Lean - 3 Lean Tools You Can Use With Your Team Today

BY SIAN JONES

Last week I spoke about Lean and how I believe, similarly to agile, that above all else, it is a business philosophy; or a way to think about business and organisations. Today I am going to give you three tools that were created under the lean banner that anyone can use with their teams and/or organisations today.

Kaizen

– is a Japanese term meaning “change for the better” or Continuous Improvement. Literally Kai (change) zen (good). You could almost argue that it is a philosophy and not a tool; as there are some businesses that make it a great focus to continuously look for better ways to do things. 

The process is quite simple. It is about following these four simple steps in a cycled way: Identify opportunities for improvement, plan how a process can be improved, execute and implement those changes, and finally, review how the changes are working. Identify, Plan, Execute and Review; and start all over again. 

In traditional corporations, we tend to see processes and systems as linear and as a one-off thing we need to do. Once we have “resolved” the issue, we tend to pour “concrete” over and make it “the process”. Having a kaizen or continuous improvement approach means to continuously interrogate a process, system or product as there are always ways to make it better.

Two important things to consider if you want to implement kaizen in your team or organisation. First, always involve your team. The identification and improvements always needs to come from the people doing the work; not from an external party coming and telling them. That way you will also generate empowerment and ownership.

Second, don’t KPI this process. Don’t “make” people find improvements and solutions by rewarding or penalising it; as you will lose the essence of what Kaizen aims to achieve. 

Kanban

– is another Japanese term meaning “Visual Card”, and it is about visualising the work. The way I like to see it, it’s about putting the work at the centre. Agile made this approach very popular with all its visual management techniques, many organisations piled up on post-its and index cards. When Covid hit, we saw those visual management boards transition online and move to systems like Trello, Monday, Jira, etc…

Two important things to consider if you want to use visual boards to manage the work with your teams. Create Visual Boards that make sense to the team. In some cases, you may want to visualise the flow of a process or sometimes it is just a reminder of project and tasks priorities. Also, don’t use it to micromanage people or “push” work down; in fact, use it the other way around. Use it so the people in your team “pull” the work. Decide as a team what needs to be done and let them decide who wants to do what.

Gemba 

Another Japanese term, Gemba means “actual place”. It is used in lean as “the place where the value creating work actually happens”. For Toyota, it was the factory floor where the cars were made; so, the Executives had to do regular “gemba walks” to understand what was happening. It was never designed with the intention to evaluate, criticise or punish the “workers” that were performing the tasks; but to understand how the system operated and where could be improved so the employees could perform those tasks better; or the value created for the customer could be greater. 

Imagine having Executives spending most of the time where the work happens rather than in their corner offices or in board rooms. Imagine them spending time observing the operating and waiting rooms in a hospital, the job site in a construction business or the contact centre in a service organisation. If you are a leader, where do you spend most of the time?

I will leave you with a bonus fourth;

The Andon Cord;

— which used to be an actual cord (not anymore) that any Toyota employee could pull to stop the production line at any point if they observed any defects or potential improvements.  Imagine the feeling of empowerment, accountability and responsibility that something like this would give any employee. Imagine how your employees or team members would feel if they had power…