Moon Shot Lens test (Panasonic 45-200 micro 4/3 zoom lens)

I just got a new Zoom lens for my Olympus E-PL1 (micro four thirds format camera). its the Panasonic 45-200 f/4.0-5.6. The first thing I did was take a couple of shots of the moon. The first shot is the maximum magnification for the kit lens that came with the camera (a 14-45 mm lens). The second shot is maximum magnification from the new Panasonic zoom. The third image is the second shot cropped down.

I'm already pleased with this lens. I recommend it for any Micro four thirds camera owners.

The moon taken at the maximum magnification of the 14-42 mm kit lens

Moon taken at maximum magnification of 45-200 mm panasonic zoom lens

The second photo cropped down. Not bad at all.

Very good sentences about College Cost.

Very good Sentences:

Since 1978, cost of living has gone up three-fold. Medical costs, much to the horror of everyone in Congress, has gone up six-fold. And college education has gone up a whopping tenfold. This is beyond the housing bubble, the stock market bubble, any bubble you can think of.

The entire article is worth a read: http://huff.to/hTRHAV

Get off your Butt: The Super Flexible Stand Up Desk

It turns out that sitting on your bum all day is bad for your health, and it seems like everyone is writing about stand-up desks. Well Count me in. I was already growing tired all the sitting I was doing so I decided to build my own stand up desk. Fifty bucks later, and here is what I ended up with:

See and download the full gallery on posterous

The keyboard tray is from Ikea and everything else from Lowes. The build design is based on the FlexyTable. This design is extremely adjustable, I was able to set the table keyboard and monitors at the exact perfect height with the help of an ergonomics expert that works at my hospital. Here is a close up of where the leg meets the table. 

I've been using it for three months and love it. I recommend it, and if you want one of your own, feel free to steal my design.

 

 

Kaizen using Baby Shoes

Mike over at Got Boondoggle posted an example of kaizen using tennis balls on the bottom of chair legs to prevent the floor from getting scuffed up. My favorite ice cream shop uses the same technique, but with baby shoes. Clever.

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Everybody wants your meetings to stop sucking.

A few weeks ago I posted my thoughts on improving meetings. Apparently I'm not the only on who has had to suffer through some bad meetings lately. Every blogger I know is writing on the same topic.

Michael Hyatt is taking some of the complexity out of his organization and has this to say:

The number of meetings. We should be very careful about setting up routine meetings. Once they are in place, they are hard to eliminate—they seem to take on a life of their own. Every once in a while (perhaps annually) it is good to re-evaluate every standing meeting and ask five questions:

“What is the intended outcome of this meeting?”
“Are all the people who attend this meeting really necessary to achieve this outcome?
“Can we meet less frequently and still achieve this outcome?”
“Can we meet for a shorter period of time and still achieve this outcome?”
“Is there some way to accomplish this outcome without a regular meeting?”

Seth Godin has 9 great ideas for shaking up your meetings. Here are a couple:

8. Create a public space (either a big piece of poster board or a simple online page) that allows attendees to rate meetings and their organizers on a scale of 1 to 5 in terms of usefulness. Just a simple box where everyone can write a number. Watch what happens.

9. If you're not adding value to a meeting, leave. You can always read the summary later.

Bert Decker lists 10 steps to make your meetings better. My favorites:

1. Cut the meetings you have in half. Cut the time of the meetings that remain in half. Unproductive talk and time will fill the space of long meetings - The Peter Principle in action.

4. Be controversial. Not outlandish, but stimulate robust dialogue. The reason most meetings are boring is because most meetings are boring. As the meeting leader, it's up to you to make it interesting.

All of their advice is a little different, but with a consistent theme: don't have one if you don't need to. And if you do, have an agenda, keep it short and lively, and send out minutes promptly.

Together we can make the world a better place. Or at least meetings.

What are meetings like in your organization?

Photo: kjarrett

You're not the only one that hates brainstorming

Is brainstorming ever not a soul sucking waste of time? Richard Huntington doesn't think so. He says (via Lateral Thinking):

I hate brainstorms.

I hate running them, I hate contributing to them and I hate using them to solve problems.

They waste huge amounts of time and talent and they are no f***ing good at delivering decent ideas.

Okay then. It turns out there is research to back this up. Most of the research shows that groups individuals working alone will generate more ideas that those working together. But as Bob Sutton points out this research is flawed.

The academic research on brainstorming -- the laboratory studies that are described as showing it doesn't work -- are rigorous but irrelevant. They compare how many ideas individuals working alone versus versus working in groups can utter into a microphone in the same stretch of time. This is irrelevant and silly, as the practical norm that people take turns talking seems to explain why people are more productive alone -- so this research rules out LISTENING TO OTHERS as productive behavior. Also, the way those studies are done makes it impossible for people to build on each others' ideas -- because building on the ideas of others is impossible when you work alone.

So is Brainstorming worth it? I can be if it's done right. Companies Like Pixar and IDEO have created some of the most imaginative films and products using brainstorming as a part of their process. According to Tom Kelly the General Manager of IDEO:

Brainstorming is practically a religion at IDEO, one we practice nearly every day. Though brainstorms themselves are often playful, brainstorming as a tool - as a skill - is taken quite seriously. And in a company without many rules, we have a very firm idea about what constitutes a brainstorm and how it should be organised.

So what makes a good brainstorming session? Honestly I still struggle with it. But here are seven secrets to good brainstorming and six sure fire ways to kill a brainstorm.

How do you brainstorm?

photo by: Khilwat

What to put in your slides. (Part 2)

In part 1 I talked about some things commonly found on PowerPoint slides that need to come off. Among those are logos and standard templates. Here are a few tips to keep your presentations looking professional and related to you brand without resorting to logos and the standard templates.

Create a custom color palette. You may not have your logo on the slides, but you can still incorporate your brand into your presentation material. Create a color palette based on your logo or on a photo representative of your industry. My favorite tool for this is Kuler. Just upload an image and let Kuler do its thing. You can tell it whether you want bold, colorful, or subdued colors.

Write down the RGB values for each color. You can enter those values into PowerPoint's color picker when selecting color for text, shapes, or lines. These will then show up as choices the next time you need to change a color. I create a color palette slide at the end of the deck to use as reference while creating the presentation. An example of this is below.

Once you have a palette use it in a consistent way for text, shapes, charts, etc.

Use Grids to create a flexible, yet consistent layout. In Slide:ology, Nancy Duarte recommends using grids to maintain consistency in the placing of elements from one slide to the next. Check out Adam's example of a 4 x 4 grid system. Try a 5 x 5 grid or 4 x 5 grid. A 3 x 3 grid is great for using to the rule of thirds. Here is an example of a Fibonacci grid with the color swatches for a corporate color palette.

From Jeromy Timmer

For their work with Adobe, Duarte used a 5 x 5 grid on a white background with a corporate branded color palette. Check it out here.



Use photographs. People remember pictures better than words. This is called the picture superiority effect. In addition, people remember concepts better when they hear about it and see it (but reading does not count as seeing). Since this is a live presentation, you have the hearing part covered. Use pictures and images to reinforce the

The clip art built into MS Office is overused and cliched. Avoid it. Instead, use professional looking photographs from stock image sites such as iStockPhoto.com or Flickr. You can find very creative and striking images from the stock photo sites. But if you need shots of people exhibiting genuine emotion you'll have better luck with Flickr Creative Commons photos.

Use fewer words. As a rule: If you are going to say it, then it does not to be on the slide. This will keep you from reading the slide, which bores the audience to death and reduces comprehension. Use keywords and headlines for the audience to key in on. But avoid complete sentences (other than the headline, or pertinent quotes).

Those tips will get you started toward better looking presentations. for more advice on Presentation design read the following.

Presentation Zen

Speaking about Presenting

Slide:ology Blog

Extreme Presentation

What to take off your slides. (Part 1)

Why is there so much junk on PowerPoint slides?

Olivia at Speaking about Presenting asks the question, "what would you like to see in PowerPoint slide design in 2009?" This is aimed at an audience already on the better presentation bandwagon. But I still see a lot of basic mistakes in PowerPoint design. So before talking about what I'd like to see in PowerPoint slide design is a discussion of what needs to come off of PowerPoint slides.

There is a direct correlation between the amount of unnecessary junk on the slides and the boredom of the audience. This isn't cause and effect, they both result from the presenter not really understanding the needs of the audience.

So take some time to figure what the audience needs are and get rid of the following elements from your slides.

Company Logo. The audience does not need a reminder of whom you work for on every slide, especially if you all work for the same company.

Animated Logo. One company I worked for had an animated logo in the top left corner of their standard template. Every 30 seconds the logo would spin around and explode in a fountain of color. I can only imagine what went though the mind of the audience, "I think I might buy . . . whoooaaa look at the pretty colors . . . what was I thinking?"

Page numbers. Page numbers are for books and documents. There is absolutely no reason the audience needs to know that a particular slide is number 42 of 168. Unless you plan on giving the audience a printed version of the presentation as a document . But don't do that either. If you must, print it with the page numbers and present it without.

Document control information. I've seen copyright notices, trademarks, file names and revision numbers (e.g. Company.Training.Pres ver. 2.00.1.15) appear in slide footers more than once. Again, this might be appropriate if you print them (please don't), but take them off your presentation. The audience does not need to see these.

Standard Templates. All of the standard Microsoft PowerPoint templates stink. Horribly. The ones that aren't completely awful are so overused that they've become a cliche. Don't use any of them. It is possible to get a well designed, thoughtful and useful template. But be careful, some designers think putting an animated logo on every slide is a good idea.

Bullet Points. Don't get me started on bullet points.

All of these things have one thing in common: they don't serve the needs of the audience. Once you take all of that junk out of your presentation, you can keep a professional, brand oriented appearance using the tips in part 2.

Photo: Phoenixdailyphoto

Lean: less complicated than you think.

What does it mean to practice Lean? Jon over at Gemba Penta Rei has the most elegant description of Lean I've seen:

1. Set the rules
2. Follow the rules
3. Improve the rules

Jon describes this as being "sensible and simple, to the point of being stunning." And I agree. In fact, I will be incorporating a tweaked version of this in all of my lean training and six sigma training from this point forward. Tweaked, to remove the baggage laden word "rules" and incorporate the lean term "standard." so it becomes:

1. Set the Standard
2. Follow the Standard
3. Improve the standard

All of the other lean tools (5S, Kanba, Visual controls, etc) are simply means to do one of those three things. If you are applying lean to your work area it is important to understand where you need to start.

Set the standard

This means to set the standard work. You can not improve if everybody doing the same job does it differently. Work with the people who actually do the job to develop a current best practice, and make that the standard process everybody follows. This is not just for front line workers, this applies to the CEO as well.

Follow the standard

Many managers assure me they have standard work procedures in place, but when pressed admit that it is only followed half the time. In this case we need to work on following the standard. This does not mean cracking the whip, or yelling at people, or holding other people accountable.

Find out why people are not following the standard and use lean tools to correct the process. Make the process as simple as possible and use signs and visual cues to make the next steps obvious. Build in visual controls to so that deviations from the standard are apparent. Once everyone is following the standard work, you will be able to see what is hard to do or doesn't work well and you can move on to improving the standard.

The best predictor of future success is current success. If you are able to manage a mediocre process, you will be able to manage an improved process. Likewise, if you can't manage an existing process, an improved one will likely revert to chaos before too long.

Improve the standard

As when setting the standard, get your front line people involved in improving the standard work. They know exactly where the current process falls short and they'll probably have good ideas for improving it. Make this a part of the culture instead of something that happens in big projects infrequently. Encourage employees to make suggestions any time, evaluate those suggestions with the group, and follow up with her whether you implement the suggestion or not. Facilitating this improvement cycle should be part of a manager's standard work.

This is the foundation of any improvement strategy whether it is lean, six sigma, TQM or the Red X. Improvement is impossible without managing those three things.

So what do you need to work on in your area? Setting standards, following standards, or improving the standards?

Photo: William Couch

How to have effective meetings

As I mentioned in my post on standard work for leadership, meetings at most companies are a mess.  There are too many, they don't accomplish enough, and people dread going to them.  And if they are not productive, they are a giant money pit.  Run Payscale's Meeting Miser for a few meetings and ask yourself if you got your money's worth (or if you are really brave, ask the team).

It doesn't have to be that way.  Here are six tips to improve meetings, and thereby improve your life.

1. Don't have a meeting

Meetings should always involve making decisions or doing genuine work that cannot be done individually.  Ask yourself "why am I having this meeting?"  If the answer contains the words "informational" or "get everyone on the same page" chances are you don't need a meeting.  Other forms of communication (email, phone calls, or conversation) will work much better and take less time.

Before you schedule a meeting make sure that you know what decisions need to be made or work needs to get done, and that a meeting is the best venue for doing that.

2. Send a simple agenda

I know.  Everybody says this, but nobody does it.  Most people have opened up MS Word's Agenda Wizard at least once , filled in all of the blanks, picked a template, saved it to their hard drive, and sent it as an attachment to the team, only to find out that most people didn't read it.  I think this is the main reason most people don't write agendas: its too complicated and nobody reads it anyway.

Keep it simple.  Write the agenda in the body of the email so that folks don't have to open up an attachment to read it, and make it short.  Many of the things normally on an agenda (attendees, time, place, etc) are already included in appointments sent with Outlook or Groupwise.  You don't need to repeat those. So just get to the point of the meeting: 

"we are meeting to finalize the 2009 budget.  We need to decide on X, Y, and Z.  Nancy will email the latest TPS report, John is bringing the bagels"  

3. Start on time

If you are missing people at the start time, start anyway.  They'll be on time to the next meeting.  Skip ahead in the agenda if you need to.  

4. Keep the meeting to 50 Minutes or less

I am amazed at the number people who schedule back to back meetings that last sixty minutes. After the first meeting they run late for the rest of the day.  This is nuts.  By high school most people have figured out that you need five to ten minutes to get to the next class.  This rule also applies to meetings.  

For some reason the default meeting length in Outlook is thirty minutes and Groupwise is sixty minutes.  Have your IT department change this to 50 minutes for the whole organization.  If they refuse, at least change it for yourself. Actually this might be difficult in Outlook, but to do it in Groupwise go to Tools > Options > Date & Time > Default appointment length.  If you are using Outlook you may have to just set each appointment to fifty minutes when you make them.  

5. The HIPPO should keep his mouth shut

Bob Sutton has a great article about the leadership problems at GM.  They have a culture where the top guy at any given meeting talks the most.  Instead of the team actually doing their job, they end up echoing the highest paid person's opinion (HIPPO).  Read Bob's article to find out why this is so poisonous.  The HIPPO in the room should spend most of their time listening and moderating the conversation.  If you are the HIPPO and you need to do all the talking, just send a memo.  You don't need a meeting for that.

  

6. Send out minutes the same day

If your organization requires that you take detailed minutes of everything said at the meeting, make sure you have somebody there that can do that.  But most of the time all you really need is a record of what decisions were made, what activities need to get done, and who is responsible for them.  Spend the last minute of the meeting reviewing these and making sure everyone commits getting there part done (one minute minutes).  Then email these minutes to the team the same day.  If you don't do this somebody will drop the ball, guaranteed.

The good news is that all of this advice makes scheduling and having meetings simpler (and more effective).  If you are in a leadership position make this the standard by which your organization conducts meetings.  If you are not in a leadership position then lead by example.  Plan and run your own meetings well and forward this article to anybody that needs to read it.

Photo: indexed

The most loaded word in the english language.

Accountability. Never has there been a word uttered so often by so many with so little idea of what it really means.

I've worked with many managers to improve their processes. In the early stages of these projects, when we've identified the extent of how bad the problem is, the manager will often turn to me and say, "Isn't this really just a matter of holding people accountable?" or "they need to be more accountable." This is just finger pointing, not accountability. Accountability should always be about yourself not somebody else. Miki Saxon writes about this in the context of the current political environment, but it applies in all organizations.

In QBQ John Miller writes that accountability is the ability to ask the right questions. Examples of wrong questions are:

• Who dropped the ball?
• Who's going to solve this problem?
• When is somebody going to train me?
• Who made them king?

Better questions focus on personal accountability:

• How can I help?
• How can I become a part of the solution?
• What can I do to develop myself?
• What can I do to lead.

Instead of focusing on why something happened or who is at fault, ask questions with these qualities:

• Start with how or what. Why and who are usually counter-productive
• Contain an "I". In the end that is the only person you can actually control
• Focus on action.

These are questions that you can actually answer yourself, and they bring about a mindset and action that will improve things. This is how leaders approach personal accountability.

Photo by a2gemma

What I learned from my root canal.

I hate dentists. I hate making the appointments, taking work off to see them, paying them, laying in the chair, the bright light, the pokes, the prods, the paper bib, the drool, trying to answer questions with fingers in my mouth, and flossing (because it reminds me of some dentist telling me to floss more). This is completely irrational because my loathing actually stems from my experience with an orthodontist (not a dentist), but imagine my annoyance at needing a root canal.

Some people have not had the pleasure of having a root canal, like my friend Jessica. Our conversation on the subject went something like this:

Jessica: What's a root canal?
Me: You know how you and most normal people go to the dentist every six months.
J:Yeah
Me: And every once in a while you have a cavity, but it never really hurt and the dentist fills it, and its no big deal.
J: Yeah
Me: Well if you don't see the dentist often enough the cavity goes all the way to the root, where the nerves and blood supply to the tooth get infected and it hurts like hell.
J: Oh.
Me: so they have to drill out the center of the tooth and pull out all of the nerves and blood supply in the root of the tooth, fill it all back in, and put a crown on it. It's a big pain in the butt and really expensive.
J: So let me get this straight. You have to have all of this work done mainly because you didn't see the dentist every six months?
Me: Right.
J: And its dentists you hate?

Ouch.

So here is what I learned from my root canal:

• My problems are my own fault.
• Seeing the dentist every six months is not a scam
• My dentist has every right to talk to me like I'm an idiot.
  
• When the dentist says "don't chew on the right side," don't chew on the right side.

This is just one of many occasions where I suffered great pain to learn a simple lesson. What have you learned the hard way? (tell me in the comments.)

By the way, If you need a Dentist in Kalamazoo, Dr. Allen and Dr. Wilson are both terrific.

Photo: Betsssssy

What to say when you screw up.

Everybody screws up occasionally. When it happens the apology is important. There is only one right way to say I'm sorry and it should go something like this: "I'm sorry for what I did. I know it caused you pain. I promise it will never happen again." Notice that there is no "but." Anything that begins, "I'm sorry, but..." is not an apology.

Earlier this week one of the web services we use was performing horribly. Nobody from our company complained immediately, some of us even assumed the problem was on our end. Today, however we got the following note form the vendor (the name of the service has been changed.)

The last two days have been rough. HAL9000's performance was terrible. I would like to explain what happened, what we did to fix the problem, and how we are making sure that it doesn't happen again. Your time is valuable, and spending minutes waiting for every HAL9000 operation (or getting kicked out after entering data) is plain not good.

First, the slowdown was a performance issue not a security one. Our database was stuck in a logic loop. The root of the problem was the monthly snapshot that HAL9000 makes of each clients data for use in comparative reporting. The December 1st snapshot was the first one to include the new 2009 regulatory standards. We made a mistake in the computer code, so that the database made a full snapshot with EACH new standard. Needless to say, that's a lot of snapshots. The size of that request (measured in Terabytes, not megabytes or gigabytes) caused a cascade of safety features to kick-in. Our tech team has spent the past two days resetting those safety features and modifying the snapshot code. Short-term problem resolved.

To make sure this does not happen again, we have done two things: first we have upgrade the diagnostic systems that monitor our data base from industry standard to cutting edge, and second we have engaged a consulting company to analyze and optimize our database structure. While this performance issue was the first for HAL9000 in 2.5 years, we agree that even once is too much.

Thank you for your understanding, and we are sorry for the inconvenience this has caused. If we can help enter data that has accumulated over the past days, please forward them to your account manager. As always, contact me directly if you would like more gory tech details.

Sincerely,
Jon

That is how you write an apology. It begins with an acknowledgment that they screwed up, it goes on to acknowledge the pain it causes, and it assures us that they have put in procedures to prevent this from happening again. While it does go into some technical detail, it does so only to provide context for the assurances that it won't happen again. The technical stuff doesn't become an excuse. That's important. And they never use the word "but".

So the next time you screw up, remember these three things:

• I'm sorry
• I know it caused you pain
• It won't happen again

Try it at work and at home.

Photo: Half Chinese

Malcolm Gladwell on why we squander talent

Poptech has a video of Malcolm Gladwell discussing some of the ideas in his new book Outliers. (Thanks, Garr !) He discusses how we are very poor at capitalizing on human potential, and what the barriers are to getting all people to achieve their best.





There are barriers to human capitalization common to most business.

Lack of Diversity

There is a lot of research showing that diverse organizations outperform non-diverse ones (thanks, Penelope ). Why is this? Think about it from the negative. The opposite of diversity is promoting and hiring people who are just like ourselves: similar background, experience, and ways of thinking about things. Non-diverse businesses miss out on a wider range of perspective and creativity. It is natural to gravitate to people who our like us, but if we don't keep that tendency in check we squander the potential of many or our employees, and the organization suffers as a result.

Arrogance

The best ideas often come from the people doing the work. It makes sense that folks who actually interact with the customer or assemble the product might have some good ideas about improving the customer experience or the manufacturing process. But organizations with rigid hierarchies only listen to the engineers and MBAs, completely squandering the intelligence and creativity of the folks closest to the customer. The best business listen to emplyees at all levels of the org chart.


What are some of the barriers to human capitalization in your organization?

Best time management advice ever.

Everyone has seen Randy Pausch's inspirational Last Lecture. Shortly after that he gave a much more practical (and just as inspirational) lecture on time management. Watch the video and implement at least one of his recommendations. See more of Randy's videos here.


I don't do everything he suggests, but I can personally attest to:

• Multiple monitors. Don't be a scrooge, they're cheap and they really do improve productivity.
• Batching email. It takes much more time to respond to dozens of emails as they come in than it does to go through them all at once. Bonus Tip: Apply GTD workflow to you email processing, and empty your inbox every day.
  
• Covey's four quadrants: Prioritize your to-do list according to Covey's four quadrants. Make time for those things that are important but not urgent (quadrant 2).

The power of the last two items becomes apparent when I don't do them for a while: my stress level goes way up. If you are a software developer, make your first million by building a productivity suite that incorporates email batching and covey's four quadrants. I know I'd buy it.

Do you practice any of these techniques? Leave a comment and let me know how it works for you.

Who knew Honda made Tofu?

When people think of Lean they often think of the tools associated with it: 5S, kanban, error proofing, visual controls, etc. But the tools alone are not what lean is. Lean is basically finding creative solutions to management problems (or engineering problems).

John at Curious Cat Management has a great example of creative problem solving from honda:

"Of all the bizarre subsidiaries that big companies can find themselves with, Harmony Agricultural Products, founded and owned by Honda Motor, is one of the strangest. This small company near Marysville, Ohio produces soybeans for tofu. Soybeans? Honda couldn't brook the sight of the shipping containers that brought parts from Japan to its nearby auto factories returning empty. So Harmony now ships 33,000 pounds of soybeans to Japan." - Forbes

That's just elegant. In addition Honda has never suffered layoffs or an unprofitable year. Hmmm.

Photo- Jwinfred

Standard work is for everyone: even the CEO

Continuous Improvement starts and ends with standard work. It is much easier to improve a process when everyone works the same way. And the only way to maintain the gains of an improved process is to standardize it. This is fundamental for front line workers, but is often missing from the leadership of many "Lean" organizations. In order to improve how you lead or manage you have to standardize the processes you use to lead and manage. The CEO is not exempt. Here are a few ways that the folks in the C-suite can apply standard work.

Safety
The employee safety rate in healthcare (my industry) is abysmal. The injury rate is three times that of most manufacturing industries. Nurses and techs tend to focus on patient care and safety while ignoring their own personal safety. This is not an accident, it is a direct result of the way that most hospitals are led from the very top, and up there employee safety takes a back seat to patient safety and care.

Leading a safe organization starts with making safety a priotity. Do this by putting safety first, literally.

• Make it the first item on the agenda for leadership and operational meeting.
  
• Start every day by reviewing and following up on injuries from the previous day.
  
• Make your recordable injury rate the first item on you operational dashboard.
  

Insist that your directors and managers follow this example and put safety first in their daily meetings and interactions with frontline employees. Putting safety first at the very top creates a culture of safety. It is not the only thing need to improve safety, but without it nothing else matters.

Go to the Gemba
In Lean, gemba means "the place where the work is done." We talk about "going to the gemba" to see what is actually happening with our employees and customers. This is also called management by walking around. When the CEO or or VPs go to where the work is done and talk to front line employees amazing things happen. Trust starts to build. The leadership will understand what challenges are employees face in getting their work done in a way that they wouldn't otherwise.

This is something that makes sense to most leaders, but is still done much too infrequently. How can that change? make it part of standard work.

• Schedule part of every day to visit some area of the organization and talk with the employees.
  
• This should not be a formal meeting, just observe the work being done and talk with them about any challenges or frustrations they have. (And remind them to work safely.)
  
• Make this a part of your routine, and set the expectation that VPs, directors, and managers make it a part of their routine.

Metrics
If it is important, measure it everyday. Enterprise software makes it easy (or at least possible) to track financial metrics by the day, and most executives do this already. But financial metrics are often too far removed from the processes we manage to be a real guide. Identify what process have the most impact to meeting your goals, find a way to measure them, and track those metrics on at least a daily basis.

Every organization I've worked at has had at least some metrics that they looked at monthly, and caused hysteria when the numbers were out of line. By the time the metric is actually reported it was too late to investigate the problem, much less fix it. If a process is important enough to report monthly, then it is important enough to measure daily. This is how you make sure that you stay on top of those things that are important, not just urgent.

• Inventory: Have your supply chain manager or each department manager report inventory days on hand on a daily basis.
• Staffing: If you flex your staff based on demand, measure your staffing ratios on a daily basis and tweak your flexing process.
• Clinical results: Any clinical activities that have a standard process associated with them should be measured daily. examples include: medication nomograms, glycemic control, and time from lab order to result reported.

Standardize the process of getting these metrics so that you know that the right people are also looking at the numbers. The IT department shouldn't just write a report that for the CEO that does this automatically. The process owners need to be responsible for collecting this data and reporting it up.

Meetings
Meetings at most companies are a mess. There are too many of them getting too little done with too many of the wrong people attending them. Leadership can go a long way toward fixing this by setting some standards.

• Agendas: Every meeting needs an agenda. Short, simple, and in the body of the email (instead of an attachement) is best. Give your people the option of declining any meeting that doesn't have one.
• Time: Keep them to fifty minutes. By ending ten minutes before the hour folks can get to their next meeting on time. We should have learned this in high school. See if your IT folks can make this the default in your calendar software.
  
• Publish the decisions made and next actions the same day.

The further you get from actually serving the customer or making your product the easier it is to get distracted from what is really important in your organization. Use standard work to keep the important things first.

Photo: indexed

Improve Your Dessert

This blog is mostly about process improvement, but it is generally about everything improvement, and today it is about dessert improvement. Here it goes: throw out your Cool Whip right now! Wired magazine has a very informative article on what is actually in Cool Whip and guess what, cream is nowhere to be found. In fact the ingredients are pretty disgusting. Go ahead, Read it.

Now I understand using concoctions like this for the sake of convenience, but the truth is that making real whipped cream is so cheap and easy there is almost no reason not to. Here's how you do it :

• Buy heavy whipping cream
• put in mixing bowl with some sugar (and maybe a dash of vanilla)
  
• whip with electric blender
• Its done when it looks and feels like whipped cream.
  

if you are too lazy to do that, use Reddi Whip instead of Cool Whip. At least the first ingredient on the Reddi Whip can is actually cream.

Photo by 91RS

Correcting Errors Early: Source checks, Self checks, and Successive Checks

The Lean Healthcare Exchange has an excellent article about source checks, self checks and successive checks. This concept needs to be incorporated into standard work procedures in healthcare whenever other error-proofing methods are not in place. And that would be most of the time.

The need for these checks stem from the fact that there is so much opportunity in healthcare to cause great harm from simple mistakes: fat fingering a medication order in the EMR, transposing two numbers in a lab result or medication dosage, or confusing left and right when performing a procedure on a patient. Smart people can easily make these kinds of mistakes. Source, self, and successive checks prevent these errors from harming the patient.

The classic example of this is the surgical time-out. The nurses, surgeon, and anesthesiologist stop what they are doing and review the procedure and location on the consent. This successive check ensures that they are doing what the patient and physician intend.

Unfortunately this assumes that everything leading up to the written consent is correct. The recent example of a surgeon removing the wrong kidney from a patient illustrates the problem with this. It turns out the wrong kidney was reported as cancerous in the medical record. Lets look at how source checks, self checks, and successive checks can help prevent this type of error.

• The radiologist performs a self-check to ensure the film is not backward before reading it.
• The radiologist reads the film again (source check) just prior to reporting the result.
• The physician double checks the radiology report before ordering the surgery (successive check)
• The physician looks at the film himself before ordering the surgery (source check)
• After ordering surgery the physician compares what he just ordered with the radiological report (self check)
• The surgical team checks the consent before starting surgery (successive check – this is standard practice, and is what the team did)
• The surgical team checks the original film before starting surgery (source check – this is the new procedure instituted at the hospital in question)

All of this checking and re-checking seems like wasted activity. But eliminating the defect early on is much less costly than letting the defect get to the customer. This is true in manufacturing, and it is even truer in healthcare.

Real Reference Material vs Back Breaking Binders of Slideuments

In most six sigma training the students get several big thick binders filled with the PowerPoint slides used in class. This is a huge waste: a waste of trees, a waste energy carrying the things back to the office, and a waste of shelf space. The problem is that good presentation materials make horrible documents and good documents make horrible slides. When you try to do both you get slideuments, and slideuments stink.

So when I had the opportunity to develop Green Belt training from scratch I committed to making the PowerPoint slides support my message without being the message, and to giving my students decent reference material instead of useless slideuments. Since the organization is saving perhaps a quarter million a year by doing the training in house instead of hiring one of the big consultant firms, we can spend a few bucks on books.

Here is a list of the books I use in my Six Sigma Green Belt training.

Getting Things Done by David Allen

A very good book on personal productivity, it also has a chapter on project planning that I used as a basis for project management training material. I think Everyone should read this book.

The Six Sigma Handbook by Thomas Pyzdek

A big fat reference book. I don't think I like this any more than Implementing Six Sigma by Forrest Breyfogle (another big fat reference book I've used for many years). But it is cheaper.

Improving Healthcare Quality and Cost with Six Sigma

A nice application of the tools to healthcare. I've gotten good feedback on the book from the Green Belt candidates.

Measuring Quality Improvement in Healthcare: A guide to statistical process control applications

An excellent book on using SPC in healthcare. It has a lot of examples, many of which were directly applicable to processes the students work with every day. Chapter 5 has almost everything a Green Belt needs to know about SPC. In fact, this is probably the best book on SPC for non-statisticians that I've seen.

The Lean Healthcare Pocket Guide XL - Tools for the Elimination of Waste in Hospitals, Clinics and Other Healthcare Facilities
This has nice, concise description of most Lean tools. The XL version is much easier to read than the pocket size version.

Rath & Strong's Guide to Minitab: Release 15

I gave the students this guide as an alternative to writing my own guide to Minitab. I may have to write one myself anyway.