organization. While this field guide gives you a roadmap to start your transformation, ultimately your adaptation of these principles to the obstacles you encounter will be the determining factor of whether or not you are successful.

Reflection is necessary to making informed and effective adaptations. For a lean leader, a good start is to reflect on the five “Ps”: Purpose, Process, People, Problem Solving, and Personal Leadership. Focusing on these areas and aligning them to the True North goals you have identified for your organization and transformation will keep you on the right path. This does not have to be a complicated process and should be a part of your standard work, occurring on a regular basis. The key point is to set a regular cadence for self-examination with yourself and your team.

Lean System Assessment

One input to the reflection process is formal and informal assessments of the lean system. From accountability meetings to interlocking leader standard work, you are probably discerning that a lot of counterbalances are needed in your new system to prevent atrophy. It’s a little bit of a paradox: On the one hand, we are empowering our associates and giving them more control over their daily work and improvement of their work; on the other, we continually check and monitor the system to see if what we are expecting to happen actually is happening. This is really quite logical when taking into account the cultural changes occurring along with the process changes— namely, that our work is a daily experiment that we’re striving to constantly improve. Effective experiments require data. The assessment process is simply data to measure how the system is functioning and an opportunity to keep the focus on continuous improvement of both the work and the way work is done.

In a way, assessments are happening every day. Review of standard work, gemba walks, and the daily accountability standups are all designed to review lean and work processes to provide a chance for coaching and developing our people. An important part of the job of a lean manager is to learn and to teach others what the manager has discovered along the way.

We have found, however, that these daily activities are simply not enough in most companies to sustain the journey. Deeper looks into the system, with the results stored to identify and understand trends, are needed to continue the journey. Similarly to the reflection process described in “Assessment and Reflection,” these deep dives should occur on a regular basis and become a part of standard work for the organization. They should be based on carefully chosen metrics to ensure that we are making decisions based on accurate information.

Metrics and measures are absolutely important in determining the effectiveness of the delivery of products and services to our customers, whether it’s software, support services, networks, servers, defect fixes, or anything else. None of us would consider running our organizations without them. Things such as our productivity levels, defects, and service-level agreement fulfillment serve as measuring sticks and indicators of performance. We can also collect measurements on the transformation and use them as guideposts for improvement or corrective action. For example, in measuring the lean transformation, we’re assessing the practices and principles that guide us to see if they are taking root within the organization—becoming a part of our DNA and ensuring continuous improvement.

For the transformation metrics, we must focus on leading (predictive) indicators instead of the lagging indicators so often used in our organizations. Defects, productivity, project success, availability, and other standard IT metrics look in the rearview mirror. They are important, but at the same time it is hard to drive forward when you are only looking backward at historical performance. For the transformation metrics you must look at the critical elements you have put in place with the expectation that these new processes and principles will lead to better results, even if it does not happen right away. Table 9.1 shows a few examples of leading indicators you can measure as part of an ongoing assessment routine.

Continuous Learning

The prior components of the sustainability system—accountability, interlocking leader standard work, cadenced gemba walks, assessment, and reflection—are all designed to allow the leaders of the lean transformation to continually learn and improve the system through their own actions and through the empowering of associates and managers. This happens through observation, coaching, and experimentation. This concept of continuous learning must permeate all aspects of the new lean system. Above all else, a lean thinker is a learner. When we put aside our egos as leaders, acknowledge that we do not know everything, and accept that most of the time our associates know more than we do about our processes, we can truly become learners.

In fact, learning should be a part of every aspect of your lean transformation, including lean processes, daily work, strategy, and execution. You must create a mindset centered on continuous learning within all team members. ⁵ The power of moving from an organization where everyone just does his or her job to one where people do their jobs and find ways to improve their jobs cannot be overstated. Information technology changes so rapidly that you cannot possibly anticipate what the landscape will look like in 2-3 years, let alone 5-10 years. But what you can anticipate and improve is the ability of your organization to adapt to the coming changes, whatever they may be. Create the learning ecosystem now that will ensure that everyone is able to continue to provide value well into the future. A case study follows of how Nationwide created a practitioner-led learning system without heavy investment.

Creating the opportunities for frontline associates, managers, and leaders to learn and grow is of paramount importance. This will not happen without intentionally focused effort. Your job as a lean leader is to use the tools available to you in order to create opportunities for continuous learning. All of the components of the sustainability system will put you on the right path. Remember the maxim that every day is an experiment; creating a culture of continuous learning is the embodiment of this principle.

Sustainability Wrap-Up

Lean transformations are not a project; they create a new way of working. Without a committed focus to changing foundational elements of the organization—baking the changes into the DNA of the company—lean will not have a lasting impact. Building sustainability into the transformation from the beginning will provide a tremendous advantage as you progress. And while taking the time now may seem difficult, it’s much easier than the rework necessary when the system falls apart from lack of support structures. Make the commitment to build a legacy of lean leadership and execution in your transformation by implementing the five-part sustainability system described in this chapter.

Notes