KaiNexus: Continuous Improvement, Leadership, and More

We recently had an interesting conversation with a newly minted director of quality improvement in a regional hospital. The position is new, but she has years of experience implementing continuous quality improvement (CQI) programs. The first thing she realized that she needed was CQI software to support the initiative. She made the request for budget to the CFO who told her that fortunately, the hospital already had project management software and that she was free to use it to manage improvement projects.

It may seem odd for a company that sells process improvement software to declare that not every company is ready to buy it. We do like partnering with new customers, after all. But the thing is, we only want happy customers. And happy customers are organizations that have successful process improvement software rollouts, good adoption of the solution, and measurable impacts on key business metrics as a result.

Organizations all over the world, in almost every industry, are turning to continuous improvement software to solve their most challenging issues. The most successful of these Lean organizations are aware that they need 5 elements to succeed in creating an improvement culture: bottom-up improvement, top-down improvement, strategy deployment, coaching, and visual management. That sounds like a lot to manage in excel at all at once, doesn’t it? So how do these Lean organizations pull it off?

Most people will only be involved in a Lean software implementation once or maybe a few times. We help companies with improvement software deployment every single day. Because we have been around the block many times, we have seen what leads to success and which mistakes should be avoided at all costs. We are happy to share what we’ve learned.

A growing number of construction firms are embracing the Lean methodology that emphasizes maximizing value for the customer while minimizing waste. The approach is simple and attractive in an industry where budgets, timeframes, and safety are all critical. But the Lean approach to project delivery is very different than traditional construction methods, making proper execution of the philosophy and techniques difficult to implement.

Mark Graban and Greg Jacobson, MD from KaiNexus answer questions in this video webinar: How can you implement Lean without scaring people with change and Japanese concepts and language? When will Management realize that the employee on the front line is closest to the issue and concerns and usually has be best ideas? Any tips on Lean and Kaizen as applied to parenting? We're interested in KaiNexus, but still trying to figure out if it's best to start with a physical board for the team and then use KaiNexus for tracking and sharing... or should we do everything in KaiNexus? Is it necessary to make improvement mandatory? To set a goal for how many projects people should be involved in? It seems like people won't participate unless we make it mandatory.

There is a strong trend in organizations these days to apply improvement tools and techniques that originated on the manufacturing floor to other parts of the organization and other industries entirely. That is because the basis of these tools and the approach are not really related to manufacturing at all. Rather, they are about control, organizational alignment, and efficiency. What organization does not need more of those things?

When you started on your improvement journey, you may not realize it, but you actually already made a technology decision. I bet you probably managed the work in spreadsheets and bulletin boards - these are technology! Now that you are starting to engage more people in it, though, I bet that you are finding that it is hard to get the visibility you need to spread that culture efficiently and make sure nothing falls through the cracks. Your technology needs an upgrade. You could theoretically use Dropbox and a folder structure to manage critical components of your business - say, for example, your medical records or accounting transactions - but I promise you, no one is putting their organizations at risk like that. They use software built specifically for the business issue you are dealing with. It continues to baffle me that organizations do not take improvement software as seriously as they take their accounting platform or their medical records system.

Communication and organization are the keys to the success of Hoshin Kanri because managing long-term strategy, short-term goals, and daily improvement activities can be a huge challenge, especially if you have many people involved in the effort. For years, organizations have relied on tools such as complicated spreadsheets, email threads, file sharing systems, and even paper boards to track and manage the strategy, but these passive systems often fail to provide the support necessary to make lasting progress. They are time-consuming, rarely kept up-to-date, and ineffective at driving activity.

What are the traits you look for when you hire new employees? If you are like most people, you look for employees that are intelligent, capable, problem solvers who take the initiative to get stuff done and do it well. It is a shame that these same people who got hired for their mental faculties then so commonly get relegated to being a pawn in the corporate machine, with no autonomy or power to improve the business through their work.