Ronald N. Cooke

Sometimes the plan goes astray when we loose sight of the basics.

Early in my time as a green belt, I was on a project that required the shipment of some parts to another country for inspection. The package had stopped moving in customs in the destination country. It had not been blocked by the government from its final destination, just no movement out of customs.

The black belt had assumed that the addressee knew about how long clearing customs would take, and when to do a status check. This assumption did not turn out to be valid. The communications and cooperation between the three parties involved did not go well, so that the package was not received in a timely manner.

We need to facilitate the progress of our projects by diligently monitoring tasks every step of the way. This is not to say that we check on progress so much that we antagonize the participants, but it needs to be often enough to realize reasonable progress.

Every aspect of a project needs to be monitored and coaxed to completion. Otherwise, what should be completed in a short time may turn into a long time, and become a big delay. Those parts were important to our customer, and had a major effect on customer satisfaction. Lost days turned into lost production and lower profits for our customer, and damaged our reputation.

Although the root cause of delays need to be addressed, placing blame can be counterproductive. When blame is placed, people may stop bringing concerns to management, thus hiding the problem.

Even when we find what seems to be the root cause, which in this case was not  checking status and facilitating movement, it might not be the true root cause. Ask one more “why”, and you find that the black belt could have monitored progress more effectively by using a monitoring plan. Here is where there could have been a more thorough documentation of possible failure modes.

Lesson learned: projects need to show reasonable progress, which can often be tied to communication, cooperation, and diligence.

Do you have additional thoughts that you would be willing to share?

I am currently looking forward to the next step in my career. If you know of someone looking for a problem solver, I can be contacted at ronald.n.cooke@gmail.com or 815-579-5866.

P. S.  I like to do documentation!

One Response to “Back to Basics”