Planning to Fail

This is the second of what will be nine posts about the main reasons why Lean Improvement Programmes fail.

Some years ago, when I was running the government's Lean programme for Manufacturing in a number of UK regions, I was lucky enough to be able to research a wide range of organisations who had been through Lean programmes and they broadly fell into nine categories.

Well, one of these (how Lean programmes are Operated) has already been published here (see below) and this post explores why organisations seem to sometimes 'Plan to Fail' by highlighting the top ten problems with the way that organisations plan and prepare for improvement.

1. Not Allowing Sufficient Resource
If you want to make fundamental change to your organisation you will need to allocate enough time, money and people to make it happen. As someone used to say to me, "You cannot get an omlette without breaking eggs." The first mistake is thinking there is some 'magic bullet' which will fix all your problems in a morning.........unless you know otherwise, I have never found one!

2. Not Scoping the Problem Correctly
Failing to think about the change correctly often creates subsequent failure. Scoping the Improvement is vital to the success of your Lean project. If you wanted to email me (markeaton(a)amnis-uk.com), then I will email you a typical Scoping Paper that you could use as a template.

3. Not Involving the Right People
If you are going to improve an area, a process or an organisation, it will often involve people from different areas, processes or even organisations and failing to involve these people can lead to you introducing improvements which creates problems either upstream or downstream of where the improvement occurs.

4. Moving Too Slow
Plans are great - but worthless - until they are enacted. Moving too slow will kill a programme of improvement dead as everyone will believe it is just 'not important'.

5. Failing to Coordinate
If you have multiple improvement programmes to run it can often be a problem coordinating them effectively. Having dedicated resource who has the competence and experience to lead Lean improvements will help to counter this, but only if they are involved in setting and scheduling all improvement activities.

6. Designing Rigid Plans
I like to say 'Plan to celebrate success, but accept occasional failure' and having rigid plans can create excessive stress on your improvement programme and slow it to a halt.

7. Not Being Clear Enough
This is different to number 2 above in that this is about being clear to your team about the plans and ensuring they have an understanding of what is required of them. It is all very well have well formed plans in a desk, but it is in the operational areas where it counts.

8. Simply Not Planning
Yep - lots of people do some training and then move straight into action, which can of course be great in terms of short term wins in small areas but trying to move from a 'one day 5S training course' into changing an organisation is often a flight of fancy, but it still happens!

9. Not having a focused planHaving a 'wishy washy' plan that lacks punch, even a well formed plan, can simply just fail to get off the ground through simple apathy. Plans need to be compelling, engaging and meaningful.

10. Not tackling the issue that counts
Having a plan that does not address the issues that your team perceive need to be addressed will lead to subsequent problems with engagement of the team, but more importantly - your people often know what the real issue so failing to take this into account is a potential route to failure!

Hopefully you have found this useful. In later editions we will explore the remaining 7 areas of Lean failure.

I would love to hear your problems with the way you have planned improvements.