0111. Mastering the Game of Operational Excellence and Continuous Improvement.

- Discover actionable strategies for success, including data-driven decisions and effective communication.
- Learn why operational excellence involves refining resources, not just adding them.
- Unlock the power of performance metrics and turning concerns into quantifiable data.
- Explore making lasting workflow adjustments and the value of reeducation over punishment.
- Celebrate the unsung heroes of process improvement and their impact on corporate goals.
- Foster a culture of innovation and efficiency through open communication and collaboration.
- Join the journey to becoming lean by design with us.

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Transcript

Oscar Gonzalez: 0:00

Oh, you guys did some improvement. That's adorable, you know it's like. Well, the whole idea is to make this place function better. Welcome to Lean by Design Podcast. I'm your host, Oscar Gonzalez, alongside my co-host, Lawrence Wong. We are former MBA classmates turned business partners with over 25 years of combined experience in life sciences, from R&D through manufacturing. Our experiences have shed light into the complex, ever-changing challenges experienced by this industry and many others. We took a risk quit our six-figure paying jobs in Boston Biotech and Pharma to start Sigma Lab Consulting. Journey with us as we explore the relationship between people and workflow design, the goal to learn, inspire and deliver practical tips to navigate these ever-changing challenges. Stick with us and learn to work smarter, not harder, and be lean by design. Consider this A recent McKinsey survey highlighted that 70% of process improvement initiatives fail to meet their objectives.

Oscar Gonzalez: 1:12

Imagine being part of a team that spends months perfecting new workflows, only to find out, much like three out of four companies, you're not getting the results you expected. We're picturing a manufacturing firm investing thousands in new quality assurance procedures only to see error rates remain unchanged. These are not mere hypotheticals, but real scenarios faced by businesses every day. This alarming statistic will be the centerpiece for our discussion today. Together, we'll explore insights and walk through the pitfalls and best practices, emphasizing the need for tangible data, open communication and the critical role of leadership in ensuring success, from organizations reverting back to old habits, despite introducing new processes, to teams overlooking critical tasks, leading to bottlenecks. We're here to dissect it all, so grab your headphones and get ready for a deep dive into what truly makes project improvement tick. Welcome back to another episode of Lean by Design Podcast. I'm your host, Oscar Gonzalez, here with my co-host, co-founder, mentor, friend Lawrence Wong. Hello, oh yeah that's right.

Oscar Gonzalez: 2:31

We've been hanging out enough that we can start to create some superlatives for each other, so I'm okay with that. We work together. We were in class together and now we're recording podcasts together. So, constant, trying to be a little bit of a ying and yang as we build this organization and really bring knowledge and educate folks out there that things don't always have to be the way that they are. We have opportunities to make adjustments and make improvements. What I want to talk about today has to do with that next step.

Oscar Gonzalez: 3:13

We go into process improvement initiatives, whether or not it's structured or just something that we're doing internally as a function of our corporate goals or our functional goals. But what do we do after that? A lot of times, we often will find that we set those process improvement initiatives up, just like you mentioned before, where you set up a new process and then, a month later, you have a backlog of stuff already. Why is that happening? Why is it that every time we set something up, we pat ourselves on the back and then we go on to the next thing like there's nothing new for us to do here? I'm here to say that there's a lot of work that's left to be done. Lawrence, you're as familiar as anyone that in process improvement it's a cycle. You have to continue to improve those processes and really refine what you're doing. Not only that, you have to have some level of consistency.

Oscar Gonzalez: 4:21

What we fail to realize as we're putting together this process improvement initiative is that there is some culture and some habits that need to form. A lot of the issues that we experience usually come from some bad habit. Where we go in, we get trained and oh yeah, you don't have to worry about that stuff. All we do is just send it to this email address and they take care of it. I can't tell you how often I've had those sort of directives thinking so I just send this off and you leave off all these different spaces that we're supposed to fill out just because you deem that it's not necessary. How does the other group that's on the receiving end of this form or document, et cetera, how are they going to feel about us half-assing the work here?

Oscar Gonzalez: 5:17

There's a fair bit of work that needs to happen to change the habits that have been created within the organization, to change the mindset of that function, of that department, into one that is hey, let's do it right, let's do it right the first time and then we don't get this cycle of having to redo work, because that kills this man. The amount of rework that's being done on a daily basis is astounding Not in any research. You're going to have a lot of testing and trials and research, so of course you're going to be doing repeats and this didn't work out. That didn't work out. I think there are spaces that we can be a little bit more knowledgeable about what we're doing and why we're doing it, and really putting the best practices, rather than focused on how fast we're getting something done or how quick the data is coming or oh, it's the end of the day and I got a little bit lazy. Well, now you're a little bit lazy is adding another two days of work. That wasn't originally planned.

Lawrence Wong: 6:31

I think so what you brought up before, where you improve something and then somehow a month later, everything falls off the wagon and everything goes back to square one. I think there are probably a thousand reasons why this happens. Some thoughts that come to mind are well, maybe one, the process that you were improving wasn't that important, so maybe people were paying attention to it. I think two, maybe there's nobody owning the actual process. I think when a team builds something together, they have more, I would say, skin in the game because they've designed this process and they have kind of more effort that they've put in so they care about it more.

Lawrence Wong: 7:12

I think the other point too is where does this align with the overall organization's goals? Because you don't want a team of people just working on things that they improve and then management doesn't recognize that. I find that that happens a lot where there was a lot of pain being felt by some of the end users that are doing something daily and they'll improve something, but then management doesn't really acknowledge it or maybe they don't see it. It quickly gets, I wouldn't say the word is ignored, but there's more priority placed on other things. I think those three things that I mentioned come to mind when I hear process improvement initiatives failing after people spend so much time on it.

Oscar Gonzalez: 8:05

Yeah, it's almost like oh, you guys did some improvement, that's adorable. You know it's like well, the whole idea is to make this place function better and I think one of the things that we tend to ignore about those process improvement initiatives is that people stick around when they find that a company is actively working to improve upon the processes they have. I've had friends of mine that you know coworkers at the time that have left organizations because they said this company doesn't have their ish together. You know how does that feel as an organization to see that your turnover is so high. And, oh, we have the best managers, the best you know scientists, the best you know people from this group, from that group, but they're such a struggle because to do the day to day work it's hard. Oh, I don't want to do this, but why not? Well, because I can't find the folder that I'm supposed to do it in the PowerPoint slide I'm supposed to add it in when this is supposed to be due.

Oscar Gonzalez: 9:05

You know, the list goes on and on and on. It's these processes that don't really exist, and you know these processes are designed to give you almost like a step-by-step approach and develop that consistency in that organization. I mean that consistency is what we want. That consistency is what drives growth. It's not speed. Speed is going to probably lead to a bunch of errors. I mean, think about anything that goes super fast. Usually something bad happens later.

Lawrence Wong: 9:33

So you know, in the wrong direction, right? That's the other point too.

Oscar Gonzalez: 9:36

That's the other thing too. That's the other thing too. You know, take, these processes are built for a certain reason, they're designed for a certain reason and you know, I think it's important and I'll say critical for folks to recognize that. And you know, come into organizations and think to themselves what can be done. And you know, and once that's done, how do we carry it out? You know, I to your point about having leadership input and leadership acknowledgement.

Oscar Gonzalez: 10:09

I just received an email yesterday from the top leadership from one of my, one of my clients, and it was from the COO and everybody else, all of the all of the C level leaders jumped in on applauding the efforts, on applauding the work and it's not done. You know that that type of thing is not done. And you know, we had, I've seen in my experience of okay, well, what do we do next? And I've even seen from senior folks well, we didn't really think of how we want to measure this. Okay, okay, so time out. We have gone three, four months into process improvement initiative. There's kicking and screaming on changing any of the processes. You know, eventually we were able to corral that and and determine okay, these are the things that we're going to accomplish and then at the end of those three months, we have no idea how to determine if it worked or not. Come on, I mean, you know this is. You know, do we want to go To go to work and struggle to do the things that we are being paid to do simply because there's bad process or because we don't feel that we have time in our day to numerically compute how many times an error happens?

Oscar Gonzalez: 11:38

You know, let's say that you have to fill out a documentation to onboard a new consultant, but everybody is constantly uploading that document incorrectly. And then, well, you know, then the blame goes. Well, this team took so long to review because, you know, I don't even know why, and so we haven't had a chance to onboard. You know X person. Well, there was errors in there. And until we start to create the metrics and the numbers and recording of of errors and inconsistencies, you're never going to improve that process. All you're doing is having an initiative that allows you to create a new workflow, that allows you to understand a little bit further that cycle of work within the organization, that department, et cetera, and that's it, like it's just a documentation, if you don't plan to measure that change and understand where you know, because every, every function, every process is usually a combination of many processes inside of it. Now, the only way that that whole thing works is if the full process is fluid.

Oscar Gonzalez: 13:01

So as you start to create these errors, you go where did this error take place? How often is this error taking place over there? And I'm speaking from an operational standpoint, from a facility standpoint. For yourself, it's the same idea. You don't look at a whole, you know a whole system full of tanks and pipes and valves and et cetera, and go oh, this whole system stinks. No, you try to find where that error happened and you fix that error. In the same way, when you're looking at you know operations, when you're looking at processes that organizations have, internal processes, you know how we communicate to vendors, how we onboard people, how we onboard. You know alliances, how we work with those alliances. These are all many processes that occur within operations.

Oscar Gonzalez: 13:51

We have to take a look back and go okay, well, we need to measure this to know if the errors are coming in still, where are they happening? Why? Because you want to direct your training, you want to direct your learning, you want to direct your messaging to that specific space. You know it's sort of like having, you know, having an exam in high school multiple choice and everybody gets number 21 wrong. You're not going to go through every single one that pretty much everybody got right. You're going to focus on the one that people got wrong and go.

Oscar Gonzalez: 14:32

Let's talk about this. This is what's happening. Was the question worded badly, aka? Was your process, was that part of your process not clear, or are we just negligent? You know what's causing us to miss that specific question so much in this course. What is the cause of that in our process? Why is that part of our process? And we tend to not look at that and it doesn't have to be anything, you know, super intense. I just posted a LinkedIn message, really about that. Take a post-it note, take a post-it note pad right next to your desk.

Oscar Gonzalez: 15:15

If this is your day-to-day work, every time something comes into your flow from somebody else or from another department or function related to this particular operations process and it's incorrectly filled out, it was incorrectly managed, it was whatever it is. Mark a tick, just a nice little tick. You know. One, two, three, four, cross it five. One, two, three, four, cross it five, you know. Next thing, you know, hey, this week we had 10 instances. You know, I heard this from leadership before, from senior employees going yeah, I just, you know, I don't know that we have the time. Are you kidding me? We don't have the time to mark off that something, that an error is occurring, yet we want to improve the process. We're just going to come back and say it didn't work. Yeah, that's not true.

Lawrence Wong: 16:12

It's ironic because people will complain about, oh, this doesn't work, but yet they won't take the time to actually measure, like, why it's not working. And you know to your point about measuring performance. I think there's kind of two scenarios where I see, you know, you have some existing process in place, right, and you improve the process, so there should be a new, I would say, baseline performance. And then so you're looking at, like, what your target is and you're looking at how you're doing which is your baseline, and hopefully whatever you've done has gotten you over to whatever that target is. So you need to be consistently measuring it, otherwise, what did we just spend all this time doing, right, otherwise it was for nothing.

Lawrence Wong: 16:54

I think there's another scenario where I maybe it's more common in the area that we work in is there just simply are not processes and metrics designed around these like very, I would say, informal things that people are doing. And so when you design the process right, once you set that up, it's okay to say that this doesn't work, but you have to have some sort of target right, like, are you expecting, you know, 100 entries with no error? And once you start to see the errors, like, you need to record that so that you can take the next step in improving it.

Oscar Gonzalez: 17:28

If you just set up the process more, than a feeling, more than a feeling, and that actually came up where they said, well, it's more of a feeling. Okay, I just my eyes got so big just thinking okay, in the future, if you want to reach out to your senior leadership and say, oh, I need more people, I need a new piece of equipment, I need this is the data that you've been looking for to go to leadership and say, look how many entries we had last month. You know, in IT we had 72. And I only have two people. I only have one person and myself on staff. We can't respond to this load with the number of people. I need more people, rather than just like, oh, there's just, there's just so much, there's just so much to do. Like, how can you tangibly take that and expect to, you know, receive $200,000 toward a new employee because there's too much stuff to do? Look at the process, look at what you know, find out what those errors are, like that that you know our go to I don't know what it is our go to is I want more people, I want another machine. And I look at it like, well, you're operating right now like a 40% success rate. Like that's probably not something that someone would want to spend another million dollars on a machine, to add to that Like it's not going to get better because you're getting a new person or a new machine.

Oscar Gonzalez: 19:07

It gets better because you design a new process and you educate yourself, you educate the teams, and this idea of just like well, it feels this way. You have to remove all biases, because feelings are all biased. You can have 10 solidly executed experiments or you know process. You know that process that you've been working on, 10 executed flawlessly, and then you get one. They catch you on the wrong day, catches you on a day when it's raining and you stepped in a mud puddle and you forgot your coffee and it just sets you through the roof.

Oscar Gonzalez: 19:44

Guess what that one instance Now trumps all the times that you got things right and you might go oh my gosh, I can't. This is just too much like. It drives me insane. And the reality of it is it doesn't really occur. But because it feels this way, we have to get out of this, this, this incessant desire to say we feel this way. Therefore, we should have a new person a new, you know, without having any kind of supporting data to suggest why would you need an extra person. What you know it's oh, there's so much work to do. We need more people to review this and this and this. Well, why are there so many people to review that when, if you look over the last year, the entries have not increased, which means the errors are increasing, which means there's a lack of education, which means that people are jumping outside the process, and these are things that we actually can directly influence.

Lawrence Wong: 20:42

We'll be right back after a quick break. Is your team constantly fighting fires? Are you struggling with productivity and think it's due to inefficiency in your operations? These challenges can be difficult to measure, but not impossible. Sigma Lab Consulting can help you define and prioritize the issues that are negatively impacting your team. We partner with stakeholders to redesign workflows so you can work more efficiently. Find out more at SigmaLabConsultingcom.

Lawrence Wong: 21:14

There's a lot of, I would say.

Lawrence Wong: 21:15

You know, I'm going to speak to it from like a management perspective, where they they're looking at a limited amount of time, money and resources. And if you're going to come to some steering committee and say, hey, we need more resources to do this for this process, and you can demonstrate with data that, yes, this is, you know, a solution for the process to make it better, that's one thing. But, to your point, if you're just going to come and say, you know that one instance out of the hundred times that we ran it and you're going to complain about that one time, there's no justification to be able to, you know, allocate the resources and time to alleviating that, because it's clearly not. It's a one off, it's not a routine occurrence, right, right, and you know, from your perspective. What are some good practices then? Right, like, once, a continuous improvement initiative is in place. What do you suggest practitioners look at a month out, six months out, a year out, like what are those, those key considerations you would look at once. Something is in place.

Oscar Gonzalez: 22:21

Take small bites. Process improvement is not something that happens in two months and it's done. As we mentioned before, it's an iterative process. There's a lot to it and sometimes there's a lot to a process. We'll start taking small bites. Start taking you know.

Oscar Gonzalez: 22:37

You already mentioned that you have a feeling. Okay, I'm assuming you also have a feeling of where things tend to become issues. It's probably not in the very beginning, it's probably not at the very end. It might be just before this portion or just before this happens. Either we lack a signature or we lack numbers, or we lack you know. Whatever the case is, you have some, a semblance of what is a problem within that workflow. So I would say, take a couple of each of those you know. If you have a 20 step process, look at step four. You know 11, 13 and 20. And you know, over the course of the next couple of weeks, have those steps in a number. You know 10, 14, etc. Etc. And just next to it, how many errors are happening.

Oscar Gonzalez: 23:33

This is going to inform you of where either the education for this part of the process was not strong enough or the there was some miscommunication. The documentation was not had too much open space to really guide people. You know, sometimes when we're creating these, these, these work instructions or SOPs, we want them to be broad, to cover a large sweep of items, but we have to make sure that they're also executable. If you know, we want to reference this one work instruction for a plethora of items. Perhaps keep it, you know, to a low number so that folks actually know. Okay, when I go in here, this is the document that I need to look at. If we run this SOP or these work instructions with a broad stroke, sometimes that broad flexibility becomes more of like a question in the mind of somebody that's trying to execute that workflow. You know just like is this related to me? I'm not entirely sure. You know, it's a little bit confusing, but again, it's the education. You know, take those small bites and that, and that's something that you would see three to six months.

Oscar Gonzalez: 24:49

You know, one of the things that we tried to do was understand what is the. How often are new requests coming into the system? Couldn't get an answer. How often are we creating errors? Couldn't get an answer. But the answer I did get was this person, this person, this person, they don't know what to do. Well, there's also no work instructions. So the fact that everybody else is, you know for lack of a better words they're, they're knocking this, you know, out of the park, or at least they're doing an acceptable job. You know, on the on the process, it's either luck or somebody that trained them has a really good idea of how to run the process. Everybody else, they might be new.

Oscar Gonzalez: 25:40

So you can't just say like, oh, this person, this person, this person you know, I heard it, I heard it best from from a good friend, ryan Dumblap with conflict, ish, don't look at the person, look at the process. Why has this been so challenging? And then, what is the reeducation been we're so accustomed to, when someone asks us a question or someone does something incorrectly, we don't educate back. I have a two year old son. When something is done incorrectly, I try to educate him Instead of taking it out of his hand, telling him I something needs to be done. And, and you know, I try to get him like oh, okay, okay, buddy, like you know, is that where you thought that that goes? Okay, this is trash, so let's go ahead and throw this in the trash. Can you know? Not like hey, don't throw that on the floor. Why are you throwing and then grabbing it and throwing it in a trash? Can Guess what? He didn't learn anything.

Oscar Gonzalez: 26:40

So, just like that, we have to. We have to assume that people are coming into our organization with a very top level idea of how the processes work in this organization. It's up to us to actually go. Oh, you know, that's. I saw what you did there. Like, just, you know, here's our work instruction. You know I, you know, ask you to look again at steps 14 through 16.

Oscar Gonzalez: 27:08

So it's really important for us to have blah, blah, blah before this. That's all I'm asking to do. I'm not asking you to set up a whole 30 minute training and read, but educate folks. And the more that you have this conversation, the more that you have this kind of pushing out of the education, of this new workflow etc. The more people start to get aligned to it. And not only that, the more people find themselves self sufficient. So when they're filling it out again, they're like, oh wait, she sent me. I did that one thing wrong. Let me go grab the work instruction again and see what I'm doing, because otherwise, if you're not, if you're just blatantly ignoring all that stuff, that that person's probably not going to be in the organization long. But you know again this is just to reiterate we can't always respond with like I'm trying to think of the right word for it. We need to respond with more educating.

Oscar Gonzalez: 28:01

You know, when people ask me, hey, Oscar, I don't know where to find this or I don't know where this was, I will direct them usually to a dashboard and say this is a great place to start for a lot of the questions that you have. And if you look over here and here, you can find links to blah, blah, blah and a report down under here. Now, the next time they have some kind of similar question, they know where to at least start and I can stop getting the question, Oscar, where do I go? And it's more of like hey, I got here, but I can't seem to find this exact work instruction Okay, maybe the nomenclature was a little off, but working on those small bits and small chunks.

Oscar Gonzalez: 28:41

And again, it's a little bit of not just culture change, but it's also changing our habits. So instead of just trying to get rid of somebody right away, spend the two minutes to educate them so that they're not coming back to you to ask the same question Because you never educated them the first time. You just took it and said I'll just deal with it. Yeah, I think that's not gonna teach anybody anything.

Lawrence Wong: 29:06

Education pieces is crucial, and it's not just like a one-way street where you're just communicating. This is the way that you do things. I think you're also giving a chance to somebody who's in it to respond back with oh, I'm having this issue. Maybe it's something that we need to update on the work instruction. Maybe it's some step in the process that needs to get updated. But having just the quantitative measures there and not having the qualitative measures there, I think needs to be addressed as well. You can have metrics where it shows a certain number and your success rate, but I think the other thing you should be doing is creating a safe space for people to give that feedback so you can take a look at those comments and make further improvements, because I think with those two pieces together, then you get a more realistic picture of okay, well, where should we focus next if we want to improve other aspects of our operation?

Oscar Gonzalez: 29:59

That's exactly right. I mean, we're looking at here, can we follow the process and what is the quality of the output? It's super crucial for us to understand and also distinguish between those two things, because, on the one hand, you don't want to get things that are pushed through the system. Everyone filled everything out super fast but the system has advanced and now the quality or the information that's put in there is incorrect. Yes, information is put in there, but it's actually incorrect. Now you got to start thinking okay, is there a step that we've skipped? That is allowing our quality to go down?

Oscar Gonzalez: 30:41

Because it's interesting, it's almost like a catch-22 with folks when they look at big processes that go oh my gosh, this takes so long. You know what takes longer getting halfway through and having something that was supposed to be done in the very beginning and not being done, and now you got to start all over. I love the phrase I don't know who coined it, but the fact that we never have enough time to do things right the first time, somehow we find time to do it again, to redo it. Yeah, it blows my mind, because when you have the information available to you on how to proceed and we ignore those things we're creating rework which does not push.

Oscar Gonzalez: 31:29

It reminds me of rowing in crew. I did crew at VCU when I was there for a little bit back in early 2010s. Around there, and if you're not working together and you're constantly slamming the ore and slamming forward, you're basically checking the boat. So instead of the boat going in one direction smoothly because people are rowing, because people are trying to go so fast, their body weight pushes the boat backwards. So you'll see a boat kind of doing this and to me, that's what that rework is doing. It's like progress, stop, progress, stop, progress, stop.

Lawrence Wong: 32:14

Right, it's not smooth and you're having to go through a lot more friction that you necessarily need to.

Lawrence Wong: 32:22

So, to your point about collecting the feedback and holding the trainings and making the process measurable, who, at the end of the day, a month out, six months out, a year out, who is responsible for making those improvements once you've completed the project? Because I've seen this handled a number of ways, where you have a team put together to do the continuous improvement and then everybody scatters after so and so, gets their belt and now they're like, okay, this is not my project anymore, and then they vanish, and then somebody else has to kind of deal with some of the, I would say, maintenance issues that go on with making sure the process is in line with what you want to do. But also these incremental improvements that can be done, and they're not necessarily project level improvements, or maybe, hey, just update this document, or maybe let's place this sample on this end of the room and not the other one. But who's responsibility is it to own some of these incremental improvements at the end of the day?

Oscar Gonzalez: 33:26

All right. So this is a hot take of years of experience. Okay, I'm gonna give you a little nugget here. That's gonna sound very political. Everybody, now everybody has a different role to play. If you're doing this process and you're finding that it's clunky, you're finding that it's difficult, you don't have logins, you don't have all these types of issues that constantly come up it is up to you to voice them to the person. If you have an apartment and your apartment's in shambles, do you keep it all in and then, when you move out, just be like, oh yeah, that apartment sucks, so I decided to leave? No, you, actually you say something to your landlord. I think the people closest to it are gonna be those within that given function and the line manager. That line manager needs to be able to support this, because the question that comes to you is are you, do you want your function to be more productive as a function of external stakeholders external from your group, internal to the organization, external stakeholders air-proofing that?

Lawrence Wong: 34:43

We'll be right back after a quick break.

Oscar Gonzalez: 34:46

Do you suspect your life sciences company could do things more efficiently? Maybe you're seeing costly workflow issues or maybe the work feels more difficult to perform than necessary, affecting team around. If any of this resonates, reach out to the team at Sigma Lab Consulting for a free consultation on how we can develop and launch a custom solution fit for your team. Our consultants will build a custom workflow solution for your team to reach peak efficiency. Find out more at wwwSigmaLabConsultingcom.

Oscar Gonzalez: 35:18

You know this is the whole idea. You know this is where you know Sigma Lab Consulting came from. It's the idea of using Lean Six Sigma principles, and one of those at the very end of that is control. You improve, but then you need to control it. How consistent are we in getting this through the gate, through the system? And the less speed bumps that you have, the smoother that ride is gonna be. Over and over again. Then, once you receive that consistency, once you achieve that consistency, you know a year out then you start to look okay, we need to understand.

Oscar Gonzalez: 35:52

Now that we're consistent, where can we start to bring in those timelines? Is there anywhere? Now understand, we may not always have the availability to bring in timelines by 20, 30, 40%. It's like saying hey, we know you have a grocery budget. I want you to cut it in half. Well, you have to actually eat. So, no matter what, there's gonna be a minimum that you actually have to buy, and there may be a minimum to a process.

Oscar Gonzalez: 36:23

Well, once we do this, we have a contract with that organization that they have a five-day turnaround. You can't change anything about that because that's their process. You can't change a CRO's process. That is what their process is. You can maybe negotiate hey, can you stick us in here or speed it up a little bit, take us out of the queue? But there's certain things internally that you can have, whether it's everything to be turned in by Thursday to be available for Monday, one of those things. But we have to constantly it's looking at the initiative itself, looking at where that process improvement was. It's gonna be a dialogue between the ground troops and the manager.

Oscar Gonzalez: 37:09

The thing that we tend to do in these meetings that we go with our managers is we give updates. That's what we do, is we give updates and where that's fine. A lot of those updates and stuff sit in documents, they sit in PowerPoints, they sit in Excel files, they sit in this other database system. All that stuff's available, but also your work is a direct result of all these other folks that are in that organization. You should probably talk about how has it been? How is it feeling? Are there a lot of errors? And this conversation is within that particular function.

Oscar Gonzalez: 37:47

And you're right, usually there's a facilitator that is putting together the process improvement initiative. That's very close to it from a process standpoint, very unbiased. They don't do the work, they just understand processes and how to corral folks and how to bring that in, similar to the things that we do. Don't let them go so far, you know. Keep them somewhat aligned, keep them somewhat in the loop of what's happening, so that you guys can have a conversation and determine what's gonna be the next step. Well, why don't we have a training that focuses just on this?

Oscar Gonzalez: 38:22

And you guys mentioned that there's a couple of key offenders. Let's make sure that they're a part of the meeting, but we extend the invitation to everybody because we're finding that this is the most common error and even though some folks maybe did not cause that error, they may have only had one opportunity. So in that situation, you know. So it's important to include a lot of folks that have been involved in that process to say, hey, we're finding a lot of errors here and you don't make it a dialogue, you don't have to teach it like it's a lecture, you know, just raise your hand.

Oscar Gonzalez: 38:57

How has anybody, you know, dealt with that particular situation? Oh, last time I did that. I contacted such and such and she gave me a form that allowed me to kind of, you know, jump steps because of blah, blah, blah. You know, talk to your people, talk to the talk to your function and figure out, you know, what is the right, what is the right next step to solve these issues and make sure that we're educating folks, you know. So they are ultimately the ones that are responsible, but again, it's everybody that has any stakeholder that has worked with that function or with that initiative. Should it be open to freely speak on challenges, successes and the like?

Lawrence Wong: 39:45

Yeah, I think you know, in our conversation we've kind of gone over looking at a process, from evaluating the metrics to make sure that we're the improvement is actually on track. You know this training piece, which is really about educating people that are new to the process or maybe unaware of some of the changes. We've talked about sharing responsibility for the ownership of the process and not having all of that responsibility fall on one person that may or may not be part of the organization and you know some set amount of time. I also think you know we haven't talked about this yet, but you know, to kind of wrap up the conversation, what sort of incentives do you think need to be in place for all of these? I would say good practices to continue.

Lawrence Wong: 40:36

You know, from a management perspective, I feel like if you have a group of process owners that are, you know, going above and beyond and collecting the feedback and improving their teams, there should be some spotlight on these individuals and these teams to say, hey, you guys are doing a, you know, awesome job with this and hey, if there's any other areas within your operation that you feel is in need of some improvement, we are now gonna allocate the time, money and resources to that, and so you're creating this incentive for them to kind of seek out these problems and to kind of solve them. What are your thoughts on? You know the incentive structure there and what have you seen in the past to kind of not only sustain the current improvement but to carry that momentum forward to maybe another initiative that might need the same level of support?

Oscar Gonzalez: 41:32

I've seen more mature organizations actually include that into their corporate goals. That their corporate goals is a level of improvement because the organization as a whole has a mission to improve the processes that they have internal and really tweak. You know, there's things that we're doing every day, every single day. We have 15, 20 different processes that we're executing on in order to get our work done. So what are these things that are tedious, manual, prone to error. You know, look at those things and, to your point, having leadership, acknowledge and to highlight those things, shoot, I don't know, have a pizza party like they did in kindergarten. A lot of times when things went well, we had a pizza party. So you know, there's a lot of different things that we could do and I think it's really up to the organization and the way that their culture is establishing the praise for identifying core processes in the organization and what that improvement looked like, and not only that, it gives you a sense of accomplishment, you know, I think that being able to do work every day and not, you know, do the face palm or, you know, just kind of rolling the eyes because you got this other thing that you know, this other email came in with a submission that was just completely wrong. Or you know I'm frustrated because you know no one's doing this right. I don't know how many times I've heard that and nothing was done about it ever. And you know it's. So.

Oscar Gonzalez: 43:12

Bring in these types of incentive programs. You know whether it's acknowledgement, or, you know, almost like a competition, like, hey, find your worst, yeah, your compensation. You know, and ideally, ideally, you're gonna feel it here personally. You're gonna feel weight off your shoulders because you're not coming into the office with a stack full of stuff that is error and it stops you from doing the work that you need to actually push that to the next stage. Oh, I can't do it because this is all wrong. You know, hopefully it gives a sense of accomplishment and a sense of desire to do that again.

Oscar Gonzalez: 43:56

You know the that's what's been, I think, special for me about process improvement initiatives is that the seeing a light bulb moment in people seeing wide eyes, that, wow, this was so easy, I think. I can't remember, I think, one of the first videos I posted on LinkedIn, I talked about work not having to be hard. If the field that you're in is difficult to nature, that's one thing, but to actually do your job and having just the actions of doing your job in an office setting let's just talk about it as an office setting and it's difficult. Like, doesn't that make you want to scratch your head and go why is something so basic or so standard, incredibly complicated or incredibly difficult to successfully initiate all the way through? Why aren't we having those questions answered? Why aren't we questioning it? We go into organizations and we go well, this is how they do it. That's fine, but that might have been a process that was implemented years ago, if not a decade ago. Yeah, I think let's feel compelled to have that question to answer that.

Lawrence Wong: 45:12

Yeah, I think having, like you said, a pizza party or some sort of incentive where you reward people for going about making things better right. So there's a level of, I would say, accomplishment that you get from not only just improving the way that you do things, but if you're able to influence how other people do things right, and I think there's a level of ownership that you have. And when you go about these changes, I also think that there's a lot of opportunity, right. If you are looking to, let's say, gain more responsibility, this is one of the most obvious opportunities for, like driving change management, demonstrating to the leadership. Hey, I can, like take on this responsibility and I can influence change, and that's exactly what they're looking for in somebody who's trying to make things better and it opens so many more doors for you. I mean, we can probably go on and on about like chances that we've taken in improving things that have opened these doors for us.

Oscar Gonzalez: 46:18

Yeah, absolutely that was. I think that's a fantastic way to end this conversation is really, you're coming up and you're young and you're curious and you want to make an impact. It doesn't have to be necessarily directly related to some scientific discovery. If you're able to find better methods that are more consistent, and whether it's creating the process improvement or just discovering those methods you know and being able to execute on those things, people are watching and you're exactly right. We are direct examples of when you improve a process or improve a system or improve a workflow. People see that and they notice it.

Oscar Gonzalez: 47:05

And then you do another one and they go hey, this person's got some chops, I like what they're doing and I like what they're doing for the organization. And look at how well people are communicating with them about all these issues. You know it's not about being a listening ear to everybody's troubles. It's about thinking back and when you have an influence on something, a direct influence on some workflow, being able to say that's a great suggestion, let me surface that Like I can see where that works. Or you know what? Yeah, I did see that we're not seeing that. It happens very often, so I don't know that that's something that we would do an initiative on right away, but we are paying attention to it. At least being able to say something like that it creates a different feel for the employees that are there. I mean, let's stop this resentment with other functions that happens in every organization and start looking at the process instead of the people as the cause for that ish. I'm gonna steal from Ryan again. He's gonna kill me.

Lawrence Wong: 48:14

There's something to be said about being able to push change throughout your organization to the extent that, like management will recognize that, and then they'll start pulling you in to things that they want you to work on.

Oscar Gonzalez: 48:27

Right, because you have a different perspective. Yeah, absolutely. Well, you know what I appreciate the time. This was great conversation and I hope our listeners get something from it too. You know, it's really important to make sure that we're questioning what we're doing and the manner at which we're doing it. We spend a majority of our early adult lives through middle adulthood, through middle age, middle age working, and if we can't make it better for us or for the people around us, it's not gonna be fun. It's gonna be a long, long road. I will say that, and there's a lot of opportunity out there Lot of opportunity to be seen, lot of opportunity to be heard, lot of opportunity to move up quickly when you're executing on things like that.

Lawrence Wong: 49:16

Absolutely.

Oscar Gonzalez: 49:21

In today's discussion, we unraveled some crucial insights on process improvement. First and foremost, the importance of relying on concrete data rather than mere feelings or isolated incidents cannot be stressed enough. It's also become evident that the foundation of any successful process lies in clear work instructions and SOPs. Without them, confusion and errors are inevitable. We also highlighted the critical role of ongoing dialogue between teams and managers. Open communication fosters understanding and collaboration, enabling teams to adjust challenges and share successes.

Oscar Gonzalez: 49:58

On the topic of collaboration, the shared responsibility of process ownership emerges as a vital component. Everyone, from leadership to the front lines, has a part to play in ensuring successful process improvement. Lastly, integrating these initiatives into broader corporate goals and recognizing teams for their efforts creates a culture of commitment and motivation. These key takeaways underscore the multifaceted nature of process improvement and the strategies required for success and to become lean by design. Thanks for listening. Don't forget to leave us a review, like and share on Spotify, apple and Google Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, and if you're interested in being on the show or becoming a sponsor, send us a message at Lean by Design, at SigmaLabConsultingcom. Work harder before you Work smarter before you work harder. Oh my gosh, look at me.