Summary

In this conversation, I speak with Damien Lacey, a process evangelist with extensive experience in process improvement. They discuss the importance of understanding and documenting processes, the metrics that matter in process improvement, and how organizations can effectively implement changes. Damien shares insights on the challenges of process improvement, including the need for executive buy-in, the significance of customer expectations, and the common pitfalls organizations face. The discussion emphasizes the value of a structured approach to process management and the role of culture in driving continuous improvement.

Takeaways

• Process improvement is about organizing work to improve efficiency.
• Metrics such as speed, cost, and quality are key to process improvement.
• Understanding customer expectations is crucial for effective process management.
• Documenting processes is essential for improvement and standardization.
• Engaging employees in process improvement fosters a culture of efficiency.
• Choosing the right problems to solve can lead to quick wins in process improvement.
• Executive buy-in is critical for successful process initiatives.
• Organizations must balance the need for improvement with the realities of daily operations.
• The J-curve effect can be mitigated by choosing manageable projects.
• Service industries can apply process improvement principles effectively.

Sound bites

"This is potentially transformative."

"It's all about improving metrics."

"Speed is becoming more important."

Keywords

process improvement, efficiency, productivity, process management, operational excellence, customer expectations, documentation, metrics, service industry, cross-departmental collaboration

Damien Lacey is the Founder of OE Partners and has spent 20 years in Australia and Japan helping teams transform business processes. This session will teach you how to enable profitable growth through "step-change" improvements in productivity for your business

Damien's Facebook page

@oepartners on Instagram

Damien's Website

@OE_Partners on X

Damien on YouTube

Foreign.

To the Knowledge Stack podcast. My name is Jason. Thank you for joining me. Today's episode is a conversation with Damian Lacy. Damien is a 20 year veteran of process management.

He helps organizations become more efficient and more profitable. Damian and I had a great conversation about process improvement.

Damian shared his insights on the challenges of process improvement and how to get executive buy in what are common obstacles that organizations face when undertaking a process improvement challenge. And Damian comes with a lot of really good information and he comes with some credentials.

Damian spent years at Toyota Motor in Japan and those of you that have any familiarity with process and process improvement will know that that is going to the source. It's, it's getting the word directly from the experts.

So our conversation really focused on the value of taking a structured approach to process management and how that initiative can help drive not only the strategic vision, but also the the culture within an. So it's an outstanding topic that I'm sure both Damian and I can talk about for another hour or so. But I think we hit on all the important points.

It's a great episode. I hope you enjoy it like always. Please like subscribe, comment do all of those things that I always ask you to do.

And as always, I hope you enjoy this episode and I can't wait to bring you some more content just like this. Again, thanks and have a great day. I'm speaking with Damian Lacy. Damian is a process evangelist.

He's got 20 years of making processes more efficient, making organizations more profitable, more efficient and more scalable.

And I thought it would be outstanding to talk with Damian about process improvement in general and how organizations can leverage the magic of process documentation and improvement to become more efficient. So welcome Damian. It's great to have you.

Thank you, Jason. Great to be here. Appreciate the conversation.

Absolutely. Let's start with, give us a little bit about your background.

You know, I read a little bit about you and you know, some interesting you, you are on the other side of the globe. You are in Australia, I believe.

That's right, in Melbourne, Australia, down the south on the other side. So a bit of background, mechanical engineering, technical background, worked in the automotive industry, spent my initial formative years.

You're working in parts manufacturer Robert Bosch, part of their team to roll out productivity improvement methods across, across one of their plants and you know, kind of got hooked on the idea of process improvement from that point forward. Just seeing the impact that these ideas can make to really boost efficiency, a boost productivity.

A lot of the ideas are based on the Toyota production system. Okay. And had a lot of traction obviously you'd expect in the, in the automotive industry. And I wanted to learn from the source, so to speak.

I also studied Japanese which, which helped started doing more and more work with Japanese customers in Nissan. And then I, I, I, I joined Toyota.

I joined the, the product development team here in Australia and was shipped off to Japan for a few years which is pretty normal for, for brainwashing.

So, so yeah, it's been a few years in Toyota head office in Japan and lots of cost reduction, lots of process improvement and came back into Australia. In Australia the automotive industry pretty much wound up. Government decided in its wisdom to withdraw all support for the automotive industry.

It died on the vine. And so yeah, then started.

Are there any Australian automobile manufacturers?

There are a few remaining ones but they're very niche.

There are some large truck and bus automotive manufacturing because you know, that doesn't lend itself to you know, shipping around fully assembled buses, you know, in a global supply chain that doesn't really work. And there's some sort of smaller custom models made in the, in the U.S. which are you know, left hand drive and they get changed to right hand drive.

So that's kind of small bit of manufacturing related too.

So but there used to be, there used to be Ford, General Motors, Toyota, Nissan, all with automotive assembly plants in, in Australia and that's, that's gone. So yeah, then decided to, to start consulting to Australian, Australian businesses, predominantly Australia, New Zealand, South Asia.

On, on productivity. Basically we, it's our mission to help businesses become more productive and, and that's sort of, that's what we do.

I'm, I'm curious. This is in no way related to process improvement. But you, you say it's not uncommon for Australians to go to Japan for training and things like that.

I'm curious about language. So in the US our, you know, our bordering countries are predominantly Hispanic.

So Spanish is kind of the secondary language is Australian or New Zealand. I don't know what the New Zealanders, I don't know what their language is. Is it comparable in Australia?

Well, so we're, you know, we're pretty much a first world, you know, English speaking, democratic, capitalist country like all the rest. So it's not dissimilar to Canada, not dissimilar to, to, to England and, and, and European countries.

So it's, it's great country, great place to live. Language definitely English. You know, we've got a lot of immigrants kind of like, kind of like the US in that regard.

It's a country of immigration, but definitely English Is the first, is the first.

Language, is the languages offered in your, you know, your primary or secondary schools. Is, is Japanese. This, this kind of the popular second language for, for Americans, Spanish, you know, because it's so useful here.

Yeah, not really. I would say it's. It's a bit of a mixed bag in terms of languages. There's no one that sort of.

You've got a lot of immigrants from Italy and, you know, European countries. So, you know, you get French and Italian, you get Chinese, you get Japanese, Indonesian. So it's a real mixed bag. There's no one above all the others.

I was just curious about that. So. Yep. So let's, let's talk about the process improvement. So let's, let's, I guess let's start off with just a basic definition. Process management.

You mentioned you spent some time at Toyota and those that have even a casual relationship to process improvement.

Process management knows that from manufacturing, specifically from Toyota, is essentially the birthplace of modern process improvement and all of the methodologies that come along with that. And it's easy to see because it's a very linear assembly line sort of environment.

So it lends itself to process improvement and sort of improving each individual step along the way to get a collective improvement in the overall process.

That is true.

So what really is process improvement and process review and process documentation at the heart of it? What are we trying to do when we're talking about process improvement?

Yeah, I mean, it's a great, good question to start with. It's basically looking at work, looking at activity and trying to organize it better with the goal of improving one of a small few of metrics.

You're either trying to do it faster, you're trying to do it for cheaper, you're trying to do it with better quality, or do it more reliably. Let's say it's a great cheap product and quality, but we only deliver for our customers on time, 50% of the time. And so we need to improve that.

So really it's sort of one of those handful or a couple of those handful of metrics that we're trying to improve.

And so what can happen is teams, they work and they're doing their hardest and, you know, they'll sort of push back on the management team and say, look, it's different every day. It changes. We're doing the best we can. And so they're sort of treating every day as a new day.

And it's our job with working with frontline teams, middle managers, senior managers, to say, okay, how can we look at this work in terms of a process? What are the steps, what are the inputs? And then how can we make it better?

It can be in a little way, it can be in a big way, but how do we make a change to make it better and make one of those metrics perform better?

Do you approach the process approved process improvement initiative differently based on those metrics that you're trying to improve? If you're trying to improve the efficiency of the process, reduce errors.

If you're trying to improve the efficiency so that you can get more work done in a shorter period of time or maybe with less resources, do you approach those process improvement initiatives. Initiatives differently?

Yeah, you can, you can for sure. You know, the, the, the tools, the, the projects, the changes that you're looking to make will be different depending on, on, on the goal.

Like let's say, for example, you've got a quality, a quality problem. You know, you've got three people doing the job and it changes depending on who's doing the job, right? Then, you know, that's, that's the focus.

How do I, how do I achieve consistency and standardization across their, their role or if it's, if it's at speed, you know, we're taking three weeks to complete this project cycle.

Well, you know, I want to see all of the steps from start to finish and all the handoffs between departments and where things getting stuck and queuing because that's where the answers to making things happen faster are going to lie, right? Whereas the first example with the, with the quality, it's like, well, hang on, what's causing these, these variations?

Is it people who's training people don't have clarity on the role? You know, it's a different, it's a different lens, it's going to be a different solution depending on that, on that outcome.

What would you say is more impactful to the efficiency of a process? Is it speed or is it accuracy?

Yeah, I mean, that's a good question.

Now obviously there's no one right answer, but I would say just on average, right, Dealing with hundreds of clients and hundreds of engagements, more and more these days, it's speed, okay? More and more. It's speed that is important.

You know, how can you get requirements from a customer, turn that into some sort of proposal or quote and price and then once you get the green light to go ahead, converting that into the product and the service. Because you know, as you know, things are getting faster, people expect more, they want it instantaneously.

So if I had to Pick everything's important. But more often these days it's a, it's about speed. You know, how do we, how do we cut that down?

Well, interesting point about the example that you just gave.

I, I think a lot of times people will make the mistake to focus on, for lack of a better word, the assembly line, the creation or assembly of the product, the deliverable, the tangible, the widget. People focus on that because that's your traditional work, that's your assembly line.

Go from, you know, workstation one to workstation 20 and work gets done. But you, you started with requirements gathering, you started with getting a proposal. They're all really important to the overall process.

And I think a lot of times people overlook that because if you don't successfully define the requirements or set the expectation for delivery dates and deadlines, your, you're not going to be successful no matter how efficient your assembly process is.

So it's interesting that you started your example with looking at the entire process because I think most organizations and people, when they sit down to look at a process, they just, they concentrate on the work to be done. And that's, that's a great point that you made.

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I mean what I'm referring to there is really a value stream view of the work.

And for your audience that don't know necessarily what a value stream is, it's really, you know, in a business there's lots of stuff going on, there's lots of people and roles and responsibilities. Some of the activity is core to the product and the service that you're delivering it.

Some of it is supporting the, the core like your, your finance teams, your, your HR teams, you know, your, your demand generation marketing, whatever it might be, they're supporting the core. So, and then you've got the, the actual day to day stuff that pays, you know, creates the product and delivers a service.

So there's a lot going on and like where do we focus and what do we look at? It can be really powerful and clarifying for the team to really zoom in from end to end on the value creating processes.

Okay, what from absolute start to absolute finish is required to happen in our organization with our team to fulfill a customer's service requirement or product requirement. And that gives you a lot of clarity on where to focus your improvement efforts.

You can get a group of people together in your company with a whiteboard and start talking about what are different things that we can do to improve. And that's a good exercise. I'm not sort of disparaging that, but you can get a laundry list really quickly. You can get like 50 things.

You could even get a hundred things that need to be improved. But not all of those 50 things.

In fact, most of those 50 things won't make a measurable impact immediately on those things we talked about like, you know, making us more cost effective, making us more responsive, proving the quality of what we do. And only a few will.

Right?

Because they're not those initiatives, those problems, those ideas for improvement aren't where the business is actually getting constrained. And so, you know, a value stream view of your organization can be really good to focus the attention.

And just going back to your original point around starting with the customer. Yeah, it can be surprising where teams and organizations, they look internally, what are we doing? What do we think we should be doing better?

How can we better improve ourselves and not necessarily proactively ask the customer or really consider what the customer wants as silly as kind of.

That might sound like a bit of an inane statement, but it's often the case where, hang on, out of all these things we could be doing, you know, the 50 things, what does the customer actually really care about?

What would the customer be really excited about if we said we can, you know, you know, make it easy for Billy in accounts to process paperwork or we could actually reduce the lead time to delivering a service by two days? You know, it's the latter, probably, but.

Using that to prioritize there as well, to potentially change the process. If the expectation of the customer is two days is completely acceptable, you may be able to slow down your, you know, your production cycles.

You may be able to switch your supply chain to more of a just in time. There's a whole lot of things that may inform the rest of the process if your assumption about what the customer wants is incorrect.

So I would agree with that. That's a spot on statement. I'm curious. So I'm pretty sure Elon Musk has a question.

Quote something to the effect of don't try to improve a process that shouldn't exist.

It's good.

Yeah, I mean, it's. How much time do you spend trying to, you know, optimize a process that in this case the customer may not want?

So if it's a product or service that the customer doesn't need, why waste the time improving the process? But I want to talk a little bit about process improvement. So you had a pretty clear vision of the process that you had in your head.

You started with a customer, you're ending with a deliverable steps after that.

But what, what should organizations do to commit to and to invest the time, effort, money, sweat, tears into doing a thorough, and I mean thorough, at the level you described, process, documentation, initiative. I, I firmly agree with whether it was Elon Musk or not, that you cannot improve a process if you don't understand the process.

That's right.

How would you position organizations to kind of prioritize that and identify that as something that they need to do?

Yeah, that's an interesting one. And, and a pretty common one where the process definition is loose. It sits in people's heads.

There's four different people doing it four different ways thing, things like that.

The only, so the only issue with that is that if we say, okay, we're going to clean up our documentation, we're going to define our processes, it can be overwhelming.

Right.

It's like, oh my goodness, I like the idea, Jason, but you're talking about careers worth of administration work there that we'd have to kick off to. But having said that, you're absolutely right. You've got to start with a standard baseline before you can improve. And it also depends.

So that's one issue. Right. It also depends on the stage at, with the organization, where this organization is at. Okay.

So for example, if we were a store, if we're a small scrappy startup, and I don't get me wrong, I advocate getting clarity around your processes, getting measures of performance, trying to be better every day. If you're a small scrappy startup, your, your primary focus is on growth. It's on sales.

It's about, hang on, is the product or service we're delivering meaning what customers actually need and so and less about.

So whereas if you're a medium to large organization and you're still operating with sort of loose documentation and people doing it four different ways. Well, that's more of an issue, right, because you've now got potentially hundreds of people doing work in different ways. You're wasting money.

I, I don't care who you are or what you tell me. If we've got like a hundred people doing it according to loose documentation or no process, you're wasting money.

And in fact, it could be holding back growth. It could actually be holding back growth.

It doesn't scale.

Yeah, it doesn't scale.

Right.

You can't scale. You just keep throwing, you know, bodies at a problem. It's not going to resolve the problem.

It's going to satisfy the work requirement at that particular moment. It's not going to make you more efficient.

That's exactly right. So it's, it's. Okay, so there's two issues identified there, right? It's the size of the job and then it's the strategic need for it.

So, you know, if you're a small, scrappy startup, don't worry necessarily about having, you know, pristine documentation. But if you're not that, and you do have an ambition to grow and scale, well, then, yeah, so it needs to be a strategic initiative.

It needs to actually move the dial in terms of performance that the business is chasing. And if it is, then the leadership team should be on board with that. It's not a nice to have.

It's actually fundamental to executing our strategic plan. So we've got to tick that box. The leadership team actually have to be on board.

But then you've got the second issue of oh my goodness, where do we even start? And that is a real problem. And it's like anything, right? Eat an elephant. How do you do it? One step at a time.

And the other thing though is that if you're in the midst of eating another elephant, don't, don't get yourself another elephant.

Right?

So let's, you know, if it is a strategic objective, you know, we've, we've, I don't know, create, made a new acquisition, we've developed a new service line and that's done. Okay. We've got a bit of capacity, right, let's, let's start this process optimization, process standardization piece. One step at a time.

You know, you are not going to try and standardize every single thing that happens in the business. I would then go back to the value stream.

What are those key processes where if we did spend the time on defining the how to, writing it down, training people to a standard, it would actually make a benefit. It would actually sort of deliver a benefit.

So who do you think is best equipped to undertake that?

Would it be the folks that do this on a daily basis or is this one of those scenarios where you really need an outside pair of eyes to adequately accurately document the as built not. Well, this is what I do every day. So here's, here's my instructions. You go and you write it down and we'll put it in a book.

And this is now our standard operating procedure for how to do process A. What would be your recommendation to. On how an organization would approach that?

Yeah, okay, excellent issue identified there with that question. That's another, you know, common, common hurdle. So, okay, we, we've got the strategic initiative.

We know we've got to do it, we're going to do it step by step. But still we're up to here already just with day to day. And you're asking me now to do this on top of what part of I'm full don't you understand?

Very, very common scenario now. So we've got to be pragmatic about this. And it all comes down to how well you plan it, how well you resource it.

If you don't put a plan, you don't put resources. What do you know, you don't get the result.

So as much as I would like to say as a, as a consultant offering external support, just give us a call, we'll bring our magic wand and you know, hey, presto, you'll have it all defined within two weeks. Like, it's not that easy. So there is a certain amount of participation obviously required by the process, subject matter, expertise.

Now, if you're fortunate, some instances, there's a bit of spare capacity in the organization. You know, every employee will have about, I don't know, 5 to 10% of discretionary time at least. Okay.

Where they can choose what they do and what they don't do, you know, for extra projects or participating in something, you know, I'd say extracurricular if you like, from their core requirements of the job. You got a bit of capacity there.

Right.

And so sometimes companies will use that. They'll say, okay, well, Betty and David and John, we're going to work on our processes, just chip away at it.

And when you've got the spare time, start documenting the work that you do and how you do it.

Right.

That's 5 or 10%.

Yeah. No, and that's also dependent on the fact do they really have 5% or is that just wishful thinking? So, yeah, that's a concern.

Some instances, businesses are able to do that and they'll just chip away over time. More often than not, you've got your two other choices, right? You will.

So it's tap into the discretionary time and kind of hope and pray that you'll get a result. Second option is, okay, we're going to do this as an initiative. We're going to do this as an initiative.

We're going to take some senior people from the department or this process and we're going to take them out of their operational role for a certain period of time. Let's say it's a three month period or a six month period, and we're going to backfill their role, you know, if we can.

Right.

And then they, and you see this when you're deploying a new ERP or some sort of big system change, right? Or where we've got an acquisition and we need to kind of bring it into the fold.

So you're going to actually pull people out of their day to day, backfill the role and then these people, these experienced people are freed up. So you can do that. And then, you know, they've got a goal to say, okay, we will focus on really locking down. How do we operate as our company?

What's our how to? It's a strategic initiative. We're going to do it, we're going to resource it. You'll get some support, you'll get some results with that. I would.

Your second, your third option then is also kind of do something similar.

It's kind of like a halfway point between asking them to do it in their spare time, fully taking them out of their role is you get the process experts to dedicate a certain agreed amount of time, let's say it's a day, a week or. And work with some technical writers. Okay.

And work with some external consultants to help coordinate this activity and make it clear what's the output image that we're trying to achieve here in terms of this? Because even this we're going to document, we're going to better define our processes. What does that mean? What is that actually going to look like?

Is it going to be useful?

So engaging, you know, technical writers, you know, experts kind of like, you know, like us and, or similar to really get the balance right and make sure the output is, is, is good.

Right.

So is there more value in that as opposed to maybe having a process expert?

The technical writer will be very well equipped to, to take the, let's say, bullet point, step by step process from the subject matter expert and convert it into a process flow or something that we put into whatever our process documentation system is going to end up being or is having the employee that does the work handle the bulk of that with a consultant helping with eliciting questions about interconnections between departments, about inputs, outputs, raci about all of these things that are inherent to processes and adequately documenting how they relate, how they're. They cross swim lanes and all of those important things like where's the value?

Is it in the, you know, conversion of the process procedures or is it in asking those questions?

Yeah, it's all of the above. And look, there's more than one way of doing the job. There's more than one way of skinning a cat.

You will find, though, that when you've got a set of process leaders in your business, they, they run a department or they lead a process, it's going to be different skill sets and different abilities.

Right.

You probably can't assume that just because they're a great manager, they're a great leader, they're also going to be great at documenting a process. Well, that can be then handed over to third parties or new managers or new employees.

So, yeah, you're, you might strike gold and they can just take what's in their head and convert it into something, you know, a set of tools, a set of procedures. But more often that you're not, you're not going to get that.

So again, you want a good outcome, you've got a plan for it, you've got to resource it for it. So, yeah, resourcing it with some, you know, consulting support or internal consultant, external consultant, whoever, I don't, I don't care.

But someone who is good at taking, you know, knowledge and convert it in, into a logical, easy to understand, easy to follow from an outside perspective. You know, that's, that's a real skill, right? That's a real set of experience that you want to, you want to tap into.

Should you avoid the, in some cases, overwhelming desire to improve the process while you're documenting it, or should you document the as built and then go back and undertake an improvement initiative?

I mean, look, I think focus is important here. So you got to ask yourself the question, are we looking to straight up improve the process?

If we are, if we're saying, hang on, there's no real point documenting this because it's a bit of a moving picture and there's no real clear one way. All right, well then don't worry about documentation first. Just sort of get the team together. What are the four different ways this work happens?

Okay. And let's agree on what the, the new way will be and that'll be the best way. So you are the, the goal is to improve straight up. Sure, yeah.

So it depends on the situation. So. Or it's a, yeah, it. Improve, you know, improve it straight up and then document.

But if you've got a stable process, like let's say it's a sales process, okay? And you've got a team of 15, 20 salespeople. It's all, it's pretty well understood what, what success looks like.

And you know, we've got some, you know, we've got a top tier of salespeople and they seem to have a way to do It. It's really not about reinventing what they do. It's really just capturing what they do so that we can send it.

You know, we can get the rest of the team following the same way. So then the goal is just. Just defining process. Yes.

What if it's. It's a. You gave the example before where there is a process and.

And there's four different people that do it four different ways, and there is a lot of inconsistency. If you're starting from that point. Is it.

Would you say that changes the equation a little bit or it's still a valiant effort to improve the process and document the improved process, knowing that it might take away from the time available to do additional process documentation?

Yeah, I mean, again, it's.

If I'm a senior manager and I want to better define, better document, better standardize what's happening in my organization, I would say I only want to document something that's worth keeping. If what's happening in a department is just.

Just changes all the time, then, you know, the first thing is just let's get together and improve and standardize and then document. Right, That's. That would be my take on that.

How do you preemptively address the J curve and the dip that comes with that?

It's pretty much a guarantee that be some, you know, frustration and tears and anger and, you know, hopefully not a lot of resignations, but you preemptively address that. Yeah, well, curve down here in the screen so people can understand what we're talking about.

But yeah, I mean, you take people on a journey. Let's say we're going to improve a process or solve a problem. Yeah, let's do that. It's going to be great. We're all excited about it.

And then you get into it, it's like, oh, man, this is more complicated than I thought. And that people get frustrated, lose a bit of faith, and you really got to push through to get to the other side.

So this can be an issue for an individual, it can be an issue for a team, and it can be an issue for the organization overall. Okay, hang on.

This process improvement stuff, and hang on, why aren't we out there selling more stuff or delivering more projects if the organization doesn't have a lot of experience with this kind of stuff? You know, you really want to chalk up a win very quickly. Okay, so how do we do that in.

First of all, let's choose a problem or a process where we think, yeah, you know what, we've got a good Chance of success here. The solution is pretty clear in our minds, and we're not trying to boil the ocean. Okay. It's. It's in a focused area.

So, yes, scope your first couple of projects or initiatives with, okay, highest chance of success, not a huge amount of effort to do it. Also choose your team to be, you know, the best of the bunch.

Right.

You don't want the cranky, you know, naysayers. Not in that first team.

Right.

And then, yeah, you make it clear to the team, okay, this is why we're doing it. Getting their involvement with defining the problem. Start thinking about solutions. So they're part of the journey from day one. Yeah.

And so if you can do some of that preparation work up front, your chances of success will be a lot higher.

Um, and yeah, you really want to build up some momentum, some internal case studies of success so that when you do tackle that, that really tricky problem with lots of arms and legs and there's more chances of roadblocks. You're like, you know what? It's tough, but we've done this before and we know this is worth doing because what we've done previously, you'll.

You'll have a bit of a momentum to. To ride over those bumps.

How would you quantify success in process improvement? I think we can identify when a process is more efficient or better or it's got less steps.

But what's a good way to quantitatively document that so that you can keep track and keep score and you can celebrate that this improvement yielded X. What is X?

Yeah, I think it's. It's good. And the best transformations, we, you know, I've been involved.

We've been involved with it at OE Partners is one where we're solving a real. A clear problem. Okay. So we're. It's not so much the goal is to create a new process.

It's like, well, that's a means that's not necessarily the end, you know, okay, what is the problem that we're trying to solve? So we're consistently late with our customer orders or we're losing money on this product. You know, there should be a clear problem that we're.

That we've got to find, and that's what we're trying to solve. So there should be some measures attached to that.

So, and this is very much a way of thinking drummed into me from Toyota is that, you know, we talk about problems, you know, and how wonderful is it to have, like, a list of problems to work through? It's actually a Privilege.

So being really clear about the problem and having some measures of success attached to that problem up front, then you, then you know, whether or not you've, you've hit it or if you still have to, to go to improve it further. Yeah.

How does the, everything that we just talked about. My industry is a service industry.

Yes.

Obviously different than manufacturing. You know, we don't have deep per thousand. How do you translate all of these things that we just talked about into a service environment?

Yes, yes, great. A great point.

Right.

And this is the initially some of the mental hurdles that people need to get over when they're in a service industry. It's pretty obvious why these tools and principles developed in a manufacturing environment.

Right.

Because all the work happens in one spot in like some sort of rectangular workspace where, you know, professionals can walk in and observe it. And it's usually happening in a repeatable way. So it's, it's all happened in one spot, it's repeatable, it's observable and that it makes sense.

Right. For these tools and principles to grow up in that environment.

However, we're in the 21st century now and just about every single industry has adopted these work practices, these management principles, these tools to make us more productive and efficient. You know, finance, health care, whatever you want to. So there are applications.

So first of all, if you're thinking, I'm not sure if this stuff applies to us because we're in services, that's not the question to ask. It is it has and your competitors or are already doing so, it's how do I apply this to our type of work?

So you definitely can and will be able to apply these tools and principles to a service based environment. It's more challenging in that the work isn't as visible because it's knowledge work.

Right.

It's happening on screens, it's happening in, you know, separate locations. Not everyone's in the same, the same work spot. So it does require a little bit more focus to see the work that you do in a similar way. Okay.

And then you get people say, oh no, no, it's, it's very different and it's very unique and it requires my, my special magic. If that's the way you want to continue to think about the work, you know, no one can help you.

Right.

Because that's, that's basically a definition of chaos.

And so you've got that end of the spectrum where you've got the unique magicians doing what they do and then you've got the other end of the spectrum, where is, you know, it's the Model T Ford production line and you're pumping out the same product, any color you want as black. Now that's not a realistic scenario either. The solution for you in your organization with service based knowledge work is somewhere in the middle.

Okay. We have to start to get some definition of the work that we do in terms of a process.

And whilst the specific work for that specific customer today is not going to be defined as the way we make a McDonald's burger. Right. You're never going to achieve that level of precision. But at the same time, we can't just say, oh, it's all chaos and different every day.

Right. It's somewhere in between. And the more of a process view you take to the work, that's the path to success and efficiency and better performance.

Okay. How would you recommend someone tackles a process that crosses into multiple swim lanes and multiple. And multiple owners?

Yeah, that a process that you're, you know, you're assembled group of process experts and your technical writer, do they tackle that as a single process or does each individual person within the swim, each individual swim lane tackle their piece of the process and then there's some consolidation or some overarching review of all of the pieces and how they assemble together. Which approach works best?

I would definitely advocate for the former. The first way of. Okay, let's get a group of people from across functions. We know that this, this work, let's say it's a loan application, Right?

It's a loan application. We're in a finance scenario here. Now there's a bunch of different people that are involved in that whole thing from end to end.

And well, what's important with loan application? Well, getting it through quickly. You know, we can't leave the customer just waiting for an answer.

So, okay, let's get all the people along the chain and there might be three or four, five different departments and let's just step through it. Okay. What happens here and what happens there and where do things queue up, where do things waste, how long do things take?

And that will be a really eye opening experience for the team because in a large organization it's rare for any one person to actually see what happens end to end because you're not, that's not what you paid for. So yeah, that would be probably a great exercise.

And then if we agree, okay, we want to reduce the time here, what can we all do to help each other move the ball quickly between the different departments? And that will probably generate a lot of Useful ideas. And, you know, part of that will be defining process.

You know, okay, let's document what it is we need to do in order to move the ball more quickly through the different process steps.

That's a great point, because early on in the process, when you're getting the application from the customer or the member, there may be a piece of information that eight steps later, four departments later, eight different swim lanes later, they need to go back to the customer to ask a question that could, could have readily been gathered at the application point.

So that's right.

And looking at it as, as an overall process, at the very least, you get the input for why. You know, you ask one of the many whys that you're going to ask during this process to identify why are you doing this step?

Why do you need this information and where is it coming from? And if the answer to that is easily satisfied by step number one, you've just eliminated an entire step in your process.

So that's it. Yeah, exactly.

What would be your recommendation for organizations looking to get started with improving their processes? How should, you know, how should I plant my flag in process management and get started?

Yeah, I mean, look, if you've got a really engaged executive team, you know, they've got a lot of experience of process improvement, they know the power, they know the benefit, then you can probably be a little bit more ambitious and, you know, start off with a more significant problem to solve because there's experience and maturity in the organization. But if that's not the case, and that's, you know, not uncommon, you don't necessarily have an executive team who's really super bought into it.

Pick a win.

Right.

You need to demonstrate this through success. So start with a specific problem. Ideally, it's a problem that the organization cares about.

You know, it's not, oh yeah, it'd be nice to do that process improvement stuff, but the real work is over here. Okay, well, let's look at the real work. Okay. What from an organization's point of view, what is strategically important?

Is it we need to reduce costs or we need to improve speed or we need, you need to increase capacity? Like what is on the strategic plan for the organization and what project or problem can you solve that will directly impact that strategic goal?

Those strategic goals for the organization.

So if you can choose something that's in line with that, it's manageable, it's not huge, and you can do it in a fairly short period of time, then you've got a good case study, you've got A good, a good sort of set of experience that you can build upon and then go to the.

Next station excited about improving janitorial supplies. I think you need something that's going to knock the hair back a little bit more than, you know, those mundane basic processes.

If your first process has two boxes and, and a start and a finish, you probably pricked the wrong process to start with.

Potentially, yeah. You might need to be a bit more targeted in where you're investing your time.

How do you get executive buy in is always important, especially with organizational level initiatives. At what level or at what depth do you think you should educate those executives on?

I'm not proposing they all are black belts, Six Sigma certified, but at what level do you think there's a value in some sort of education? Whether it's Six Sigma or any of the other philosophies that are out there. How far would you recommend you go with something like that?

Yeah, you're right. You're right in that you need to get the exec team sort of familiar with these ideas, these principles.

You also need to get them, you know, aligned, but they're not going to be doing, you know, detailed process analysis. That's not their role.

So I do, I would definitely, and we do advocate this at OE Partners that when we're kicking off the transformation, we get the leadership team together. It could be a half a day session, it could be a two hour session, it could be a one day session, something of that nature.

We run what we call a lean leadership workshop. So it's about 50% talking of, and you may change the word from lean to operational excellence or you could change it to better productivity.

The label that your organization is most comfortable with. Get them in the room and talk about these tools and principles and ideas. And the other half is really, then what does this mean for the organization?

So how does this align with the strategic plan? It should align very, very quickly and easily.

And what sort of behaviors do we need to demonstrate and what sort of actions are we going to agree to over the next sort of 612 months period?

So that sort of sets the scene and can clear the way a lot for, for the, for the organization then to spend time and effort on, on process improvement because that's, there's no way of getting around it. Process improvement is an investment in time and resources that will be spent somewhere else in the organization.

You kind of need to make the case as to why are we investing people's time and sometimes cases money to make the process work better.

Shouldn't we just, you know, work on a new product or shouldn't we return a dividend to the shareholders or pay some debt down or, you know, we've got to make the case for it. So, yeah, getting the leadership team aligned and aware is a good first step.

Would you, would you go as far as, you know, explaining things like DMAIC and, you know, understanding at that level? Is that where you kind of draw the line? Are you getting a little bit too deep or.

You might, you might. I think that's fine. Yeah.

I think you can talk about how there's, there's a process improvement cycle, there's frameworks that help teams align better, you know, so, yeah, I think you can definitely. You can touch on that for sure. You do you want to touch on some concrete examples of what we're talking about.

You know, you might say, let's talk about visual management. Let's talk about, you know, the DOMIC cycle or the PDCA cycle or, you know, touch on some tools.

Because if you don't, it's all kind of just buzzwords.

Or it's an abstract and it's hard to, you know, really nail down what you're trying to do if everything's just an abstraction.

Yeah, that's. That's right, that's right. And, and this sort of stuff, it's a real, it's a real piece of process ip, business ip.

If you've got a group of teams, a group of people coming together as a team and you're solving a problem, well, let's not argue about how to solve the problem. Let's just work through the steps. Like that's, that's very valuable for an organization.

That's great. Tell me a little bit about what OE Partners does.

Yeah, so we're a team of consultants, coaches, trainers. OE stands for Operational Excellence. So Operational Excellence Partners. Yeah, really experienced team.

We've all worked in industry, so my background's from Toyota, as I've said before, four in the automotive industry. And the team is. There's eight of us all got a similar background from industry predominantly.

We do have some ex Big four consultants as part of the team, but I, I look past that. I kind of, I don't hold that against them personally, but what I mean by that is that we're from industry for industry.

So it's not about creating, you know, pixel perfect PowerPoint slides.

Sure.

You know, we do the analysis and we verify where the opportunities are, but 80% of our time is spent on, then the implementation. Okay, so we pick the right problems, we turn it into a project and we work with teams to execute those projects.

Because you can do all sorts of analysis, you can create a vision statement, you can get people excited, but then that has to translate into action.

Right.

You have to define a set of process improvement projects with a clear problem and, and an outcome that you're chasing and driving. That is what delivers the business performance and driving those projects with teams internally, that's what drives culture.

You know, you can create a corporate video, you can sort of book an offside. It's all good to do, don't get me wrong.

Absolutely.

But teams coming together, solving a problem, going through that J curve, that's, that's what creates culture. Sure, yeah, we, we can do this. We've done it.

Yeah, we've got skills, disparate skills that come together and they're, they're more than the, than the individual, some of the parts, you know, that, that's the sort of thing that really drives culture.

So we spend most of our time, you know, working with teams, solving problems and also training them and coaching them on, on the tools and the principles we do.

You know, white belt, yellow belt, green belt, black belt, training and certification to also build capability internally in the organizations that we work with.

You said this exercise or these exercises build culture. And you know, it's interesting because there's a value proposition.

You know, if you're at an all hands meeting and you're watching the latest video that was put together by the executive team, it's, you know, it's nice we put the effort in and we created it.

But you know, if you get to participate in a cross functional team and improve, not only yours, but the person sitting or standing next to you, whether it's on an assembly line or if it's in a bank branch, if you cut 20 steps out of a process that they do every day, is there more value in that or more value in the all hands meeting and watching a video? So it's, it's a little self serving.

You're, you're engaging these folks to improve their processes and make themselves happy, but you're also making the organizational, more organization more efficient as well. So that's.

Yeah.

Interesting that you, you frame it that way because I hadn't, I hadn't thought of that. You're setting the tone.

You're building a culture based on efficiency and based on we care because we're making your process and your daily life a lot better. So that's, that's an interesting way of kind of framing this herculean undertaking that organizations go through for sure.

Yeah, absolutely. And, and just to add to that there and talk about culture, people do look to Toyota as an example and you know, sort of look at it so.

Oh, you know, it's just because they're Japanese or whatever and it's not the case. There's some rubbish Japanese companies, I've, I've walked through their factories, don't get me wrong.

But there are some excellent companies and Lukota is one. And so, you know, how does Toyota develop that culture?

And you know, there's definitely that ingrained drive to, okay, let's make it a little bit better. What's the next improvement? You know, that incremental improvement stuff.

But then in addition to that there's also step change improvement that happens.

Like you could pretty much set your clock to it in Toyota if you're, if you're in the, if you're sitting somewhere in the organization, give it 12 months, give it 18 months. There will be some company wide initiative that requires you to do something differently.

Literally weeks before we were talking about how do we make changes to the production line to get more out to, oh my goodness, we're going to have to put factories on, on like three day weeks. And it was all about cost cutting. Like literally the entire organization pretty much stopped what they were doing and it was all about cost cutting.

How do we reduce variants, how do we reduce, you know, costs of materials or how do we really change processes? And it just, it was quite dramatic and the organization reacted. And then in another instance it was the price of steel shot up. Okay.

So we need to go through the supply chain and figure out this is a different point in time.

Right.

How do we, you know, commonize materials? How do we reduce gauges? How do we get more out of one piece of steel? Again, it required a real big shift. Yeah. And just every, the, the Aussie dollar.

When we were working in Australia, at one point the Aussie dollar reached above the US dollar. It was more than you could buy, more than $1. So that make local cost of production in Australia really expensive.

Again, that triggered a massive cost cutting initiative. So how do companies build culture? It's by doing.

And how does Toyota do it in, you know, they've got the day to day incremental, but then they'd have the regular sort of Step change. Exec team really tells the organization they need to change significantly and that. And the organization then react. Reacts to that.

That's kaizen, right?

Yeah, it's kaizen. And if we want to go with the Japanese terms, you got kaizen, you got kaikaku.

So kaizen is that small sort of incremental stuff and then the, you know, innovation, those step changes.

A big step change.

Yeah, yeah. So you need both. You need both.

Okay. What. So two more questions. One, what do you see when you come into an organization? Maybe they've, maybe they've started.

Maybe they're sitting in the bottom of the J curve. Maybe they just threw their hands up and they can't handle it. What are.

If you could pick one thing, one mistake that organizations make and you see it time and time again, what is that one mistake?

Oh, so many to choose from. So many to choose from, Jason.

Look, I, I would say kind of being half going off half cocked, you know, and, you know, expecting that it'll all be easy and setting it as a strategic goal at the exec level and just expecting the organization to, to react and to be successful and they won't. I'd say that's probably pretty, pretty common. You get, you know, an excited exec or manager. Yep, let's do this.

Set a goal, but then not really work through what needs to happen to get that goal achieved.

Because it could be that, you know, we want to, you know, improve performance of our, you know, sales department, or we want to get the factories working better. There's a whole bunch of reason why they're not doing it right now.

If, if they were able to do it right now with the current configuration of skills, resources, support, it'd be done already.

Right.

So it hasn't happened yet. And there's going to be people issues, going to be capability issues, it's going to be resourcing issues, you know, motivational issues.

So there's going to be a number of reasons why you set the goal and it doesn't happen. And so you need to kind of progressively work through those issues with patients maturity. So that, that would be, that'd be probably my number one.

Setting a goal but not really supporting it to the level that it needs to get the outcome.

Outstanding. Damien, this was great. I have one more question. I am shamelessly stealing this from Stephen Bartlett.

He has the Diary of a CEO podcast, and one of the things that he does is he asked his guest.

To.

To provide a question for the very next guest. So I'm going to ask you for a question. Doesn't need to be about process. Doesn't need to be about anything in particular. Could be completely random.

But give me a question for my next guest.

Yeah, okay. That's a good one. Without notice. But so I'm going to say, look, I'm a. I'm a productivity nerd. Okay.

I think about work and how to do work, like, an inordinate amount of time. So I'm gonna just ask, what's the one thing that you've done personally that has improved your productivity in a noticeable way? That's.

I'm always curious to hear about people. What have they done personally that has improved their productivity? Doesn't need to be huge. Just something concrete and specific.

That's great. I will let you know what the answer to that question is. I'm recording an episode tomorrow, so we will get the answer to that question in short order.

So, Damien, thank you for this. This has been outstanding. I appreciate the very thoughtful conversation.

You clearly are an expert, and OE Partners is certainly a resource that my tens of listeners should reach out to, hopefully be able to utilize your services. I hope in the future somebody looks back 10 years and my millions of listeners may reach out and hopefully engage with OE Partners.

So, again, Damian, thank you so for your time and your expertise. I really appreciate it.

No, it's been great. It's been a lot of fun chatting. Thanks, Jason.

Absolutely. Thank you.