Thoughts

Life happens. Sometimes it rains on wedding days. Sometimes a supplier misses a ship date, and sometimes there are glitches in our processes. The challenge for lean practitioners is what to do about this – especially since all of these things could happen.

Did first-class passengers on the Titanic get preferential treatment during the evacuation? James Cameron’s movie certainly seems to suggest so, but let’s look at the data.

So, you have been asked to lead an enterprise wide transformation. How many kaizen events should you plan on conducting in order to achieve sustained improvement?

Recently, a handful of us fellow-lean bloggers had the opportunity to chat about the voice of the customer (VOC). This was not an abstract discussion about someone else’s customers. We were focused on our own – the folks who comprise our blogging community, the lean learning community.

Yes, we were talking about YOU…and whether we were (at least) meeting your needs. Hopefully, your ears weren’t burning.

Multi-Voting, also known as N/3 multi-voting, N/3 voting, dot-voting and sometimes mistakenly thought to be identical to nominal group technique, is a technique used by small groups to quickly select a subset from a broader set of options. This democratic approach allows team member to cast a finite number of votes, with few restrictions (e.g., individuals can’t “plump” all of their votes on one single candidate), for their options of choice. Ultimately, the process yields a rank order.