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Leveraging Lean Six Sigma

By Ron Crabtree CPIM, CIRM, MLSSBB
President, MetaOps Inc.

For year I have been providing coaching for professionals who are learning how to find the right data about existing processes to support chartering projects to leverage Operational Excellence (OpEx), Business Process Reengineering (BPR) and Lean Six Sigma (LSS) initiatives. One of the absolutely critical elements of that must be achieved is a very clear picture of the current state of operations in the organization before we begin mucking around changing things. This must include a careful assessment of what works, what doesn’t and why. At the same time we have to figure out the right process metrics and accompanying improvement objectives.

Value stream mapping is one of the most critical LSS skills required to get a picture of the true current state of our processes. However, I have found there is a really big problem when mapping service related processes (like in human relations functions) where we don’t have a physical thing (like a part in an assembly or a raw material) to follow through our process. The problem is this: We don’t have any data being captured in a usable manner today. We are totally dependent on the subject matter experts (SMEs) who do the work for the data we need. A great example of this is the typical phone inquiry that comes into an organization or department seeking information.

Unless this call is coming into an actual call center that has an IVR system and a workforce management system (used monitor call queues help manage backlogs and routing of calls to people to handle them), you are unlikely to have any real actionable data about the call process. Here’s the rub: Every service providing organization handles a lot of inbound calls, and most don’t have an IVR or workforce management system on the front end. So, it’s a sure bet that we don’t have any meaningful data about what is happening to those requests — why we are getting them and what happens in the process to handle them.

So, that leaves us with the good old practice of “heading to the floor” and asking the SMEs to tell us what’s going on, and build some data to get an accurate picture of the current process. This is where you, the person charged with getting sufficient data about the current state from executives, managers, SMEs and even customers of process has to get creative. Just walking around watching what is going on and referring to published documentation on current state is far from enough to build an accurate picture of what is going on. We need to find out specifically what is working, what doesn’t work and why. At the same time we need to glean from everyone their ideas of what can be measured, what needs to be improved and a sense for the goals that should be set.

In addition to the usual techniques for gathering data for mapping, we must also use the power of Socratic questioning to gather insights from the people involved to support making improvements. Over the years I have interviewed thousands of people in hundreds of organizations to find out that is really going on, and will share with you here some methods do just that.

What’s Socratic questioning?

Here’s a short definition: Socratic questioning seeks to get the other person to answer their own questions by making them think and drawing out the answer from them. A longer and more helpful one is: Socratic questioning is disciplined questioning that can be used to pursue thought in many directions and for many purposes, including: to explore complex ideas, to get to the truth of things, to open up issues and problems, to uncover assumptions, to analyze concepts, to distinguish what we know from what we don’t know and to follow out logical implications of thought. (source: Wikipedia)

I have italicized some of the more important aspects of this definition and specifically underlined to distinguish what we know from what we don’t know. It’s what we don’t know about our processes that can hurt us the most. We need to be disciplined and inquisitive in our search for the brutal truth in service processes where the only reliable source is the people who manage the work, do the work and are the recipients of the process outputs — process and end customers.

In the next edition of this column I will give you some detailed thoughts on lines of questioning for the three key constituencies you need to gather data from before starting a process improvement effort.