Politicians refer to hard dollars vs. soft dollars often and I don’t pretend to understand what they mean. For one, it has nothing to do with the hard and soft money we deal with in our improvement work. The distinction between hard and soft money can be confusing, but we’ll…
Love ‘em or hate ‘em, there is a lot to love about cruising! I’ve spent a total of 45 days at sea so far with no regrets, real complaints, or major weight gain! In fact, I just returned from a 10-day Alaska Inside-Passage Cruise and found the staff to be…
Workplace refrigerators around the world are a necessary evil. Employees need facilities for their meals, but no one seems to clean up after themselves when they’re done and no is one assigned to maintain the shared space so it’s no surprise they’re such a universal source of irritation. Here’s how…
Lean Six Sigma helps improve both the private and the public sector. In this real-world application of Lean Six Sigma, GoLeanSixSigma.com Black Belt Jessica Shirley-Saenz, Project Control Manager for the City of San Antonio (TX) increases payments for street maintenance using the DMAIC methodology. Executive Summary Business Case In April…
Every year, Spring comes around and suddenly Facebook feeds are full of “We spring-cleaned the house and now we’re ready for Summer!” So, is a mess what’s going on during the Fall and Winter? Why wait to have an annual cleaning when you can practice simple cleaning and decluttering tricks…
“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” That’s my favorite aphorism that sums up the reality of unintended consequences. Those ripple effects from our best efforts that we had no idea would happen. Of course, unlike the proverb, not all ripple effects are bad. The term “happy accidents”…
So what does yard work have to do with Lean or Agile? They both benefit from something called a Kanban Board. Kanban is Japanese for "signboard" which was originally developed as a way to regulate production at Toyota. You’re probably thinking, "Mixing yard work with software. What?" At its core,…
Sometimes being a process improvement expert is a curse, especially when you’re the customer receiving bad service from an organization. In the midst of experiencing the bad service, do you ever start to analyze why the process is so poorly designed? I want to share a story from my own…
Leader Standard Work is a set of actions, tools and behaviors incorporated into the daily work of leaders to create a Lean Management System. One of the first priorities is to make your work environment more visible, so a great tool to start with is a Pulse Point Map. What Is…
Check out how the City of SeaTac improved their Right-of -Way Permit Process by completing a Process Walk and Rapid Improvement (Kaizen) Event. What Is a Rapid Improvement Event? A Rapid Improvement Event (also known as a Kaizen Event) involves key process participants focusing on solving a narrowly scoped process…