RIE to Lean

It is a shame that some people believe that Lean is purely about Rapid Improvement Events!

Lean can be implemented in a variety of ways and whilst I would always recommend that you quickly create a 'case study' site inside your organisation, the majority of the long-term benefit comes from incremental improvements led by your front line teams. Sadly, the popularity of Rapid Improvement Events is growing, particularly in Healthcare, driven by the fact that they deliver quick returns. However, if these improvements are not backed up by on-going management interest in sustaining the improvements and a culture of on-going review and improvement within the teams themselves, the benefits will quickly erode.

Rapid Improvement Events are great for management consultancies as they allow the best return for the consultancy in the short to medium term and perhaps their popularity is being driven by these consultancies?

The dangers of this approach for an organisation is that an isolated event may create problems upstream or downstream in the process or in another pathway completely. They are also resource intensive, both from external support and internal effort, and can be disruptive and potentially dangerous in high risk environments.

I would always advocate that before any improvement activity occurs, the teams understand the potential impacts upstream or downstream using such tools as 'Value Stream Analysis' or Pathway Mapping and that available data is collated. In addition, your organisation should identify its internal change agents before you look for external support as these change agents will be essential for the embedding of improvements.

Lastly, to back up any Rapid Improvement Events you do run, I suggest you will need regular reviews of progress and the benefit of continuous improvement led by your own front line teams.

What do you think?

Is structure more important than tools?

It is interesting when a group of 'Lean' (or Six Sigma) enthusiasts get together as the talk quickly moves onto the topic of which tools have been used and examples of 'Visual Management'.

However, given that Lean/Six Sigma/Concurrent Design are really just a bag of tools from which a skilled mechanic will draw out one that is appropriate, I believe it is more important to discuss the structure of the improvement process. Fundamentally, what steps will be taken by the organisation to deliver improvements - from outlining the requirement for improvement (setting out the organisational Roadmap and Scoping the changes to be made) to implementing improvements in a flexible manner - the discussions need to cover who will be involved, when and why and how the process will be managed and reported.

I would be interested in knowing what your thoughts are and in the meantime if you would like a copy of a document which will help you set out your plan of attack then please drop us an email to info(a)amnis-uk.com.