Tag Archives: Super Seven

Super7 Operations - The Next Step for Lean in Financial Services

The 7 principles of Super7 Operations – what does good look like?

Successful implementation of Super 7 Operations – the next step for lean in financial services – depends on the introduction of all 7 principles of Super7 Operations: 1. Customer central, 2. Felxibility in skills and capacity, 3. Output steering and supportive management, 4. Daily rhythm and quick response management, 5. Autonomy in work distribution and process improvement, 6. Continous improvement of planning and forecast, 7. Visual management – open and transparent operations. 

The 7 principles of Super7 Operations

Principles of Super7 Operations

Naturally, the introduction of the principles of Super 7 Operations is best done step-wise. However, it’s good to start with the end in mind:  what does good look like in Super 7 Operations?

 

 

 

 

 

 

  1.  The Super7 team has a goal that is relevant for the customer. The Super 7 team can help each other in achieving this goal. The goal is translated daily to a goal for that day. The Super7 team is committed to achieving the daily goal. When problems arise during the day and the daily goal can’t be met, the Super 7 team responses by doing what they can to come as close as possible to the goal. When that isn’t enough to reach the goal, they ask for help from their team manager. The request for help is quantitative and specific. For instance: we come 6 hours short, we solve 4 hours ourselves and ask for 2 hours help from another team.
     
  2. All Super 7 team members have the skills for all types of work. The Super7 Skills-Matrix shows who can do what, and at what skill level. The Super 7 team members are sufficiently flexible in working hours to be able to meet customer demand on busy days. 
  3. Team manager steers on output. Manager stimulates the Super 7 team to  come up with solutions. Manager is available and helpful when the Super7 asks for help. 
     
  4. The daily rhythm is adjusted to the rhythm of the customer requests. There is a fixed schedule for Super 7 team stand-up meetings, focused on achieving the daily goal. When incidents happen, the department responses quickly in constructive and effective dialogue between Super7 team and their manager, and subsequently between the team managers and the department head.
     
  5. Super 7 team is autonomous in work distribution and who does what. There is a standard way of working. The team can deviate from this standard, as part of an improvement experiment. The duration of this experiment is known beforehand (optimally 1 week). Evaluation is based on facts and figures. Most important outcome, however, is what the Super7 team has learned from the experiment.
  6. The Super 7 team is stimulated to continuously make the daily goals more challenging. Standard norm times are improved and planning is made tighter. Work is planned based on forecast. The organization continuously strives towards improved forecast accuracy and improved performance. Performance is discussed on all level of the organization. 
     
  7. The Super 7 team board is neat and easy to read. Daily goal and progress towards this is visible on the Super7 team board. Performance of last period is visible, as is the trend. Running and planned experiments and improvements are visible on the Super7 team board. Fixed lines are made with tape, fixed headers are printed.                                                                  

 More on Super7 principles? My book on Super7 Operation – the Next Step for Lean in Financial Services – is available in bookstores! 

Super7 Operations – the next step for Lean Operational Management

Super7 - the next wave for operationsSuper7 Operations, an innovative way of using Lean in back-offices, proves to be the next step after Lean Operational Management. Cooperation is a key ellement of Super7.

I have been always amazed by what is achieved when a production team, with operators and maintenance engineers working closely together, improves their own production line step-by-step. I’ve seen this many times, in my 15 years working as a Lean consultant. The first signs of improvement appear after the team gets training and starts applying the principles of Lean. The team finds the first quick wins, and immediately, this creates enthusiasm and momentum. The real transformation happens, however, when the team begins to truly cooperate. They become an improvement team, committed to improve performance, making optimal use of the strengths of each of the team members. When they really get going and continuous improvement starts, it’s just wonderful to witness.

I’ve been working as a Lean and Lean Six Sigma for a decade and a half now. Over the years, I’ve introduced the concept of improvement teams within a dozen production companies within The Netherlands, and a couple in Germany. In these multi-disciplinary teams, people from different departments work together on the single task of improving a production line, making it run faster and smoother, reducing down-time and break-downs, etc. As a team, they have the flexibility to cope with any production problem that can occur. For me, the people on the shop floor aren’t ‘resources’ that need to be ‘managed’, but creative and knowledgeable individuals, that can do great things, especially when they truly work together. Recently, I implemented these ideas in a financial service back-office in what I and others feel is an innovative way– the Super7 operations principle.

My book on Super7 Operations, with information on what Super7 Operations is, how it works and how you could apply it in your own work environment, is expected to be published within a couple of months. I’ll keep you posted – on www.super7ops.com!

Optimal team size for Lean is seven: Super7 Operations

Super7 Operations uses small teams of 5-9: average 7 persons. Why did we chose this team size?

The optimal team size for Lean working – a question that keeps popping up. In several recent publications on SCRUM (e.g. articles on Scrum.org or informit.com), an optimal team size of 7 plus or minus 2 (that’s 5 to 9 to you and me) is mentioned. Stephen Robbins, author of Essentials of Organizational Behavior (2005), a best-selling textbook on organizational behavior, has concluded that teams of more than 10 to 12 people have a difficult time establishing feelings of trust, mutual accountability, and cohesiveness. Without these, constructive interaction is difficult. At the SPA 2009 conference, Joseph Pelrine told his audience that the sizes 5, 15 and 150 have been mentioned in (or can be derived from) scientific research, as being optimal sizes for social groups. To me, 150 sounds to big, and impractical for an autonomous team. And then there are people that are convinced that a team should have an odd number of team members, so that a democratic decision will always have a majority. And then there is the principle of social loafing, first demonstrated by psychologist Max Ringelmann in the 1920s when he measured the pressure exerted by individuals and teams pulling on a rope. Groups of three exerted only two-and-a-half times (not three times) the average individual pressure. Groups of eight exhibited less than four times the individual average. Ringelmann’s and related studies have shown that individual effort is inversely related to team size. But is effort the same thing as effectiveness, especially when the work is not so much physical but requires intelligence and judgement? My analysis, based on all of these sources and my own experience in Lean-teams, results in the following graph. With the introduction of Super7, we discovered that a small team of about 7 people works great. What do you think?Graph team size