How quickly should you roll out a Lean transformation?

In recent posts we talked about blockages people get and how to get them through those blockages when doing a Lean transformation – Getting People to See Opportunity for Improvement Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. We dove deep into how to minimize blockages and the common archetypes you might see during a transformation effort. One thing we didn’t talk about as much is how quickly to move through a transformation and how do you know if you need to slow down or speed up? First off let’s define speed of implementation.

Speed of Change = (% [Unique Participants/Total People in the Department/Organization involved in projects] per Month * Average % [Time per each Unique Person] per Month)*100

This will give you a score from 0-100 and here is how you read the results

0- <5 You are not going to be doing enough to make a significant change in your culture and have a high chance of the Lean transformation failing in the long run
5- <10 You are doing well but might be moving a bit slow and depending on your turnover rate you may never get full momentum during your Lean Transformation.
10-25 This is a sweet spot. If you can keep at this pace monthly you will have highest probability of success with a Lean Transformation
>25-35 You are doing well but might be moving too fast and you might be taking too many resources away from running your business
>35-100 You are dedicated too many resources and while change can be fast you may not have enough resources to run your daily operations.

These are guidelines and a place for you to start to think about how you want to roll out your transformation. You could have once a month 2-3 day event with everyone and just shut down your business and get some work done, or you could decide to involve about 1/4th the staff in projects that take up 3/4 of the weeks of the month, or you could decide to involve 1/2 your people for 2 weeks out of the month in resolving challenges. You can mix it up from month to month and depending on your size you may be closer to the lower green band (large organizations) or to the upper green band (small organizations). The green band will gives you criteria to follow in getting saturation for Lean in your organization. Saturation means that once you have enough people believing in what you are doing then you hit a tipping point where it becomes easier to do Lean and much of your resistance goes away. Where do you currently fall into the chart? How has it been working for you?

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