Hey everyone. Welcome to this lecture, real life anecdote of a five s project in the service industry. I have chosen to share this project because this is a common problem in every organization, and five s can really help you solve this problem easily. Let's begin. The CEO of one of a mid sized organization requested for a progress update on the existing cost improvement initiatives within the organization. Rather than sharing the existing report that was published monthly.
The project management officer who is also known as the PMO, decided to share a comprehensive report to the CEO. The CEO only wanted to know how much money was invested from the approved budget. And what were the gains from the various projects rather than getting the specific details. The PMO spent 15 days gathering information from various project managers. Each of the project managers were already burdened with active project activities. And this request from the PMO was an additional activity.
As the CEO received the detailed comprehensive report after 15 days, he asked the specific question of how much money was invested out of the approved budget. And what were the returns so far. Some project updates had these details while others did not. The CEO asked for these specific details again, the PMO went back to the project managers and again built a customized comprehensive report, where he provided the amount invested and the returns gained. He further gave a monthly and itemized breakup of each project expense. This took another 10 days by the time the final review reached the CEO.
Almost after 25 days from the initial request, he had already completed his board meeting where he needed these inputs. Now, all the efforts, the PMO and all the project managers had put in, were literally wasted. Most CEOs want to spend additional time thinking about waste and its elimination, especially in the reporting arena. But the CEO of this organization was different. He looked at the reports made by the CMO and liked the in depth updates. However, he wondered why it took the PMO so long to get back with these details.
He called the PMO to his office, and as the reason for this delay, the PMO said that they had created customized reports based on the requirement that the CEO had given the CEO further asked How many man hours did you and your project managers put in? Getting this report completed? The answer he received was 80 plus ours. Wow. The CEO further asked that he needed only specific information and why additional information was given that he had not asked for. So that the PMO said he felt that the additional information was also needed.
However, the CEO did not really need that additional intelligence at that moment. So guys, two reports were created by the PMO and his team of project managers. They spent two full time employees worth of work for one week, considering 40 hours per week concept, and the result was that the report was not used. What really went wrong? The CEO needed specific information, and the PMO thought that the CEO needed a thorough process. Press update, either the CEO should have been specific in asking what he wanted, or the PMO should have asked what the CEO was exactly looking for.
The PMO decided to create a customized report, rather than using the existing ones because the top of the house was requesting it. The PMO could have possibly looked at the existing inventory of reports. And given one that was the best fit for CEOs requirements, maybe with minor modifications. The PMO did not really care about the time spent by his project managers, and by himself to create the report. The PMO was definitely hard working. But did he really work smart?
While talking to the PMO, the CEO spotted all of these issues and inefficiencies. The CEO then asked how many reports the PMO made each month and his response Was minimum 11. They included all these reports. In addition to that, the PMO had four team members, including him, to coordinate with different teams gather required data and create these reports. This was their full time job Think about all of the next question the CEO asked was also crucial. He asked is the information provided in each of these reports the same or different?
The PMO pointed out that most of the information in each of the report is the same. It is just formatted differently based on the needs and requirements of respective audiences. Oh, my God. If you look at this from the customer's perspective, the customer is paying for receiving the product or service from an organization. He is not willing to pay for any non value added activities? What value add was the customer getting from these internal reports?
Why would the customer pay for the salaries of these four individuals? Can the talents of these individuals be engaged in more productive activities? Even the project managers were engaged in sending required reports as requested, so their non value added time was also not accounted for. The CEO was able to see through this waste. Do you agree with this waste? I was working as an external consultant of this organization.
I had a meeting with the CEO for some of the other project a day after this conversation between the CEO and the PMO. As I met him, the CEO, he shared this challenge that he came across yesterday. It looked like a complex problem and the solution was potentially exhaustive, hence the CEO was hoping to do some extravagant six sigma project to resolve this challenge. I had come across this situation in several organizations in the past. So my solution to him was understood. Let's do a five s project.
And I can give you a sustainable solution. In three to four weeks. The CEO was a lien literate, he was surprised with my response of using a simple five s tool to solve this problem. He said, Really, would five s solve this mammoth problem. As usual, I was confident I had done this so many times in the past. I just told him, I need a couple of project managers one taboo, or any business intelligence analyst expert and some minor support from it.
He agreed and approved my requirements. I began working on the solution. We began With the first step of fibers known as sorting, or care, our small project team looked at all the existing reports. And we also met the stakeholders. These stakeholders were the key recipients of these reports. We understood their specific requirements and made a list.
Based on their feedback, we sorted the requirements as high, medium and low. So high indicator meant the requirement was critical. Medium indicator meant that the requirement was important but not critical. And the low indicator remained that the requirement was good to have. We also looked at the data that was being collected to populate these reports. We looked at two aspects, what data was collected and how this data was collected.
There was no issue in the type of data being collected. The issue mainly persisted in how this data collection to place the observations were, the data collection process was manual. information was requested on an email, and project managers would respond with their data spreadsheets. The data was being collected in different formats, the PMO team would gather the different formats and convert them into meaningful information based on the stakeholders requirements. Because the data collection process was manual, and data collection was in different formats, the entire reporting process was very time consuming. In this step, it mapped what data was required to fulfill which requirement.
The mapping effort was nothing but sorting the available information as inputs to fulfill the requirements. The team then moved to the next step in the five is process called set in order or Seaton. In this step, our team created a simple input screen where the Project Managers could input their data. We also gave them the ability to upload their spreadsheet directly in the database at the click of a button, so their time was not wasted to input single sales for each of their projects. We then created a dashboard on tableau, which is a business intelligence software that would reflect the requirements shared by the audience. The strawman of these reports were shared with all key stakeholders for feedback.
We connected the channel of input to the tableau reports. It required a minor customization, and the tableau expert in our team did his job well. The input and output of the process was now set in order this new software was ready for a pilot. The next step in the five s process was shine, or Cecil. In this step, we identified a group of five projects managers and executed a pilot. They used the input screen to update their data, and in a matter of a few seconds their reports were generated.
Additionally, the tool also helped them slice and dice their data. Based on their requirements. We gathered additional feedback from the pilot team and incorporated that in the tool. We cleaned up a few nuances and non value added stuff and shined this tool to perfection. Then it was time to standardize or cycled through this process. The team created training material to use the tool.
It created standard operating and maintenance procedures of this tool. We also created a response plan if the tool failed to deliver the required output, plus the maintenance of the tool and any changes to the requirements. were handed over to the IT team The new process was standardized before we finally incorporated it. Finally, we reached the final step of five s process that was sustain, or shifts okay? In this step, we rolled out the new tool to all projects within the organization. The project was sustained for a period of two months.
The first four steps, sort, set an order shine standardize, took roughly three weeks. We then sustained the process for a considerable period of time to ensure all the anomalies were eliminated. The project was a big success in the organization. We only had to invest in one Tableau license to create these reports. All the other users who were the audience, were able to view the dashboard by using a free version of Tableau reader. The project realized several benefits Including shortening cycle time from data collection to report generation process from 25 days to a matter of few minutes.
Wow. We no longer needed a team of four members to generate these reports. Since there was no manual activity involved anymore. The members of the PMO office were relocated to do productive work. project managers were extremely happy as they did not have to spend time consolidating data to create reports. They were able to feed their raw data spreadsheets into the tool directly.
One dashboard served all stakeholders, stakeholders were trained to slice and dice the data to get the reports the way they wanted. A simple five s project helped the entire organization. Just a quick note, after about a year of implementation, the team further streamline the process by conducting The tool to the sources of raw data. This way the project manager now no longer needed to upload the spreadsheet into the tool. The tool was able to capture real time data from the source systems, thus offering real time reporting capability. I call this S five s on steroids.
That brings us to the end of this lecture. I hope you've liked it. Thank you for attending. See you in the next one.