Category Archives: Lean

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! 

How to apply Super7 Operations without TITO

Is Super7 Operations possible without TITO, you might wonder? (Or, “What’s a TITO?”)

In my book on Super7 Operations (Super7 Operation – the Next Step for Lean in Financial Services), I describe the development of Super7 Operations – Lean and Operational Management with small autonomous teams. One of the crucial things in Super7 Operations is that there is a daily goal for each small autonomous Super7 team – one that they can reach by working together, by helping each other. In the first departments where Super7 Operations has been introduced successfully, this goal was to work TITO: Today-In, Today Out. All customer requests that are received today are processed today -finished today, the customer shouldn’t have to wait.  The team’s common goal is: finish all customer requests that you receive today or at least those that you receive up to one hour before closing time. The fluctuation in ‘demand’ isn’t buffered with inventory, but is answered with sufficient flexibility in capacity.

Recently, Super7 Operations was introduced in several operational departments where the nature of the work made it impossible or extremely impractical to work TITO. Request that take more than one day to process, in one instance. In another, extreme peaks and lows, with almost all requests of one month coming in in one single batch (Naturally, batches are evil (to summarize one of the principles of Lean to the extreme).  But sometimes batches happen).

We have found that it is possible to work with other daily goals than TITO. This requires more sophisticated planning, for one, to translate the total demand into daily goals. Working with goals like TITO+5 doesn’t work, as we experienced. The team needs to have a clear goal for each day, which is higher when demand is high and lower when demand is low. Only then you get the commitment, improvement and cooperation that you expect from Super7 Operations.

If you’r interested in how this planning for daily goals works, please drop me a note below. I can give you more details, if you want. Or, you can join the discussion on www.super7ops.com

A new book on Super7 Operations!

Super7 Operations –  a book by Menno van Dijk 

(tip: clik the link above ↑ to buy the book at amazon.com)

 Naamloos

                       

“Why did you decide to write this book on Super7 Operations?”

–          “To me, Super7 Operations is the logical next step for LEAN in financial services. I’m proud that we developed this innovation within ING. I’m so enthousiastic about it, it would be fantastic if this innovation would spread across the financial world. So much more can be achieved with LEAN than cost reduction alone. LEAN can become the culture within which people truly work together to improve every day.  That’s the foundation of Super7.  We believe in the abilities of our people, we trust them and give them responisibilities, and we steer on output. This improves the service to our customers. And, LEAN becomes FUN again! I had to write a book about Super7 Operations, to give as much people as possible the chance to learn about it.

“What were the reactions so far?”

–          “Very positive indeed! That started already with the publiser: the book was selected as “Editors Choice”,  something that I’m very proud of. And the feedback that I have received from readers has been great too.”

“Are you planning to write more in the future?”

–          “Well, we have been working on developing Super7 Operations further within ING. The method has been introduced in much more teams, some with totally different type of work than where Super7 Operations first was developed. For instance, what do you do when TITO (today-in-today-out) isn’t possible, when the nature of the work is such that it takes more than one day to complete it? This requires a different way of setting daily goals.  These developments may make a  great addition to the existing book, maybe for the second edition?”

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

 

Updated White Paper: Team Targets or Individual Targets for Super7 Operations

Super7 Operations is based of small teams, working on a common goal. What does that mean for their team targets and incentives?

A lot has been said about bonuses and target related incentives, the past few years. Do they lead to irresponsible behaviour and risk taking within financial institutions? Should managers from state-owned companies, or companies relying on state support, get a bonus if they meet their targets? Interesting questions; however, that’s not what this blog is about. How bonuses and incentives influence the way teams work together, especially in Lean organisations, now that’s something I’m very passionate about.

In my experience as a Lean consultant, I have often found that organisations struggle to maintain the initial rate of improvement: when autonomous production teams, lean quality circles or TPM-teams are first formed, the performance improves spectacular. 20%-50% increase in productivity or machine output is achieved almost every time. In some exceptional situations, I even encountered productivity increase of over 100%. Enough to exceed my clients’ expectations, but my goal was always to get to a state of ‘continuous improvement’. This is when the production teams continue to improve: relentlessly reducing waste, again and again improving their standards.

I strongly believe that financial team incentives can play an important role in making the final step towards continuous improvement. That is why I did this literature search: to find out if my believe is supported by reliable research.

My conclusion: Several publications, especially on effectiveness of ‘Operational Excellence teams’ (e.g. TPM teams, autonomous teams, six sigma project teams, etc.), confirm that team incentives are more effective than individual targets. However, I had to adjust my strong believe on two points:

  • Also individual targets have their merits, and a combination of team and individual targets may well be worth considering
  • Targets and incentives aren’t the only driver, nor the main driver, for success of Operational Excellence teams, and they should be part of an integral approach

New White Paper: optimal team size

Lean and Super7 Operations work with small, autonomous teams. Exactly how small should our small autonomous teams be?

This is the question the manager of the central back-office of a large Dutch retail bank asked me, when I proposed the idea of autonomous team to him. At the time, I was working on a project to introduce customer focus and to realise same-day processing in his organisation. I came up with an innovative organisation design, in which small teams are responsible for their work for that day, i.e. all customer request of a certain type that the bank had received that day. After successful pilots, the organisation wanted to introduce this way of working for all (ca. 400) employees. That’s when this question came up…
 
From experience, I knew that the teams shouldn’t be too big: the pilots were done with teams of 5 – 7 persons. However, factual substantiation was needed. A quick search showed me that a lot of research had been done on Agile / Scrum teams, so that’s where I started. And this article is the result: a literature search on the optimal team size for autonomous teams.

My conclusion is: Organisational design isn’t an exact science. As an engineer, I would have loved to have found statistically sound measurements on the effectiveness of teams of different sizes – but in truth, I think that team size isn’t the main driver for team effectiveness. However, if your customer, the type of work your customer asks you to do, requires your organisation to work in small teams, I would suggest – as I did to the manager of the banking back office: small teams consist of 5 to 9 persons. Or, If the flexibility of your workforce allows this, as it did in the case of the banking back office: flexible team size, ranging from 5 on slow days to 9 on a busy day.

At the moment of writing, the banking back office has implemented the new way of working, and has asked me to do a ‘check-up’ on effectiveness of the new organisation. I can’t wait to start: Ï wonder what I will find, but I bet that it will be inspiration for several articles on CoOperationalExcellence.nl!
 

White Paper: Optimal Team Size

Team targets or individual targets? Does in matter for Operational Excellence?

Team targets are essential for making Lean, Lean Six Sigma and Super7 Operations work.

Despite the increasing popularity of Six Sigma as an effective improvement methodology, many Six Sigma projects fail to deliver expected savings. The topmost reason why Six Sigma projects fall short of expectations is a lack of management engagement at the right level of the organization.

While a lack of commitment and sponsorship is the leading cause of project short falls, there are several other important reasons for project short falls, including:

  • Lack of team cohesion and leadership
  • Lack of effective project monitoring mechanism such as setting of targets and monitoring
  • Difficulty leading distributed teams
  • Improper motivation to associates
  • Differences between employees
  • Non cooperation in both horizontal and vertical due to individual targets

To overcome above mentioned problems and to achieve six sigma targets and benefits top management has to set up group targets and incentives accordingly with the help of HR team, yearly appraisals, bonuses and individual key performance indicators (KPI’s) metrics also should have reflection of team achievements. Hence all major organizations are setting group targets and group incentive plans to achieve six sigma goals and targets.

Cooperational Excellence: what’s in a name?

Cooperational Excellence: People working toghether in small teams to create excellence in your operation. This may be nothing new under the sun for manufacturing and assembly plants: mini-factories, autonomous teams, u-cell manufacturing, quality circles etc. have become the standard in the last decenia. Especially in automotive, where off course Toyota still sets the standards (Toyota Production System).

In creating Service Excellence, these methCooods and organisational principles haven’t been applied so widely. Recently, I have implemented autonomous teams in a back-office of a large financial service provider, with even for me unexpected success: costs are down, queues and ‘inventory’ have almost completely dissapeared – which means waiting times for the customer times have also – and employees and management are enthousiastic about esponsiblitly on the ‘shop floor’ instead  top-down management control.

I have named this, the application of manufacturing-style teamwork in administration and service, cooperational excellence: working toghether in small teams in close cooperation, to achieve operational excellence.

If you want to know more, contact me, or just check regularly for new posts on this website!