Tag Archives: improvement

Never Stop Looking for Improvement

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Never Stop Looking for Improvement

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

If it’s working fine, why mess with it?

Well, whatever “it” is may work just fine, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be better.

This idea came to me as I read an article about United Airlines changing the way passengers board the plane. Most airlines put passengers in groups and call them in order. United will continue doing this but make changes to some of the groups. First-class passengers and higher-level frequent fliers won’t notice, but there will be a change once Group 4 is called. Passengers with window seats will board first, followed by passengers in middle seats, and eventually, passengers with aisle seats. This new process will save two minutes.

Now, you might be thinking, “Two minutes. Big deal!” But, in the airline business, two minutes is a big deal. A mismanaged boarding process could delay the departure and cause disruptions throughout the day. So, while two minutes may not seem like much, the goal is to always look for ways to streamline an often chaotic process.

Improvement Cartoon of Shep Hyken

This story has at least two lessons. First, every company should tinker with what’s working by experimenting and looking for better ways to do “what they’ve always done,” even if it’s working. And second, small changes can add up to make a bigger difference when combined.

So, you have two choices:

  1. Do it the way you’ve always done it. Don’t question it. If it works, don’t try to change it. Unfortunately, many companies operate this way and miss opportunities to improve.
  2. Always look to improve everything, even when it’s working well. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been doing something that works, come back on a regular basis – maybe annually – and take a closer look. This is an excellent way to use a Journey Map. Look at every interaction point a customer has with your organization and ask, “Is there a way to make it better?” While there may not be a better way today, keep asking the question; you might find one over time.

Zig Ziglar, the famous motivational speaker, used to tell a story of a little girl who asked her mom, “Why do we cut the end off the roast before we put it in the oven?” Mom answered, “Because that’s how your grandmother taught me to cook it.” So, the little girl went to her grandmother and asked the same question. Grandma answered, “Because that’s how your great-grandmother taught me.” So, the little girl went to her great-grandmother and asked the same question. Great Grandma responded, “Because back then, the ovens were smaller than they are today, so we had to cut off the end to get it to fit.”

The moral of the story is if something worked yesterday, that doesn’t mean it’s the best thing to do today. Always look for improvement.

Image Credits: Shep Hyken, Pexels

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Announcing a New Lean Innovation Series

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Announcing a New Lean Innovation SeriesI’ve started working with a local healthcare insurance company in a role focused on driving improvement and innovation in its membership and billing operations. The company has a big focus on LEAN throughout the company and always has some sort of value stream mapping (VSM) or rapid process improvement workshop (RPIW) going on through the Kaizen Promotion Office (KPO). Despite this only being my second week on the job, I have already been involved in the company’s LEAN efforts. Having gone through Six Sigma Green Belt training and with my focus on innovation, this of course has been very interesting so far.

Some of you may recall my popular DMAIC for Innovation article for iSixSigma magazine.

In the spirit of the linkage I made between Six Sigma and Innovation in this article, I thought I would create a series of articles looking at the relationship and connections between LEAN and Innovation.

To anchor us all in the same frame of mind about what innovation is, my definition of the word is:

“Innovation transforms the useful seeds of invention into widely adopted solutions valued above every existing alternative.”

One of the key intersection points between LEAN and Innovation is that both are focused on value. LEAN focuses on activities in a process that add value and removing those that introduce waste, while innovation is focused on value creation, value access, and value translation. This I introduced in my often referenced article – Innovation is All About Value.

Innovation = Value Creation (x) Value Access (x) Value Translation

Now you will notice that the components are multiplicative not additive. Do one or two well and one poorly and it doesn’t necessarily add up to a positive result. Doing one poorly and two well can still doom your innovation investment to failure. Let’s look at the three equation components in brief:

Value Creation is pretty self-explanatory. Your innovation investment must create incremental or completely new value large enough to overcome the switching costs of moving to your new solution from the old solution (including the ‘Do Nothing Solution’). New value can be created by making something more efficient, more effective, possible that wasn’t possible before, or create new psychological or emotional benefits.

Value Access could also be thought of as friction reduction. How easy do you make it for customers and consumers to access the value you’ve created. How well has the product or service been designed to allow people to access the value easily? How easy is it for the solution to be created? How easy is it for people to do business with you?

Value Translation is all about helping people understand the value you’ve created and how it fits into their lives. Value translation is also about understanding where on a continuum between the need for explanation and education that your solution falls. Incremental innovations can usually just be explained to people because they anchor to something they already understand, but radical or disruptive innovations inevitably require some level of education (often far in advance of the launch).

Done really well, value translation also helps to communicate how easy it will be for customers and consumers to exchange their old solution for the new solution. My favorite example of poor value translation and brilliant value translation come from the same company and the same product launch – The Apple iPad. It’s hard to believe, but Apple actually announced the iPad with the following statement:

“Our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price.”

iPad BillboardThis set off a firestorm of criticism and put the launch at risk of failure. But amazingly Apple managed to come up with the Out of Home (OOH) advertisements with a person with their feet up on a couch and the iPad on their lap (see above) by the time the product shipping. If a picture is worth a thousand words, this particular picture will probably end up being worth billions of dollars to Apple.

Never Forget!

Value Creation is important, but you can’t succeed without equal attention being paid to both Value Access and Value Translation…

Because innovation is all about value…

Value Creation (x) Value Access (x) Value Translation = Success!

Lean versus Innovation

The graphic above highlights that LEAN and Innovation intersect on Value Access. Now let’s have a quick look at some of the key principles of LEAN from the web site of the Lean Enterprise Institute:

PRINCIPLES OF LEAN

The five-step thought process for guiding the implementation of lean techniques is easy to remember, but not always easy to achieve:

  • Specify value from the standpoint of the end customer by product family.
  • Identify all the steps in the value stream for each product family, eliminating whenever possible those steps that do not create value.
  • Make the value-creating steps occur in tight sequence so the product will flow smoothly toward the customer.
  • As flow is introduced, let customers pull value from the next upstream activity.
  • As value is specified, value streams are identified, wasted steps are removed, and flow and pull are introduced, begin the process again and continue it until a state of perfection is reached in which perfect value is created with no waste.

Key LEAN Principles

The second part of the above graphic highlights the seven sources of waste:

  • Inventory
  • Motion
  • Defects
  • Transportation
  • Processing
  • Overproduction
  • Time

While developed for the manufacturing context, LEAN can be (and is) used in service industries like health insurance as well. As you can see, LEAN is really focused on improvement and optimization of the status quo, while innovation in contrast is focused on the introduction of something new that disrupts the status quo. As a result, one is not better than the other, but instead both methodologies can be used side by side, and in future articles I will share more of my musings on how innovation and LEAN can be used together.

Stay tuned!


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The Adopted Child of Innovation

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The Adopted Child of InnovationInnovation is everywhere. Or at least the word is. CEOs talk about innovation, every technology company claims to be innovative (or to want innovative employees) and now we’re even seeing advertisements on television talk about innovation. Even Nissan, which has had innovation in their tagline for two years now, has decided to change their tagline from “Innovation for All” to something new “Innovation that Excites.” Okay, it still has innovation in it. But, the fact that they decided to move from innovation being something that is democratic, to something that is exciting, is an interesting shift. Maybe now that everybody is claiming to be innovative they felt the need to say, “No, our innovations aren’t like everyone else’s, our innovations are exciting!”

Because people talk about innovation so much, and misuse the term so frequently, I think it is important to reiterate my definition of innovation and talk a bit about the differences between invention and innovation and the differences between innovation and improvement. My definition of innovation is:

“Innovation transforms the useful seeds of invention into solutions valued above every existing alternative – and achieves wide adoption.”

Adoption is of course key to something moving from being an invention to innovation, but then so of course is the threshold that something is valued above every existing alternative, and as a result isn’t just merely useful – but valuable. Crossing this threshold means that people willingly replace their existing solution. Crossing this threshold is what solidifies your solution as a true innovation. And that’s the point.

Improvement versus Replacement

All companies must focus on improving their existing solutions. But at the same time they must also constantly be on guard against other ways of potentially solving the same customer problem or fulfilling the same customer need. Six Sigma does a great job at fulfilling the mission of improvement and at helping to achieve operational excellence. But while an organization must be ruthless in their pursuit of perfection, or the amount of perfection that their customers are willing to pay for and that they can make profitably, organizations must also make a commitment to the pursuit of innovation excellence. The reason companies must strike a balance between the pursuit of improvement and replacement is that sooner or later something will become possible that wasn’t possible before – due to changes in technology AND customer psychological readiness for change – creating an opening for replacement. Really good value translation (and education) can help accelerate that customer readiness, but launching before both conditions exist can lead to financial ruin. When replacement does become inevitable, the only question is whether you will continue to focus on improvement and be replaced, or whether you will have the courage to replace your own solution with a new one…

Is there any innovation here to excite?

For fun you might want to check out one of the latest Nissan advertisements from the United Kingdom for the Nissan Juke that I’ve embedded below. Is the car itself innovative? No. Is the advertisement innovative? No. But it is creative. Is there any innovation in the product at all? Well, that depends. It depends on whether there are any new components that don’t just merely improve their performance but instead completely replace the traditional approaches to solving the targeted problem or performing the job-to-be-done. What do you think, true or false?

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Following the Line to Innovation

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Following the Line to InnovationOK, it may not really be an innovation, but I appreciated the following operational efficiency anyway:

Going to check out of the Hilton New York City, there was a queue in spite of the several available kiosks and multiple employees staffing the counter to help customers with various requests. Hilton had obviously invested in some business process consulting (or possibly listened to an employee suggestion) because in addition to the kiosks and the employees staffing the counter, they had an employee staffing the line to identify the needs of guests while they waited in line.

In my case, she asked how my stay was and I told her the story about how I had difficulty with the WiFi not allowing me back into my work e-mail after the connection went down and came back up again. I told her that the first night it worked fine and that I expected not to pay for the second night because it didn’t work properly (leaving important time-critical messages stuck in my outbox). She was sympathetic, but I halfway expected to have to tell the story all over again when I got up to the counter (as this is the typical bad customer experience on the phone or in person). I was surprised and impressed when she told the counter person to take off the second night’s WiFi and that I was ready to check out. Thankfully, I didn’t have to tell the story again.

This is good operational practice for a couple of reasons:

  1. It gave them a way of increasing throughput during busy times when they would otherwise be limited by the number of computer workstations.
  2. It provided a good customer experience. I only had to tell the story once.
  3. I was on my way much more quickly as a result, and the counter person was on to their next customer more quickly as well
  4. The poor person behind me didn’t have to wait while I told my story again, and potentially argued with the counter person because this had already been taken care of while we were both waiting in line (except no arguing was necessary).
  5. If the customer has no special needs, the employee can direct the customer to an available kiosk.

This example, while more about good operational practice and customer service than innovation, does provide the opportunity to identify process innovation opportunities if we look at our own business through a lens of separating the customer experience into the following parts:

  1. Information Gathering
  2. Information Evaluation
  3. Information Processing

Are there times in your business when your customers are waiting? Why are they waiting?

Innovation Training for your whole organization from Braden Kelley

Do you have certain resources that reach capacity quickly or for sustained periods during busy times that you can’t expand easily?

Is there a way to utilize that waiting time to separate out the information gathering or information evaluation components of a customer interaction, to allow for a division of labor that can be more easily flexed to accommodate demand spikes?

In a phone scenario, could you not implement an interactive voice response phone system that notifies the customer how long they can expect to wait and then transitions to a “While you are waiting…” message and then asks the customer for their name, account number, and phone number to either be played for the agent before transferring the call, or maybe even trying to do some kind of speech to text and facilitate a record-lookup using that information?

Maybe you need to allow your skilled people to focus on information evaluation and processing, while lower skilled people focus on information gathering. Or, maybe in your industry the skilled people are at the front end, focusing on information gathering and evaluation and need to be separated from the information processing tasks.

In a manufacturing environment, while we don’t talk about information gathering, evaluation, or processing, we still use the same logic to evaluate the overall system throughput. Then, break it down into components so that we can identify and manage critical constraints and manage them in a way that maximizes throughput.

So whether you are in a manufacturing or a service environment, are you constantly looking for ways to optimize throughput and maximize profits or customer service (or maybe even both)?

What are your favorite stories of process innovations that have led to improved customer service or manufacturing efficiencies?

P.S. Continue reading on this topic by reading – Followup – Following the Line to Innovation at Costco

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