Lean deployment

A lean deployment always generates significant results, but only if management is also willing to question its practices and deeply held beliefs. Visible support for lean from the executive committee and managerial involvement are essential. If present, these factors are critical to the success of a project; if absent, failure is certain.

Operae Partners helps upper and middle managers to:

• Understand what benefits they can expect from deploying lean
• Find the right words to communicate their expectations to employees
• Identify potential avenues of improvement, and develop the habit of self-examination to find reasons why the enterprise is not performing as well as it could
• Acquire the necessary attitude to achieve the expected results.

The involvement of the executive committee grows stronger as a lean deployment progresses. Their support is the wellspring of a mobilization toward continuous improvement throughout the hierarchy.

Operae Partners intervenes at all levels of the business to transfer the skills and attitudes necessary to practice lean. Its lean deployment strategy is designed to:

• Foster a spirit of collective awareness and action
• Demonstrate the benefits of lean right away, in a limited number of supervised projects,
• Transform the business culture gradually, by deploying lean one team at a time.

Every coach at Operae Partners supports this program with two core competencies: intimate knowledge of the economic and managerial models driving the enterprise, and recognized expertise in the theory and practice of deploying lean in the service industry. All our coaches have practiced lean exclusively for several years.

An enterprise or department wishing to deploy lean should create an internal team to promote and guide the process. The team consists of:

• A change leader. This person knows the enterprise backwards and forwards, is respected by management, is determined, and is personally committed to the success of the lean approach. He is capable of identifying a transformation model that will guide the operational improvements made by teams towards economic results, and will get personally involved to make this happen.
• One to three lean coaches, depending on the size of the project management team. A lean coach is equally at ease sharing knowledge with an operational team in the field, or explaining the team’s decisions and their context to the manager sponsoring their transition. Their principal mission is to train the lean project managers.
• Lean project managers. These work with teams in the field to guide them through the lean approach. They know the method, know how to lead a project, and are comfortable with the work being done by the team. Their mission is to teach the team leaders how to identify pertinent improvements and obtain operational results over the long term.

Although the three profiles are distinct, each member of the internal lean team must share the same desire to learn and the courage to progress by questioning ingrained assumptions and deeply held beliefs. Operae Partners has wide experience in transferring lean skills and attitudes to the internal team in charge of deploying lean throughout a business. We know that our coaches are excellent, because our clients obtain large-scale results with little intervention on our part. In practice, our coaches regularly assess the level of skill attained by the internal team, and define appropriate challenges to encourage everyone to continue their apprenticeship in lean. They explain and demonstrate lean practices with benevolence, propose a rigorous framework of observation and analysis for problem-solving, and give teams ample leeway to identify and implement effective paths of improvement.

Deploying lean only makes sense if the client truly wants to change their paradigm. The breakthrough will result in real performance improvements: increased client satisfaction, fewer defects, reduced delays, and lower costs. We strive to obtain results as quickly as possible, because rapid improvement means a real competitive advantage for the enterprise. Furthermore, when a deployment produces visible results early in a project, every stakeholder grows more confident in the lean approach.

When it decides to deploy lean, an enterprise expects impressive results. Operae Partners helps its clients achieve these results:

Project selection:

In just a few days, we can identify the scope of activity with a real potential for improvement, and evaluate the levels of performance attainable by projects. In this way, we can supply the enterprise with a steady stream of new projects suitable for lean deployment.

Project orthodoxy:

We are experts in deploying lean in the service and information technology industries. We immediately recognize ideas that are intellectually tempting but ineffective in practice, nipping them in the bud before the client wastes time implementing them. Our rigorous approach is based on our practical experience coaching hundreds of improvement projects, on professional exchanges with other lean communities working in the IT and service industries since 2007, and on established methodologies for the observation, analysis and guidance of projects.

Project governance:

We teach our clients to tackle very short projects, only about three months long, which nonetheless deliver exceptional results. The milestones are clear and we have developed best practices for leading projects, making it easy for the client to deploy lean on a grand scale.