Results-Driven Government

Session Summary

Perhaps the most powerful movement in state government is the shift to a focus on results, a shift being driven from within states by people committed to making a difference to the people they serve and excited to see that difference in concrete, measurable terms. This series explains the concepts that drive new management thinking that ultimately leads to remarkable changes in how a team, department and state operate.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand the origins of modern management
• Understand why it is critical to bring freedom and order into balance
• Understand what a management system is and how it is build
• Understand the Theory of Constraints and its application

Session Downloadable Handouts:

• Management Principles
• Deming’s 14 Points
• Waste Exercise
• Management System Schematic

Session Time: 25:15

Unleashing the greatest source of value

Session Summary

People are the source of improvement; improvement driven by their knowledge, experience, expertise and passion. Modern day management practices bring into balance an organization’s order and freedom, providing a system of management that enables people to act on their commitment to make government better.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand the complexity we as humans bring to work
• Understand the impact fear has on people
• Understand that the role of management has changed
• Understand how the management system determines if people get heard

Session Downloadable Handouts:

• Definition of fear
• Order/Freedom Assessment

Session time: 15:17

Those we serve define value

Session Summary

Everyone serves a customer, and the better that customer’s needs are understood, the easier it is to eliminate the waste in the work it takes to meet their needs. Customers define value – whether they are residents of the state or work in the office building next door – whoever receives your work is your customer.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand that we all have customers
• Understand employees are management’s customers
• Understand how to identify your customers
• Understand that it is critical to capture our customers needs in order to focus our work
• Understand how to assess your customer needs

Session Downloadable Handouts:

• Customer Need Assessment
• Sum Total of People

Session Time: 16:59

The power of seeing how we do our work

Session Summary

All work is the product of a process. We can understand even the most complex work if we take the time to walk through it step-by-step. Seeing it gives us the power to improve it. People often believe that becoming process-oriented means reducing flexibility and creativity, but just the opposite is true. Process thinking accelerates the learning curve by capturing what we know that works, and giving us a solid foundation for developing new ideas rather than relearning what others in the past have already learned.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand why processes are so important
• Understand the roles processes play in improving results
• Understand that being process driven doesn’t limit creativity, it harvests it
• Understand how processes play a central role in the performance of the organization

Session Downloadable Handouts:

• Exercise: Name a Process

Session Time: 20:13

Dealing with reality is a relief

Session Summary

Facts move us away from our heavy reliance on symptoms and opinions which often serve to mislead us to work on the wrong things. Facts reveal truths and make solving problems so much easier because the search for facts often leads us directly to the root cause. Facts also, oddly enough, tend to dampen emotion and drama because they help us focus on where our efforts will be most productive.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand how facts make life simpler
• Understand how to find facts where there are none
• Understand how you can find the right facts you need to solve your problem
• Understand how to take facts and find meaning

Session Downloadable Handouts:

• Encouraging the use of facts

Session Time: 22:06

True accountability demands safety

Session Summary

Healthy accountability is all about ownership for results in an environment where transparency is valued because it enables and inspires collaboration. For transparency to thrive, people have to be safe knowing blame has been replaced by the desire to find the root cause in the process so it can be minimized or eliminated.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand that we all have customers
• Understand the role accountability plays in resultsdriven government
• Understand the elements of accountability
• Understand accountability in situations where you don’t have control
• Understand the relationship between accountability and ownership

Session Downloadable Handouts:

• What is accountability?
• Rating your order/freedom balance?

Session Time: 16:00

Bringing Order and Freedom into Balance

Session Summary

We all work in a system of management, whether that system was intentionally designed to drive toward well-defined results or operates simply out of tradition and habit. Management is often thought of only as the activities of supervising people. In a results-driven world it is understood as a collection of processes developed and followed in order to enable the organization to define what it wants to accomplish, know how and who will accomplish it, know how it will monitor its progress and make adjustments along the way to maximize the ability to achieve the desired result. It is a full, closed loop system going through the plan, do, check, adjust cycle in a healthy, transparent and safe way.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand what makes state government so complex
• Understand the difference between managing people and management as a system
• Understand the purpose of a results-driven management system
• Understand the “doing and “being” aspects of an organization cultural transformation

Session Downloadable Handouts:

• Our Efficiency-Killing Tangle of Laws article

Session Time: 24:29

Making our Essential Work Visible

Session Summary

In a results-driven management system we understand that the only way results improve is when we improve processes, so it stands to reason we ought to identify and consciously monitor and manage our Core Processes. Identifying the most critical processes in your function is the first step in managing the results those processes achieve. Process thinking causes us to identify our processes, bring them into conscious view, identify the constraints, discover the root cause of those constraints, and then improve them. In this session you will identify the products or services your teams produces, name your team’s Core Processes involved in those, who those processes serve (your primary process customer), and what subprocesses make up that Core Processes. You will be all set to develop your process measures.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand the role your process play
• Identify the products/services your team produces
• Identify your team’s primary customers
• Identify your core processes and the subprocesses within them

Session Downloadable Handouts:

• Core Process Step-by-Step Guide
• Core process Blue Sheet
• Examples of core processes and subs

Session Time: 12:18

Seeing our constraints

Session Summary

Process Measures tell us how well our Core Processes are meeting the needs of those who receive their output – whether the output from those processes is a product or service. Process Measures serve as ”leading indicators” in that they indicate multiple dimensions of performance and serve to give immediate feedback when improvements are introduced. Best practices teach that processes should measures three dimensions, cost, quality and time. In this session you will be developing your Process Measures to support the processes you developed in your Core Process session.

Use What You Have:

• Understand what a process measure is
• Understand the forcefields of measurement
• Develop and define your team’s process measures

Session Downloadable Handouts:

• Forcefields summary
• Measures worksheet
• Measures worksheet example

Session Time: 10:34

Making performance visible

Session Summary

Scorecards, as proven in sports, keep us informed and focused, and those two things inspire us to work together to improve. Scorecard represent the unambiguous reality of how we are doing. Transparency and inspiration are totally dependent upon people’s sense of safety. A results-driven environment that focuses on finding the problem in the processes, instead of finding the person or persons to blame, is the only organization that can become high performing. Our scorecards, our transparency, depends upon how safe people feel. The rest is mechanical. In this session you will learn how to build a scorecard and get access to a number of valuable resources you will find useful.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand scorecard guidelines and practices
• Build your scorecard
• Using your scorecard

Session Downloadable Handouts:

• ORPERS
• AZC Bowling Chart
• OYA Sparklines

Session Time: 9:50

Keeping results front and center

Session Summary

Whether you use these powerful tools daily or once a week, in person or virtually, Performance and Flow Boards are easy and intuitive tools to engage your team in improving their department. Performance Boards help your team see how they are doing on their measures of performance, identify and work things that are in the way, keep track of problems, visualize ideas, make incremental improvement, recognize action, and aid communications across shifts and geographies. Flow Boards are powerful in their ability to help you see where working is bottlenecking, so your team can focus on its constraints and take down the stress inherent in the problems that get in the way every day. Learn step-by-step how to build and use these powerful tools.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand the power of visual management
• Understand how to bring a results-driven focus into your daily work
• Understand how to build and use a team Performance Board
• Understand how to build and use a Flow Board

Session Downloadable Handouts:

• Improvement Actions
• Performance Board Steps
• Flow Board Steps
• Daily Management Highlights

Session Time: 33:56

Managing your people for results

Session Summary

Results-driven government represents a significant change in the role of executives, managers, supervisors and frontline state employees. Everyone is focused on learning and on continuous improvement. These changes require the development of new skills. At a practical level as we expect everyone to engage in driving results – which means improving processes. There is no better place to help people advance their comfort and skills in this new environment than in a personal, one-on one coaching with a skilled and patient supervisor. This session includes the introduction of a Blue Sheet, an agenda for your one-on-one meetings that helps bring a results-focus to these critical conversations. It is prepared by the employee as part of learning accountability for the results they own. In this session you will learn how to hold effective one-on-one meetings and teach your employees how to use a Blue Sheet.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand the need to create a focus on results
• Understand your role in a results-driven environment
• Understanding how to work through your own resistance to change
• Understand how to coach for results

Session Downloadable Handouts:

• Blue Sheets
• Coaching Summary

Session Time: 39:57

The most critical new skill for everyone

Session Summary

Government today is challenged to do more and more with less and less, and that challenge is not going to go away. So where will you find the capacity to meet the demand? It is not going to come from outside government or from vast new sources of tax dollars, instead a significant proportion of it must come from within the existing processes. The good news is studies show that typically government process have as much as 60 percent of the activities within them that add no value – in the language of Lean this is called “waste”. The vast majority of processes in government have not had the benefit of process improvement, so there is plenty of waste to be removed. Process improvement teaches to approach improvement by working problems that are presenting themselves often in the form of issues that make our customers unhappy, endanger those we serve, cause us to fail to meet our obligations or get us in budget trouble. Rather than randomly making improvement, we improve what is broken because what is broken usually consumes lots of time and when we find that problem, we find a problem in the process. In this session you have everything you need to implement a process improvement project.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand the central role of process improvement
• Understand the basic process of process improvement
• Understanding the various models available and what they have in common
• Understand the 7-Step Method

Session Downloadable Handouts:

• Step-by-Step 7-Step
• Waste Defined
• 7-Step Storyboard

Session Time: 24:12

The 5 core tools you’ll need

Session Summary

We solve problems by improving our processes using these basic tools: Checksheets, Cause & Effect Diagrams, Process Maps, Pareto Charts and Run Charts. While there are many more tools available, these are the most versatile and essential. In this session you will learn the basics of the five power tools and how to put them to use to help you and your team improve processes.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand the use and value of the five power tools
• Understand when to use each of the five power tools
• Understand how to use each of the five power tools

Session Downloadable Handouts:

• The 5 power Tools Step-by-Ste
• The 5 Power Tools in Brief

Session Time: 30:09

Solving the problem begins by defining it

Session Summary

Before you start any process improvement or problem solving effort, get agreement on the problem in very clear terms. You can’t succeed if you aren’t aligned. A good problem statement aligns and focuses your improvement team from the outset.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand why it is critical for a team to agree on the problem statement
• Understand what an effective problem statement looks like
• Understand how to write an effective problem statement

Session Downloadable Handouts:

• Problem Statement Highlights

Session Time: 20:29

Seeing the work is understanding it

Session Summary

All work is done using a process. Even the most complex work can be understood if we take the time to walk through it step-by-step. In this session you will learn how to lead a team through the development of a process map.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand the use of process maps
• Understand how to build a process map
• Understand how to use each of the five power tools

Session Downloadable Handouts:

• Process Mapping Step-by-Step

Session Time: 25:13

Finding solutions that work

Session Summary

Every problem, once the root cause is understood, can be solved in a variety of ways. The simplest and most targeted solution is almost always the best. In this session you will learn how to select, test and implement a solution to the problem you are working to solve.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand the pitfalls to avoid in process improvement
• Understand smart boundaries to work within on your project
• Understand how to select solutions that make the most sense

Session Downloadable Handouts:

• Defining Solution Highlights

Session Time: 17:10

Holding the hard-fought gain

Session Summary

Gains have this funny way of way of drifting away. So it’s key to lock in the win achieved through process improvement. The way to do that is to keep the measure that’s improved highly visible and to make sure you take action immediately should it start declining again. In this session you will learn how to do this.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand what a control is
• Understand the impact of buy-in to control and how to build control from the outset
• Understand how to put in place controls to make sure you hold your gains

Session Downloadable Handouts:

• Securing the Wins Highlights

Session Time: 9:02