A New Project Approach - Lean Events
Reversing the trend of underperforming Green Belt deployments is one that demands comprehensive change rather than a few tweaks. There’s no reason GB-like approaches can’t be successful as long as organizations are willing to accept the premise that the status quo isn’t working and fundamental change is required. To start, a fundamentally different project structure called a Lean Event is in order.
The traditional GB approach calls for team members to work part-time on their DMAIC project, oftentimes with more than a week between project activities. When it’s time to reconvene, valuable time is wasted getting back up to speed, and project meetings often are poorly attended or get rescheduled because of issues with members’ regular duties. Paralysis by analysis is another common pitfall of traditional project approaches, as statistical studies often take precedence over actionable elimination of waste.
Lean Events emphasize action over analysis, stripping away the busy work and focusing on the key DMAIC tasks. After thorough preparation, the team members immerse themselves in the project for a week. The full-time nature of the Event week enables teams to focus in an uninterrupted manner on making real, lasting improvements. Interestingly, once scheduled, the looming Event date is a major motivating factor in reducing project cycle time. With it being scheduled so visibly on the organization’s calendar, team members and supporting stakeholders tend to do whatever it takes to hit the targeted date.
A key benefit to the Lean Event model is it does a much better job at weeding out low-priority projects early. Affected leadership must fully support the importance of the project, since they’ll need to give up resources for the 100-percent dedication required during the Event.
The Lean Event approach obviously compresses project timelines significantly. But this isn’t just about saving time – Lean Events produce sustainable results faster, make companies more agile in reacting to changing priorities, and create more cycles of learning for team members.
One pharmaceutical industry client recently converted to this approach and successfully completed 80 percent of its projects within 4.5 months at a very conservative bottom-line impact average of $150,000 per project. I challenge anyone to find a traditional GB deployment that successful!
While the Lean Event project approach is the most visible element of this new model to get the most from Green Belts – or their Lean Belt equivalents – true deployment success requires more. The additional factors impacting success will be discussed in future blog entries.