– Wow, this must be the first time I see that all your projects on the Visual Planning Whiteboard are flagged green! Congratulations!
– Well…it is not to congratulate actually…
– Why not, you should buy a raffels ticket today! This doesn´t happen very often at the same time with so many projects….
– Now, we are on green strike. We are unhappy….
– What – green strike? What is that?
– Well, flagging anything else than green is non-productive. Before, we could flag yellow or even red and get the support needed to get back on track….today we only get that support if we flag the projects green….
– So what is measured now then?
– Well, right now we only measure things from a financial perspective. That is done by the financial department.
– Why did this happen?
– It was not looked at as a very efficient process to have these stand up meetings with 60 people around the board every Monday morning. Sure, people wrote up their Issue Task Force reports, but we could really never show if we improved throughput or lead time this way. And what did red, yellow and green really mean? And the board did not help us to really do a better job *before* we went yellow or red…
– OK….?
– You know, when the magnet was flipped, it was flipped. No measurement. No traceability. When you left the room you did not go back there until next week…The new manager comes from Manufacturing and thought this was headless…She showed us a way of work last week so that we can evaulate our status over time and get some better support for analysis…It will be avaialble also when we leave the room and we will involve our teams and subcontractors so we visualize the value chain…
– That sounds complicated?
– Oh no, it actually looked really simple and puts focus on tangible stuff. But of course, the attitude towards flagging a deviation still needs to be regained by management!
…