We launched a 30 second survey a few weeks back to ask the main question, What is your biggest challenge in gaining engagement in your Continuous Improvement Programs? and the results are in. We had a great response with just over 180 people adding their input to the question and a big thank you to those who did. In the survey we asked a couple of ...

Most people will by now have heard of the MVP, the Minimum Viable Product. It's the smallest functioning version of what you want to build or ultimately deliver to your customer but perhaps with limited features, sometimes it's a part of it, sometimes it's a dummy version with someone behind the curtain pulling the strings. Ultimately though it's p...

Episode 8 - Top Tips for Implementing 5s  Last month we got another chance to guest on the fantastic new podcast The Quest to QHSE where we joined host Craig Thornton to talk about 5s and gave our top tips for implementing it and some tips on what not to do as well! You may be wondering what 5s has to do with your QHSE (Quality Health & Sa...

Yesterday I was sitting with my daughter in a coffee shop as we shuffled between school and one of her many extracurricular activities, she is 10 so there are a lot of activities as she tests out the various options for things to do, refines it, and then, hopefully finally settles on a few as she gets a little older to focus on. I explain it to fri...

Episode 6  I was really delighted to participate in episode 6 of The Quest to QHSE Podcast with Craig where we got together and talked about how to use lean improvements to save money, something that's dear to my heart, not just because I'm a Scotsman but because it makes great sense for your organsiaiton. So how does that fit with QHSE? well ...

As questions about lean go, how to measure the success of a lean program or 'how lean' is an organisation seems to be getting an increasing amount of air time in meetings, in part, it's about how do we know where we are in the journey, but it's also around return on investment. The board, for example, wants to know what they are actually getting fo...

The other week I had a really interesting discussion over a coffee with potential client. They had been working internally to find a way to really drive and push a continuous improvement culture into their organisation and were looking for someone to help out. We talked about what their current challenges were and what they want to achieve, they sa...

It's a bit of a sitcom stable, the main character comes out with a comment or a put down and then gasps, the hand goes to their mouth and then they utter that terrible phrase... Oh no! I sound like my Mum! (or Dad as the case may be), the audience laughs, and our lead character looks both stunned and a little worried, are they in fact turning into ...

One of the 5 fundamental principles of lean is to obtain flow, find a way that your product or service flows seamlessly from the start of your process to your client and do this as fast as is practicable to maintain a high-quality product or service. There are always many ways to do this and it will vary from organisation to organisation since ever...

I get asked all the time what is the point of lean? Why would you 'do lean'? It's actually a pretty common question and there are many many answers that people give when they are asked about it. The problem is, I think, that people forget the real reason for introducing lean to an organisation, the reason it exists in the first place, why Toyota cr...

Unfortunately, Most continuous improvement programs fail, either completely or they fail to live up tot eh hype and expectations that are set up front for them The reason for this is that they are focusing only on delivering the "big bang", they make a big song and dance about this new latest thing and hope that it'll work, like the noise of t...

When we start talking to organisations about the use of checklists in their operations to ensure nothing gets missed and what needs to get check or inspected gets, well, checked and inspected we get a lot of push back. It's accepted that checklists are prevalent in HR for things like inductions, health and safety programs have no end of checklists ...

Lighthouses have got to be one of the most magical of buildings ever created, I love them. They stand against the mighty elements, the wind, the rain, the hail, the sun and everything else the environment has to throw at them. They stand firm, throwing out the vast illumination to light the way, showing where is safe and what isn't. The lighthouses...

When people talk about lean there are so many areas that are discussed, there are of course all the tools – 5s, Kanban, load balancing (Heijunka), mistake proofing (poka-yoke) Root Cause analysis with things like fishbone diagrams, A3 problem solving, Andon systems, Gemba walks, Kaizen and so the list goes on, there is the history of it and what it...

One of the fundamental elements of lean is to create pull in the system, so what does that mean? Well lets first agree what we mean when we talk about push systems and the challenges that they create and about what the heck grab is!   A Push System  Most of the time when you hear people talking about push systems, they are describing make...

Just before Christmas, I got my 1st pair of reading glasses, this was after much persuasion from my wife and daughter that something wasn't as good as it could be with my vision. The key hint apparently was me running out of arms length when reading books, reading labels on food for ingredients went a while before that.  I was actually pretty ...

I get asked frequently to explain what lean is about or find myself explaining to a management team that it's certainly not about reducing headcount. It's about continuous improvement in every area of the organisation, it's not a manufacturing thing, it's a business thing, it's a strategy. In each case I come back to the same 4 words which are at t...

Over last 6 months or so I've been playing with Google 's GSuite (disclaimer..I'm a MIcrosoft fan having lived through Windows 3.11 and so many revisiosn of office it's scray) to do a number of things for a client who is a user including building an ISO9001 system with it but in talking to some friends on a Lean group I'm in on WhatsApp&n...