My Free Webinar on Process Behavior Chart Case Studies
I'm presenting a webinar on December 18th at 1 pm ET.
You can register here:
How to Use Process Behavior Charts to Improve: Case Studies
Learn more about how to register in this post.
Category Blog
All Blog Posts
All posts from Mark Graban’s LeanBlog.org, including podcasts, announcements, articles, and more.
Throwback Thursday: This is Not a Drill — It Happened Again
I really don't enjoy the type of "Throwback Thursday" posts that are triggered by something in the news that reminds me of something that I've blogged about in the past.
Sometimes, it seems people are doomed to keep repeating the same preventable errors instead of learning from others, improving systems, and mistake proofing things in life. In this post, we look back at repeated errors in pathology, building demolition, and emergency alert systems...
GM Shrinking, Laying Off People, Shutting Down Factories, and Cutting Costs Isn’t “Lean and Agile”
I take no joy in the troubles of any automaker, be it Tesla, Nissan, GM or any others over time.
Of course, Nissan and GM have been in the news most recently, with the firing (and jailing) of Nissan and Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn. And now, GM has announced major layoffs, the cancelation of some passenger car programs, and the shutdown (and possible closure) of five plants in North America.
I was talking to a friend the other day and I predicted that we'd see news headlines about something like "GM to get Leaner." These headlines would be using the word "lean" to mean "get smaller" instead of referring to "Lean" (which I capitalize as a proper noun) as a synonym for the Toyota Production System.
I was disappointed to hear GM's CEO, Mary Barra, a long-time GM employee using the word "lean" in the context of the company getting smaller.
Operational Excellence Mixtape: November 23, 2018
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients Hospitals have been collecting patient complaint data for decades, but leveraging the data for improvement has remained elusive. Some new publications show how using a big data approach for patient complaint data can help identify…
How to Tell the Difference Between Signal and Noise in Voter Turnout Data (and Business Metrics)
Here is a new article that I posted on LinkedIn... don't worry, it's not political, but it does look at recent voter turnout rates through a statistical lens. And I think it's a lens that's helpful for looking at metrics in our own organizations:
"How to Tell the Difference Between ‘Signal’ and ‘Noise’ in Voter Turnout Numbers or Your Organization’s Metrics"
How a Community Hospital Built a Culture of Continuous Improvement
I'm happy to be hosting, via KaiNexus, another free webinar. Click the link below to register:
How One Community Hospital is Creating a Culture of Continuous Improvement
November 28 from 1:00 - 2:00 pm ET
Presented by Mike McGowan, Director of Process Excellence at Marietta Memorial Hospital
This post also includes thoughts from the KaiNexus community about challenges and barriers to improvement and innovation.
How Standard Should Standard Improvement Boards Be?
Guest Post by Joe Swartz: At Franciscan Health, we were struggling to create a system-wide standard for our improvement boards. Although we had deployed them to over 50 departments across our 14 hospitals, it has been a struggle to agree on what the boards should look like. Five of our hospitals used rows for each key metric while nine of our hospitals used columns for each key metric. However, now our leadership was asking us to become more standardized across our system.
Art Smalley on Toyota Problem Solving: Four Types of Problems Explained
My guest for Episode #324 of the podcast is Art Smalley. Art was one of the first Americans to work for Toyota Motor Corporation in Japan and, since then, has been helping other organizations with the Toyota Production System (a.k.a. "Lean") methods and approaches. You can also visit his website to learn more, www.ArtOfLean.com.
Art is a fellow faculty member at the Lean Enterprise Institute. He has written two Shingo Publication Award-winning books: Creating Level Pull and (co-authored with Durward Sobek) Understanding A3 Thinking. Art later wrote Toyota's Kaizen Methods: Six Steps to Improvement with Isao Kato.
I own all of these books and have only met Art briefly in the past, so I'm happy to finally have him here as a guest. Today, we'll talk about Art's career and his most recent book, Four Types of Problems, published by the Lean Enterprise Institute (note: LEI provided me a free electronic copy of the book).
Lean Startup Webcast: How to Turn Metrics Into the Right Kind of Action with Process Behavior Charts
Eric Ries and Lean Startup Co. have been really helpful friends in spreading the message about "Process Behavior Charts" in their community. They invited me to give a talk at last year's Lean Startup Week and Eric was kind enough to endorse my book Measures of Success (paperback coming soon - get notified or pre-order)...
Recently, they invited me to be a guest for their webcast series, where Marilyn Gorman asked me questions about my book and the Process Behavior Chart methodology. It was a challenge to talk about this visual method without slides and charts, so I did my best to create air charts with finger gestures :-)
[Video] Are Your Leaders “Addicted to the Status Quo?”
If you're a regular reader of my blog, you know that the practice of "Motivational Interviewing" has been a big interest of mine for a few years. Although this method comes from the clinical practice of addiction counseling, there are many applications in the workplace.
This week on the Lean Enterprise Institute's "The Lean Post" site, former Toyota leader Ron Oslin is asked about Motivational Interviewing and how leaders might be "addicted to the status quo" (a phrase Ron has trademarked).
Videos by Skip Steward That Explain Routine Variation and Rules for Finding “Signals”
You might remember the podcasts that I did with my friend Skip Steward, the Chief Improvement Officer at Baptist Memorial Health Care in Tennessee (links below).
Skip recently created some excellent videos that explain the basics of "Process Behavior Charts," a method that I explore in my book Measures of Success: React Less, Lead Better, Improve More.
See those videos below the podcast links.
Operational Excellence Mixtape: November 9, 2018
Healthcare – Creating Value for Patients The benefits of Electronic healthcare records are a polarizing topic with healthcare providers. Standardization and electronic workflows have their upsides, but many are developed to optimize billing and payments, and are not designed with…
