All posts from Mark Graban’s LeanBlog.org, including podcasts, announcements, articles, and more.
Thanks as always to Ryan McCormack for this… there’s always so much good reading, listening, and viewing shared here by him! Subscribe to get these directly from Ryan via email. Healthcare – Creating Value for Patient Not surprisingly, healthcare organizations with poor cultures of rigid…
Joining me today for Episode #312 of the podcast is Jeff Hunter, author of the excellent book "Patient-Centered Strategy: A Learning System for Better Care."
Jeff was with the ThedaCare in Wisconsin, where he was Senior Vice President, Strategy and Marketing for the health system. After retiring from ThedaCare, he has been a faculty member for Catalysis and has started his own consulting firm, Jeff Hunter Strategy.
In today's podcast, we discuss a number of topics, including how a good strategy is a necessary input for a "strategy deployment" management process, some of the problems with traditional approaches to strategic planning, and why an iterative PDSA approach works better than static plans.
In this post, I talk about my dental practices "need" to get Lean, my need to floss, and some of the tactics that help others change. You being right doesn't mean mean others will accept your Lean practices or your scolding about flossing nightly.
If a practice aims for "ideal care," how can there be so much waste and waiting one day, followed by a perfect waste-free visit the next? What are your experiences with care and delays in clinic settings?
My guest for Episode 311 is Jess Orr, a continuous improvement practitioner at WestRock, a large paper and packaging company, where she helps plants foster a culture of continuous improvement and employee engagement.
\Her experience includes working directly for Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky. She is particularly passionate about sharing best practices across industries, which motivated her to found Yokoten Learning.
In today's episode, we talk about her path from Six Sigma Black Belt to a Lean-thinking engineer at Toyota. How did she progress from solving problems herself to developing others? We'll talk about a blog post that she wrote for this blog earlier this year, Lean and ROI, leadership and culture, and much more. What is it like working outside of Toyota again? I hope you enjoy the discussion.
Here is a chart from a team in San Antonio, where I teach a class on Lean for quality and patient safety twice a year. This team was basically using the “A3” improvement methodology to look at a problem that really impacted patients. My understanding is that a contaminated blood culture bottle leads to false positive results that indicate that a patient has a bloodstream infection when they really don't.
This article was sent by a friend and blog reader from Winnipeg the other day:
"ER wait times down, but only slightly"
Oh good, the waiting times are down. But what does "only slightly" mean? Have ER wait times gone down in a meaningful way? Or are they just comparing two data points? Is this "down" a matter a signal or is it just noise in the system?
These are the types of questions that can be answered by methods in my new book Measures of Success: React Less, Lead Better, Improve More.
I started my career in manufacturing, so that's just one reason I'm interested in the topics of offshoring (sending manufacturing work overseas) and what's now called "reshoring," or bringing jobs and factories back to the U.S.
Somebody at A.T. Kearney sent me a link to their recent report on reshoring, with the headline:
Reshoring in Reverse Again
US manufacturers are not exactly coming back in droves. In fact, the 2018 Reshoring Index shows that imports from traditional offshoring countries are at a record high.
When you learn to look at data and workplace metrics through the "Process Behavior Chart" methodology, you learn to be skeptical of text descriptions like "a record high." Does "a record high" mean that the data point is statistically meaningful? Not always.
This post builds off of a little rant I went on over on LinkedIn. I wrote:
The Catch-22 of "Lean" training and "implementation"...
Executives want big returns and high ROI. That's understandable.
But, at the core of Lean, if you're going to call it that, is "#Kaizen," which means allowing everybody to do small improvements even if there isn't big ROI.
Today's post is some material that I wrote for my book Measures of Success but cut due to length. I've modified the material a bit to hopefully be fine as a standalone post.
There's a somewhat humorous, if not scary, story from a book (This is Going to Hurt) written by a former "junior doctor" in the British National Health Services (NHS) -- the equivalent of a "resident" in the American medical education system.
Joining me again for Episode 310 is Stephen M. Shortell Ph.D., MPH, MBA. He is Blue Cross of California Distinguished Professorship, HPM and is a Professor of Organizational Behavior at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health.
He was previously a guest on Episode 267 talking about the establishment of the Center for Lean Engagement and Research (CLEAR) at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is the director.
In this episode, we talk about some initial research that they released in a paper that was published in The Joint Commision Journal on Quality and Patient Safety:
"Use of Lean and Related Transformational Performance Improvement Systems in Hospitals in the United States: Results From a National Survey"
My next book, Measures of Success: React Less, Lead Better, Improve More, is in the final editing stages.
I previously had just a single page about the book on MarkGraban.com, but I've now created the early version of a more complete website for the book:
