Lean Business Specialists - Nestadt Consulting

My scars and lessons learned. How to achieve successful change?

How to achieve successful change ? Once Again !!
Experience counts. It counts even more when the stakes are high, and the costs of project failure are prohibitive. Experience is about picking up the subtle clues in the meeting, reading the nuances on the shopfloor, and knowing when things simply don't add up.

In this article, I reflect on my experience of the critical prerequisites for (lean) project success. You will increase the probability of Lean success by attending to the following:

Identify a leader / project champion, ideally an influential insider, who is passionate, capable and can (and wants to) make things happen.

Ensure the project has senior management support and understanding - change will require investment, rustle feathers, and challenge paradigms

Communicate details of the project continuously so everyone (& at least those affected) is in the know. Communication should be formal and informal - in the passage ways & meeting rooms, from shopfloor to senior executives.

Establish a clearly understood goal, & a sense of urgency for achieving it Ideally there needs to be a 'context for change'. Dire situations, back against the wall, fighting for survival, a critical executive management priority, and an understanding of what achieving / or not achieving that goal means to every single person.

Don't just measure, measure the right things. Understand the numbers, track root causes & link these to the financials. Make the numbers transparent and easily understood. Share the numbers.

Get specialist resources in not only if you are floundering (usually too late!), but from the start. Experience counts (a small plug!). After 19 years of Lean/JIT implementation experience one has an acute understanding of the change process, likely challenges and ways of working through difficulties.

Ensure the management team, and the consulting / outside support team are in fact on the SAME team, have the same goals, timelines and priorities. (and in fact have a stake in the same outcome)

Ensure that the change process is holistic and addresses people, commercial/strategic, and process improvement/ practices. We, as mostly engineers knew this and did our best with the people issues, but never enough - however only in 1996 brought on board specialist Organisation Dynamics experts to work in our projects, with fantastic results.

Plan to invest significantly in TRAINING, but ensure the 'learning' is connected to the 'doing' and quickly translate lessons into actions. We really learn by doing.

Sustain the programme over a long period (years); Ensure there is a mechanism to get ownership and interest at all levels. Our experience is that the longer management support and sustain the programme, the more likely it will be able to stand on its own two feet