How can you apply lean principles to transition management?

From my experience, the first step is not to define value, but to create a culture of engagement. From the very start of any lean transition, you need to get buy-in from management and from everyone in the organization. Without engaging the company in the change that will take place you will end up with a lot of expensive technical knowledge, but little stickiness in terms of long-term application. A great place to start is by getting the leadership to value engagement first. If the company believes that they are good and they are unwilling to change to be great, then that will not change much by mapping the value stream, identifying wastes, implementing Kanban systems or anything else that is done.

Easier said than done, the first step is to carry the customer's persona's and adopt his mental model in that manner your express the needs, expectations and preference. Consider using a customer journey mapping exercise to identify a holistic sequence and avoid boxing up the customer experience based on internal operating procedures alone. Consider the complaints and review your annual voice of the customer feedback so you can validate the dependencies and obstacles shared. The reality check here is important or else it would be another technical exercise that reduces wastages but fails to delight the customer at the same time.

One of the first questions that Beck & Cowan ask in the Book "Spiral Dynamics" for starting a change is: What business are you in? Repeatedly I've experienced this question to be very powerful. Without knowing your what "value" means in your business you have no idea what should be achieved. Similarly, understanding what are valid value streams and which steps it takes in order to create this value, you cannot focus on improving that. So... start with defining your value exchange model between customer/user and your business. Understand how current value streams achieve that and, based on that, think of what you want to change at all.

In my experience the Wastes in Transitions are multifold :- 1) Having a detailed upfront transition plan instead of an evolving plan results into efforts which are not used 2) When the objectives of transition are not clearly established, people take various directions in the transition effort which results into rework and waste 3) If the transition methods are not easy to use, it creates a waiting time to understand and process for its relevant consumers, it also creates waste

Rather than see PDCA as a tool that is used every so often it is helpful to consider is as a thinking methodology for employees. A simple way to do this is to start managing by using the PDCA as a coaching framework. If used in combination with the Goal, Reality, Options, What Next (GROW) coaching framework it provides a powerful coaching mechanism to integrate innovation into standard operating procedures and embed improvement in the company.

Making the Transition process collaborative and seeking the inputs of the people on the ground creates an immense buy-in and trust and strengthens the purpose of Transition. This automatically results into fast paced transitions.

This is one of the guiding principles that has paramount importance in implementing any change. They engagement starts before the planning process even. However, sometimes teams lose sight and/ orundermine the importance of stakeholder engagement. The collaborative environment that is created through stakeholder engagement bears fruit from the start till the end of the project, and even post implementation.

From my experience, it is helpful to consider a lean culture as a change management process. To really make practices such as visual management, 5S and root cause analysis stick requires a behavioural change that does not only think about these things as tools in a toolbox, but as habits in a discipline of management and work. This way a company can grow to expect improvement rather than view it as a special event.