Introducing Lean Daily Management to any organisation needs both the “will and skill”. Certainly, in the early days of the deployment, the “will” needs to be greater than the “skill”. However, there is also the question of where to start?
Our view is that it’s best to start at the leadership level and parts of the front line in parallel. In this article, I’ll focus on some of the success factors that will help get work teams started with “daily management” routines to drive improvement and get people skilled in doing the right things. For the Leadership level, I cover what is necessary in a separate article on the basics of Hoshin planning to set longer term direction and enable the achievement of goals.
What is Daily Management in Lean?
First a little about Lean Daily management, what is and what it is not. To use a sporting analogy, the Daily Management meeting is like a half time team talk. First, we must acknowledge how the game is going – are we winning or losing? If we are winning, it is about where we should continue to press our advantage or not concede goals to the opposition. If we are losing, we need to work differently to change the result. In this context, we recommend bringing structure into how Lean Daily Management meetings work in terms of agenda, focus areas and meeting outcomes.
What is the Daily Management Process?
A typical Daily Management meeting for a front-line work team should enable quick and effective responses in the short term. It should include:
- How well did we do yesterday, what went well what did learn, what must we change to improve?
- How do we best deploy our available skills and resources to meet the demand of our customers and stakeholders?
- Are there any events or special demands on the team that we must manage (absence, process changes, quality issues etc.)?
Repeating this type of meeting daily sets the team up for success and builds on their capability to work effectively together.
What are the Key Components of Daily Management in a Lean Environment?
Here are some suggestions on getting the best out of daily management meetings and how to make your Lean introduction a success.
Keep the meeting to no more than 10 minutes
Allow time for each agenda item. At first sight, this seems a bit mechanical, but discipline is important to stop it turning into another type of meeting.
Don’t allow the team to bring problems and issues to the meeting.
These need to be captured as they arise and acknowledged at the meeting. Solving problems and determining countermeasures and assessing their impact takes time and people may not be present at the meeting. Make other time in the day to look at issues and determine the problem.
Decide the main aim of the meeting
This is dependent on the context and work of the team. Essentially there are two types of Daily Management agenda, performance management or team coordination. A Performance Management-based meeting will mean gathering and presenting process data and tending the areas daily results. Team coordination will focus on key items such as who is available and what needs to be done and what individual support people might want and need during the day.
The team must be able to influence the performance indicators used through the Daily Management process.
As a business, you might want the team to be interested in high level performance goals and ensure that daily decisions have an influence on these outcomes. But it is better to measure the things that the team can affect through their own decision making. In a service-based process, a good place to focus can be the number of items waiting or with the aim of reducing the time they spend in the work queue. In repetitive manufacturing, it is possible to focus on the number of defects or number of times when the standard work cannot be followed. On a team level, it is these “leading indicators” that matter.
Have a visual board with indicators to clearly show status and give focus to the meeting
There is a strong temptation to use apps and displays right away – a simple but attractive board that can be updated physically is best to get started. For virtual remote teams a simple board based on a spreadsheet is the only way to get started.
Don’t try and get everything onto one team board
A team management process has three main elements, People, Performance, and Improvement. It is unlikely that you would be able to or need to review all of these in every daily management meeting. Of course, over a week of daily management meeting you might give time and focus to different elements. It probably makes most sense to focus daily on what matters to maintain performance, the immediate needs and demands on people and one or two key performance indicators. Separate time and boards need to be made to focus on team skills and problem solving, specific regular meetings are needs for these too. Below is an example of a “fully loaded” board.
Have the meeting at the same time every day
The meeting must have priority over all other events. People will adapt to a fixed point in the day or week.
Keep the intervals between meetings short
Daily Management is by its very nature a short interval management system. Its aim is to stop small problems becoming big problems. It is possible to have a successful daily management meeting anywhere between 3x per day or 1x a week depending on the team, the cycle times of the work and variations in customer demand.
Update the information to be reviewed before the meeting
Having people update charts and status during the meeting is a poor spectator sport and detracts from its main purpose of increasing team productivity.
Rotate the leadership of the meeting amongst team members
Daily Management is one of several Lean approaches that build people capability. Running meetings is a skill which can be learned more easily if you follow a set structure. Leadership talent will emerge from this process.
Make sure the team has a clear purpose statement
It may sound obvious but in any dynamic situation, it is important to understand your main aims and purpose.
If you are reviewing performance indicators QDIP (Quality, Delivery, Inventory, Productivity) is a good place to start
The two focus areas for maintaining and improving performance of a work team are measures of customer performance and efficiency. From a customer satisfaction perspective Quality and Delivery are two headings for a KPI (Key Performance Indicator). From the business perspective, Inventory and Productivity measures matter. Exactly what is measured depends on the team and work being done.
Have a Standard Work for the meeting and maintaining the team board
See below a standard Terms of Reference document for defining how you run any meeting. This example shown below relates to Daily Management when used by a leadership team.
Expect the Daily Management process to evolve over time
Teams that have started with this process do evolve better and have more efficient ways of completing these meetings. As the team matures and builds capability, the duration of the meeting will be adjusted to what the team and work area need. It is not uncommon to start with 15-minute meeting but try to find quicker ways to achieve the same outcome in less than a third of the time.
This article was written by Alex Gibbs, Lean Trainer and Mentor. You can watch a video of Alex talking about Lean below.
At LeanTeams, we have a great deal of experience in supporting businesses in introducing Lean. Daily Management is one of a few key tenants of a successful deployment. We can help you find the system that is most appropriate to your enterprise, one that drives a better customer experience with high levels of efficiency and productivity by building your team member’s skill and the will to succeed.
We hope you enjoyed reading about Getting Started with Team Based Lean Daily Management. If you’re interested in reading more about Lean, take a look at Fuelling Growth : Creating a Culture of Continuous Improvement and How to Reduce Errors and Increase Quality of Work.
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