Business901 » Product Launch

A Product Marketers perspective on Prototyping

business901 — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 03:30:00 +0000

Matthew Yubas is the author of Getting Your Prototype Made Quick and Easy and a Marketing Consultant for the Small Business Development and International Trade Center. He has developed products for 24 years as an Engineer, Product Manager, and Consultant for startups, small business, and Fortune 500 companies. As an young entrepreneur, he was a co-founder of a software company that developed one of the first personal information management software products.

Matt has launched new products such as software applications, wireless devices, and websites. In addition, he has helped clients in a diverse number of industries that include photography equipment, auto accessories, soy candles, children’s clothing, sporting goods, digital art, and home décor. Matthew is the author of several articles, eBooks, kits, and the popular book Product Idea to Product Success: A Complete Step-by-Step Guide to Making Money from Your Idea .

Download Podcast: Click and choose options: Prototype or go to the Business901 iTunes Store.

Matt’s mission is to help inventors, entrepreneurs, and everyday people with ideas. He Says, “You might have an invention that can benefit society and make our lives easier. No one can do it alone. If you haven’t taken a product to the market before, you need a coach to help you get over the hurdles and past the many pitfalls. Be persistent, be smart, and gather the right information before you make your next move”. Mark can be found at http://productcoach.com.

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Prototyping into a Working Form

business901 — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 03:32:00 +0000

An original idea may be your starting point and Your First Prototype is with Pen and Paper. If or when your idea receives support from others, you will be at a point to take more serious design steps. Most successful product launches start with a clear vision of what they want to accomplish. This is not saying that you will not change or even “Pivot” later on but without that clear vision initially it is very difficult to generate a lot of steam that is required to drive to a successful conclusion.

In the book Innovation Acceleration: Transforming Organizational Thinking, the authors use the term “project pillars” as a way of clarifying your vision. Their example was the “project pillars” for the Palm Pilot.

Fits in pocket.
Synchronizes seamlessly with PC
Fast and easy to use
Costs no more than $299

The authors go on to say:

The company was able to build the world’s first successful personal digital assistant. Meeting those constraints required a lot of trial and error, but it provided targets to focus the team’s creative energies. Once you have nailed the general design concept, this approach leads to more innovative outcomes rather than meandering aimlessly from one idea to another. This is a tricky position because you have to balance direct with an open mind.

They outline a design thinking process in the book that I believe can be utilized in designing your prototype. I paraphrase their material and combined with my own into a format for prototypes:

Keep good records – Archive everything. I use to use a box in my room for different design projects. I would tear out magazine articles, copies of book pages, pictures, sketches. I have since narrowed that down and store most of my files electronically that also includes audio and video recordings, links to other material and so forth.

Constantly generate and refine ideas based on customer’s perspective – This is not problem solving. It is one of the reasons that I discuss the Marketing Gateway of EDCA > PDCA>SDCA. It is also why getting a prototype out in front of customer early – even in the pen and paper stage is so important. What we think are great ideas, may not be so great. If you are going to be radical as Clayton Christensen says, “Consider your customers’ deepest values and interest rather than their purchasing behavior”.

Visualization, Mock-ups, Models – This is the most effective way of advancing an idea into reality. This is the heart of your prototype. Remember that verbal communication is often misunderstood. A better way to communicate your idea is to express it in some type of visual form. It can be done through sketches, mechanical drawings, or 3-D computer programs. As the old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. If a picture is worth a thousand words, an actual physical representation is worth a million words. If you want to get great feedback on your idea, build a prototype. Nothing gets your idea across better than something people can view from different angles and provide questions and feedback. One of the reasons managers struggle with this guideline is that they fear a lot of craftsmanship and expertise is required to build a prototype, but this is not necessarily true. Prototypes can be inexpensive and basic.

When you see a prototype being used, or played with you’ll know you’re on the right path. One of my favorite stories and coincidentally again about the Palm Pilot was that the inventor went into a “Shark Tank” (not the TV show or a literal definition) and was completely ill-prepared. Looking around for something to engage his audience, he tossed a wallet in the middle of the table and said it would look something like this. Moments later, he saw them starting to look at the wallet and knew the deal was done when they started passing the wallet around the table.

Consciously Select Solution Paths – You will face issues as you proceed. This is the point where discipline is important. People may give up because the problems seem too overwhelming to solve. In Mark Graban‘s Book Review: One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way on his blog, he states:

Maurer also has tips and lessons about rewiring one’s brain for kaizen and changes, including leading yourself and others by asking small questions, such as “What’s the smallest step I can take to be more efficient?”, learning to practice this habit in a kaizen style by starting small…

Mauer also makes a great case for how we start, with kaizen, by learning how to see and address little problems. Then, we are able to see and fix larger problems.

This is why prototyping early is so important. It allows for minor changes in the process and the ability to undo changes that later may prove to be ineffective. If you can overcome these challenges, it will give you a competitive advantage over other companies, because you will have gained particular knowledge and a distinct product for the market.

Your solution path is very much like an airplane ride. You are continuously off course, constantly adjusting and finally arriving at your destination.

Get Feedback and Involvement from a variety of People – Search for feedback from a diverse group of potential customers, suppliers, fellow managers, employees, and content experts. You may get a lot of suggestions, but only a few might be useful (that’s okay; it is a journey). You never know when someone will give you an unexpected insight that would have been overlooked had you not searched out a lot of the opinion of others. The key point is to build something you can receive feedback on and return to rebuild as soon as possible. Moreover, with available technologies today, it’s getting easier to make prototypes. But don’t stop there. What about an interactive play? What would a sales presentation look like as a prototype? You could invite customers and maybe even local actors and directors of local theaters. This is play time, use it and get the most out of it from as many people as possible.

Prototyping is meant to be an iterative process. But this is a new practice for most people and organizations. Most people within organizations are implementing orders and maintaining the way a company operates. So how do create this type of thinking and bring it into reality in everyday work? More importantly, how do you learn to experiment?

P.S. Want to get an idea across, or a problem solved in an internal setting. Remember the old game of telephone. – give them a prototype and see what develops.

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Why Prototype? Customer Interactivity is the Most Meaningful Part of Design

business901 — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 05:33:02 +0000

Prototypes are becoming a design deliverable with the advent of many sophisticated software applications spurred by Rapid Prototyping, 3D Modeling etc. However, the initial paper sketch is arguably the best tool, at least in the beginning. Prototyping helps us to design better user experiences. However, many of us still forget to include the user! We still dwell on what we can do versus looking at what the user does! Even at the paper stage of prototyping, I encourage you to try to articulate that feeling and function of the design into a model and put it in the hands of the user. Their interactivity is the most meaningful part of design. Do it early and do it often.

From adaptive path blog, Rapid Prototyping Tools:

Making Effective Prototypes

In order to evaluate a prototyping tool or technique, we first need to define what makes an effective prototype. The best prototypes are ones that slipstream right into our design process. We want the ability to quickly take sketches from a whiteboard to something interactive.

Effective prototypes are fast. We want to use techniques that allow for rapid iteration. A prototype should not just be bolted onto the end of a design process. Incorporating the creation of a prototype into your daily design work allows new ideas to emerge and validates concepts quickly.

Effective prototypes are disposable. Just like with any design deliverable, we are creating an artifact intended to express an idea to someone else (stakeholder, developer, user, etc). Once that design idea has been communicated, the prototype deliverable can be discarded. We don’t have to feel the burden of creating a masterpiece that will live on, and we certainly don’t have to work in production-level code.

Effective prototypes are focused. We want to select the interactions of our design that really need to be prototyped. Look for the parts of your design that have of complexity. Look for interaction patterns repeated throughout the user’s experience. Look for the interactions that bring revenue to your product. A prototype that demonstrates these interactions will be the best use of your time and energy.

An informative presentations on prototyping is from Jonathan Arnowitz who happens to be one of the authors of Effective Prototyping with Excel. In the book, the authors discuss how to use use Excel skills to create prototypes especially for wire frames. It is interesting how such a common and widely owned tool can offer such a wide array of solutions. The presentation below labors on wireframes at the beginning but the message soon turns into applicable information for all.

Effective Prototyping Process for Software Creation

View more presentations from Jonathan Arnowitz

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How Disney goes to Gemba to extend marketing for parks?

business901 — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 03:45:00 +0000

They looked at how being on the ground with your consumer is the tiebreaker when it comes to "making it happen" in the current marketing climate. It’s likely you’re being pushed now to deliver more results in an exceedingly challenging marketplace. If you’re not engaging your audience directly with face-to-face marketing, you may be missing your biggest opportunity. – From Red7 Media on Vimeo.

Alex Ruiz, Promotions Manager of Disney Parks, and Steve Randazzo, President of Pro Motion Inc., examine Disney Parks’ highly successful "What Will You Celebrate?" tour campaign, as well as look at other efforts that enjoyed similar results.

Integration of Experiential: How Disney Parks Grabbed Attention, Drove ROI and Made Their Marketing a Celebration to Remember

From the ProMotion1.com Website:

What they did: Personally distribute over 150,000 helium filled iconic Mickey Mouse balloons with golden invitations for people in 31 different markets across the country over the course of 30 weeks.

How they did it: The tour consisted of two teams with multiple vehicles, hundreds of Pro Motion hired brand ambassadors and hundreds of local-market volunteers fulfilling the program. Visits were structured as quick-hits. Preceded by pre-arrival awareness generated by in-market media partnerships, tour teams spent one-to-two days in each city delivering unique in-market celebration activities amidst a buzz of media coverage. They also showed up to celebrate special accomplishments at places such as the Race for the Cure in Chicago and, fresh on the heels of her son’s record-breaking Olympic triumph, at the middle school where Debbie Phelps principals.

When we think of all the different types of marketing that we do it is always about how can we make it seem real. The easiest answer to this so many times is simply go to Gemba. I have an old saying that even in this day of high technology seems to becoming more and more true: Business is still done with a handshake.

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Putting Customer Value in the Product Lifecycle

business901 — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 05:00:00 +0000

How are you at managing your Products Lifecycles? Are they being managed from Conception to Disposal or in a Green world, Recycled. I find this quite often an area that can develop rapid growth and additional streams of income very quickly. The organizations that are doing well in this economy are a result of taking a more outside in approach to the product lifecycle.

Using a very simple Lifecycle diagram made up of five components, we can demonstrate this approach.

What most companies are doing:

Innovation & Engineering: Using new innovations tactic they are designing products with greater flexibility offer more product choices and flexibility later in the design process, Toyota Scion.
Manufacturing: Lean processes have made tremendous advances in manufacturing the past several decades and has changed the way we view our own products. Learning to See Customer Value from the eyes of the customer has allowed for significant improvements in quality and customer satisfaction.
Sale & Distribution: At the point of sale, customers now experience more choices, more flexibility and better pricing than they have ever had.
Maintenance & Repair: Our expectations due to the advancement in quality accept little if any repair or maintenance during the entire lifecycle. We probably will throw it away before fixing it. However, when we do we will take it to a specialist versus doing it ourselves.
Disposal & Recycling: We expect more of our items to be recyclable. Or is there is value left, saleable and that there is an easy distribution method for that to happen. A few examples are E-bay or Craigslist.

This is the normal lifecycle and expectations of most products and even services. So what makes you better? What differentiates you? It is a difficult chore to do it. It is even more difficult to get someone to notice it. And even more difficult to get someone to pay for it!!

What are the successful companies doing:

Some companies make one of these areas a differentiator and target a customer segment that values that component. You can possibly charge more if that value proposition is strong enough for that segment or you can make it a minimal cost by burying it in the total cost of the service, such as a subscription rate. That price difference may seem minimal to that customer segment. Another way is to make one of these propositions an operational advantage that actually is saving you money. This is similar to the Theory of Constraints, Mafia offer.

Companies are also partnering with others to create additional income streams and to maintain better customer “control”. For example, these companies may offer the ability to take and/or dispose of trade-ins. Or, additional service contracts, product attachments or aftermarket products may be possible.

What are the really successful companies doing:

The really successful companies are not improving but looking at a totally different lifecycle. They realize that the value of product has diminished. There may even be little value place in the cost of ownership. The value is derived from the use of the product not in owning the product. So, they are looking at how to create value throughout the entire lifecycle.

Innovation & Engineering: Using Design Thinking Process, we focus on delivering to the customer Rapid Prototypes or Minimum Viable Products to garner their acceptance.
Manufacturing: These processes are becoming practically secondary in nature. This is not where you make your money but where you continue your journey of development. No longer is software delivered in a box, it is in the cloud. You sell iPads, iPhones and iPods or even cars but the value is in what this enables the customer to do.
Sale & Distribution: It is an entry point through a community and a joint-education process with the customer.
Maintenance & Repair: Maintenance and repair is practically non-existent. This is where we maximize the value for the customer and extend his ability to do business better.
Disposal & Recycling: Since there was little if any original value, there is little if any disposal or it is just a matter of returning it to you.

Think of what Amazon does.

Innovation & Engineering: They have created Kindle and made a unique shopping experience that few match.
Creating Content: They package, publish and inventory books.
Educations and Community: Over 50% of the books sold on Amazon are electronic. This has now created a one-time fee of $150 for the Kindle, the cost of an eBook and instant delivery at the point of sale has made the purchase a minimal part of the experience. The price is relatively not an issue in most cases. It is just as often a decision based on the time you have. They educate you about product and though it may be a stretch since they have been around so long, were introduced through a community or eWOM.
Maintenance & Repair: How often do you visit Amazon, just for a book purchase? They make a book purchase an adventure. You are updated, notified, asked for opinions, receive recommendations and watch your package travel to the destination. It is a journey with numerous touch-points that extend to your next purchase.
Disposal & Recycling: Accept used book returns and allows you to loan certain books on Kindle.

As you develop your product lifecycle to an outside–in-approach it creates more touch points and more opportunities to interact with the customer. It also allows you greater opportunity to add value to your customer’s experience. That value will become an integral part of the way they do business. The strongest differentiator you can have.

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Rehearsing your next Sales Call, why not?

business901 — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 03:21:00 +0000

At the Serious Play conference, designer Tim Brown talks about the powerful relationship between creative thinking and play — with many examples you can try at home (and one that maybe you shouldn’t).

Tim Brown is the CEO of innovation and design firm IDEO, taking an approach to design that digs deeper than the surface. Having taken over from founder David E. Kelley, Tim Brown carries forward the firm’s mission of fusing design, business and social studies to come up with deeply researched, deeply understood designs and ideas — they call it "design thinking."

One thing that I have been encouraging lately is role playing. Since we have become a service society our product has become us. Have you ever videotaped or just talked into your webcam to see how you looked and sounded? Technology has made it so easy and at practically no cost. The benefits of a rehearsal can make all the difference.

How about role playing an issues they were having with your service team? Getting a few actors from your local college to role play for you could be a lot fun in a training session. Think about developing ways to mimic the problems your customer faces. If nothing else, you could be putting yourself in their shoes – not a bad idea at all!

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Can we build organizations to foster good ideas?

business901 — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 03:46:00 +0000

New ideas come from networks and forming new networks create new ideas! People often credit their ideas to individual "Eureka!" moments. But Steven Johnson shows how history tells a different story. His fascinating tour takes us from the "liquid networks" of London’s coffee houses to Charles Darwin’s long, slow hunch to today’s high-velocity web.

Great story on how GPS was discovered. Fascinating!

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Has Technology Killed Time?

business901 — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 11:43:00 +0000

Some of the most popular books and even a few of my most popular blog posts are all centered around words like:

Fast

Rapid

Speed

Now

Immediate

Instantaneous

Quick

Has Technology killed time?

Whatever happen to the words, I need to sleep on it or let me think about it? Can you imagine your kids saying that or even accepting that answer? I still remember when a quick answer seemed imprudent, even impulsive. Maybe, I am just showing my age?

BTW: I think FORA.tv has a great looking video.

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Transforming your Supply Chain to a Lean Fulfillment Stream eBook

business901 — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 02:26:00 +0000

This is a transcription of the Businss901 Podcast with Robert Martichenko, CEO and Founder of LeanCor. We discussed applying Lean Principles to the Supply Chain. I found many of his answers very unique and his approaches straight forward and practical. At the upcoming Lean Logistics Summit, June 22nd and 23rd in Cincinnati, OH, Robert leads off the event as the keynote speaker.

Robert Martichenko co-authored the Lean Enterprise Institute’s newest lean workbook, Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream. Building on the concepts of waste, flow, and pull, this pioneering workbook illustrates how to analyze the traditional supply chain as a flowing stream of products and information. Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream provides the steps to a comprehensive, real-life implementation process for optimizing your entire fulfillment stream from raw materials to customers. This book follows the Lean Workbook format popularized by the publisher, Lean Enterprise Institute.

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Utilizing the Theory of Constraints in Product Innovation Ebook

business901 — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 16:45:17 +0000

In the three part podcast I had with Mike Dalton the founder of Guided Innovation Group, we discussed utilizing the Theory of Constraints in Innovation, the Customer Value Lens and Alliances in great detail. This is a transcription of the entire 3-part series.

Theory of Constraints in Innovation

In Mikes recent book, Simplifying Innovation: Doubling speed to market and new product profits – with your existing resources, he discussed the Guided Innovation’s unique TOC-based approach to rapid innovation improvement is helping companies slash time to market in half and nearly double new product profits. Whether you are struggling to get more sales impact from your new product and innovation investment or are growing strongly but still interested in taking your innovation performance to the next level. Customer Value Lens and much more. The book was just released in January and has received some good reviews.

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Fail Early and Fail Often

business901 — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 12:19:00 +0000

Scoot Anthony is one of my favorite authors and has authored several books to include Seeing What’s Next: Using Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change and The Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times. His advice about innovation in this video supports the message that I have been discussing recently not only in product innovation but also in marketing in general. It is no so much about your idea, but how the customer reacts to your idea. This is what has driven software developers to Agile. This message still seems a little foreign in many product development divisions and even more so in the marketing arena. Fail early and fail often may become my new motto. Enjoy what Scott has to say and remember to….

Test, TEST, TEST!

Related Posts:

Digging deeper with User Stories

Using Stories to explain your Marketing Efforts

Agile Marketing – Maybe?

Start your Marketing with a User Story

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I am reading this before my next webinar, are you?

business901 — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 04:25:00 +0000

Whether he’s introducing the new iPhone or delivering a keynote presentation, Steve Jobs electrifies audiences with his incomparable style and showmanship. He doesn’t just convey information in his presentations; he tells a story, paints a picture, and shares a vision. He gives his audience a transformative experience that is unique, inspiring, and unforgettable.

Now you can do it too, by learning the specific techniques that have made Jobs the most captivating communicator on the world stage. Using Jobs’s legendary presentations as a blueprint, communication-skills coach Carmine Gallo has mapped out a ready-to-use framework of presentation secrets to help you plan, deliver, and refine the best presentation of your life.

You’ll learn how to:

Create an inspiring brand story
Answer the one question that matters most
Paint a specific, memorable, and consistent vision
Make numbers meaningful
Deliver unforgettable moments
Build visually engaging slides
Master stage presence
Make it look effortless
Rehearse effectively
Have fun

Read a Free Chapter courtesy of McGraw-Hill-Hill

Just Buy-it: The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience

My Next Webinar: Value Stream Marketing Webinar

Technorati Tags: Steve Jobs,Presentations,Webinars,Storyboards,A3 Reporting

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Affiliate Marketing an easy way to make money – Fact or Fiction

business901 — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 04:54:00 +0000

What prompted this post was a blog post on American Express Open Forum by Chris Brogan. Chris is one of my favorite bloggers and someone that I have always held in very high esteem. However, when I read his post it left me the impression that he made Affiliate Marketing seem like an easy way to make money. He throws out the estimated numbers in 2009 for affiliate marketing of 13 billion. Heck at 13 billion, anyone can get a piece of that pie or can they?

I left a short comment on the post that I would like to expand on. As a disclaimer, I would like to mention that I make money on affiliate sales and have set up a few clients with affiliate programs. There is also affiliate links sprinkled through my website so be careful.

That all important Affiliate Link, that code that you get that is embedded in your links, banners, skyscrapers and anything else that will accept a hyperlink. All you have to do is embed it and people will click on it and you make money or do you.

Most links will register a client’s computer by embedding a cookie on to their computer. So what happens when a client cleans his cookies? What happens if he sees and discovers the product and investigates just enough before he clicks through and then searches for the site? And the one that is just about always the case is if you’re in B2B sales, how often does the purchase occur on the computer that was registered. Do you think the purchasing agent ask the requester whose site they found the product on? Do you think the requester even mentions it?

However, when your prospect is registered, what happens next? First there is typically a minimum payout and a time limit on how long the cookies last. Did you know most cookies expire in less than 90 days? Did you know that there may be a minimum threshold before sales are paid out? The thinking behind that is that you will have the highest registration in the initial 90 days and the least conversion. Meaning the affiliate resource gets the e-mail address to forever market too for a very limited if any cost.

The 13 billion dollar mark has spawned a highly competitive market for handling the affiliate resources account. There are some great ones out there and I am only here to discuss one thing. What happens when your affiliate resource switches suppliers? That’s right, your cookies all disappear and you have to re-register all of your prospects again. It also means you have to change all your links that you have created to the new one.

Read the fine print well, if there is any. I have been told that half my affiliate sales were non-commissionable because the people that clicked through my site were commissioned and they could not pay out commission to both of us.

This is my favorite bug-a-boo. I drive people to a site, they register and I now have a good solid lead. My affiliate resource starts sending him his auto-responder to sell the product therefore doing all the work. Hmm, work = auto-responder? He may convert a few, maybe not, but then what happens is that a new wave of auto-responders start being sent; selling my affiliate resource’s, affiliates! That’s right, my resource tries to move him into one of his affiliates and guess what, you don’t get to participate in this sale. No way, no how!

So now let’s get to the real skivvy, RUN THE NUMBERS! Nobody is going to tell you this but think about how many impressions you have to make to get a click-thru. Than how many leads turn into sales and then your payout. The truth is seldom is it better than direct mail numbers of 1 to 3%. So picking 2%, (and that is very high on impressions to leads) if you have 10,000 impressions that is 200 leads and as a result 2 sales. If you make, $50 a sale that is $100 for your efforts. If you can accomplish, I would bet that you are doing better than 95% of the affiliates out there. So, look at two things: How much traffic does your website get or how big is your e-zine list? For the sake of explanation, let’s say my numbers above our correct. Are you willing to give up that number of leads to someone else for a $100.

Affiliate Marketing is not an easy way to make a living. You can participate in launches, book offerings and other affiliate efforts that could increase the odds of success and prove more successful. There are some great and I mean great partnership, coaching and program structures that could prove very lucrative for you. But if you are just looking for a cookie, in my opinion most would be better served in the hole they came from. What are your thoughts?

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Are you thinking about Lean this year?

business901 — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 15:15:00 +0000

Here is a question I asked Jim Lewis, author of the Story of a Lean Journey and co-author of a soon to be released book titled “The Perry Story”.

Joe: Now you’ve talked a lot about the benefits someone can get from Lean by doing it, but how tough is it to achieve? I mean, is it doable? Is it doable in three months? Six months? I could be out of business in six months. Is it something that really can be done in the short term, or is it something that takes a long time?

Jim: Yes to both of those. And let me explain that. Lean is a journey. You’re transforming your business from wherever it is today to a new way of doing business.

It is a journey. Another reason for using an outside person is because usually internal resources don’t have a full comprehension, unless they are Lean experts themselves, they don’t have a full comprehension of the commitment that’s necessary in order to make this journey, and they really don’t know how this journey is going to unfold.

There’s an 80/20 rule that applies to anything and everything, and it applies to Lean as well. The transformation process is not complete until it becomes self?sustainable, where you forget what the old was. You can’t even remember what the old was.

I mention that in my book, once the transformation reaches that point where you can no longer remember what the old way was, then you are well on your way to a successful journey. And that takes probably three to five years before the process becomes the new norm ? the Lean now is the new norm.

Businesses have been doing business the way they have for years, since the Industrial Revolution of the 1850s. So we’ve been ingrained in us this ‘batch ‘ mentality of doing business for so long that it takes a long time to change the culture. And that’s what you’re doing, you’re changing the culture in the organization, and so that takes three to five years.

But the 80?20rule applies to that. You will get immediate results from a Lean Initiative, from day one. As soon as you begin to implement, you get positive results. I usually work with a company, either full?time or part-time depending on the organization for six to eight months.

From day one, I’m weaning myself away from the organization because I don’t want them totally dependent on me. I want them to be able to begin to take ownership and responsibility for the transformation themselves. I’ll usually find a key individual in the organization who I can work with closely, who’s going to take over the mantle as I leave.

That person will take the mantle of responsibility for ensuring that the transformation process continues to move forward until the entire culture is changed.

It’s not just changing the culture of the workers in the organization. The management, the leadership of the organization has to change their culture as well. They’re no longer task managers. They’re going to work in a collaborative way. I’m not talking about self?managed work teams. I’m talking about working with people in a collaborative way, and problem solving, and soliciting input and ideas, and suggestions and recommendations.

Empowering is another one of the E’s. It’s empowering the staff to be able to make change happen in their area of control. Managers are going to be relinquishing some control in that transformation process, where they go to a team?based activity versus a traditional, task?managed operation.

It does take a long time, but the results are immediate. If you can get through that cultural shift change and have a sustainable operation, then Lean becomes the new norm, and you forget where you were.

Related Information:

The Perry Story

Considering Lean, Check out this Lean Journey (Podcast)

Value Stream Mapping Tools

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