What we're going to do now is have a look at the next step, which is to identify actions and plan. So once you've identified the gap between what you'd like and what you've got, what we need to start thinking about is what are we going to do to close that gap? What are we going to do to change things? So the first thing that you might need to do is to start coming up with some ideas. So what could we possibly do? And to do that, you might use something called brainstorming.

Essentially, what you're doing there is you're asking some possibility type questions. What could we do to close the gap between what we've gotten what we'd like? What could we do to improve that process? What could we do to eliminate a step? What could we do to reduce the amount of transport? What might we do to improve the quality?

What might we do to stop people from having to double handle and so on? So you're really just going through that what could you do? What might you do during brainstorming? The only rule is brainstorming is there's no such thing as a bad idea. So where often I find teams get a bit mixed up with brainstorming is they think it's just as going into a room, and just thrashing out ideas. Where people say that's a good idea.

No, that's not everybody argues that case, that's actually not what brainstorming is. What brainstorming is, is just coming up with as many ideas as possible. It's an idea generation tool. At the end of that exercise, you should have dozens, if not more ideas that you might want to use. You could choose two or three of them, you might choose 20 of them. But to start with, you just got to generate those ideas.

So don't get involved in Oh, yeah, that's a good idea, or no, we couldn't do that, or No, you shouldn't do that. Just let the ideas keep coming. Get as many ideas as you possibly can. You can do that quite chaotically in a room, we just get people shouting out. You have to remember that you need to capture that information. So Do you record it, maybe with a video recorder or sound recorder, or maybe you take notes or you get people to write it down, perhaps an easy way to do it will be to give everybody sticky notes and say, right, come up with 10 ideas, or as many as you can, and then leave them for a couple of minutes to try and generate those ideas.

And that has the added benefit where that quiet one that doesn't normally get involved in that will actually start to come up with some ideas. So again, do this with your team. Do it with people that are involved, the more you can involve them at this stage, the better. So once you've identified lots of ideas, things you might do, you'll need to make some decisions about what you're going to do. So you then start to think about, well, how am I going to plan all of these activities, and one way to do that is to create a Gantt chart, and I'm a big fan of Gantt charts. They really help you to have a visual handle on what's happening and when it's happening.

So create a Gantt chart. Now, it's actually more easier than you think to create a Gantt chart, you can buy some software to do it. And there are some pieces of software that you can buy. And you can even get some free, you could use a spreadsheet to do it. But you can actually just do it on a piece of paper. So I'm just going to talk about the simple way of creating a Gantt chart.

First thing to do is simply list what needs to be done in your improvement project. So any improvement project or indeed any project at all, is basically just a list of stuff that needs to be done. If you think about it in those terms. It sounds easy. Of course, the difficult it is doing it in the right order and in the right time and to the right quality, but essentially managing a project is just managing those tasks. So the first thing to know is you have to write those out.

That's to some degree, it depends on whether you're a detail person or a high level sort of thinker, global thinker if you're ready detail person, that list of what needs to be done might be very, very long. If you're a high levels of global think you might just be thinking about a dozen different phases. Either way is fine, whatever actually makes sense to you. So list what needs to be done, order the list. Put the list in some sort of rough order, in terms of timeline or time frame. Don't worry at the moment about when it needs to be done, just order it in the order you think these things need to get done.

So if you're building Wembley Stadium, you can't put the roof on until you build the foundations clearly. Then you groove pets into stages. So if you're a global thinker, you may have already done that in stages. If you're a details person, you've probably got this long list of tasks that need to be carried out. What I would say is to make life easier. Try and group those tasks into stages or phases of your project that you can work with, you might end up with half a dozen to a dozen different phases or stages.

Then you need to decide on the intervals in your Gantt chart. So in your Gantt chart, you're going to separate or divide up your chart into intervals, that you can then see where you're up to, if you like. So, decide on the intervals is going to be daily, weekly, monthly, what what are the intervals identify completion dates, then start to have a think about when the things need to get completed in order for something else to happen. Identify dependencies. So dependency is something of course that is dependent upon something else. So what's dependent upon what well this gift needs to get done before this gets done.

So that one is dependent upon that one. So identify those dependencies. And then you can start to trace the critical path, the path that needs to be taken in order for you to achieve your initiative. goal. So that's the simple way to create a Gantt chart. So if you do that, you end up with something like this.

So it's a simple grid, you could obviously draw this on a piece of flip chart. So when I'm doing projects, certainly in the early days, when I'm got my team together, I've got a team together, we're going to talk about how to get started on this project, we'll probably do something like this on a piece of flip chart paper, just draw it into squares. So we've got our stages or phases down the left hand side there, stage one, stage two, stage three, actually, right what they are, of course, on your project. And then at the top there, you've got the intervals that I talked about. So you need to decide what the intervals are going to be. We've done monthly intervals, you might choose weekly, that is a very short project with lots of activity going on.

It's up to you. So we've got January, February, March, April. And so now what you start to do is you start to think about each of these phases or stages. When do they need to be started? And when do they need to be finished. So in this part of the diagram, stage one, the first thing we've got to do, that really needs to get done by the end of January, stage two, that really needs to get completed by the end of March.

So there might be a dependency there between stage one and stage two. We'll explore that later on. And you just keep on filling in those blocks. So what you start to see is the timeline, when things need to get completed or the order in which things are going to be completed and how long they're going to take. What you can then start to do is identify the dependencies. So really, you should probably have identified these as you're going because you're likely to realize this, but if for instance, stage two can't be completed or started before stage one is completed, then you've got a dependency there.

If stage three can't be Started until stage two is completed, you've got a dependency. Stage six is dependent upon stage four being completed, so that dependency hops across there. And stage eight is dependent upon stage seven. So if you trace that orange line down, essentially what you've got there is a critical path. So that's what you're going to need to get done. in what order.

Now it's useful to identify the dependences. Because if your project starts to perhaps go over time, you can start to identify things that could get done sooner, that passed not dependent upon other things. For instance, stage four looks like that's not really dependent on anything particularly. So we could do that a bit early if we wanted to save ourselves some time later on. So you can start to move these things around a little bit. But the main reason for doing this is if you look at stage one, for instance, let's Say, our first phase, our first stage, we're going over by a couple of weeks.

What does that mean for our project? Well, straightaway, as you can see, what will happen is everything is just going to shuffle across a couple of weeks. So if that ended July date is an absolute got to finish it by then you've got a problem. You might say, Well, I don't want to know that problem. Well, it's better to know it, then close your eyes to it. So if we know that's likely to happen, we can start to perhaps rearrange what we're doing, put some more resource on it.

Or it might be that we need to revisit the SMART goal and just say, Well, actually, this project is going to take as long but it's important to be able to have that visibility. So I really recommend doing a Gantt charts very simple. As you can see, I've just done this on a spreadsheet. You can use proprietary software for it. But really, it's just about having a visual way of tracking your projects. So where are we up to?

So for identify actions and plan, we've done some brainstorming to identify some possibilities. We've identified the things that we want to do. And we started to put those tasks together into a list. We've created a Gantt chart so that we know what's dependent upon what, and we're ready to start implementing our project. So let's go back to our cases briefly, which was changeover reduction at a printing plant. So in this stage here, we worked with the team to identify things they wanted to do to close the gap between where they are currently and where they'd like to be.

And of course, they got that information through that current state analysis and that define goals. So this stage, things start to get a lot easier because you've got all that route data, you've understood the causes, as well as the effects. And you've really started to get a feel for what needs to be done. So we help the team plan and including converting into activities to external one. So which things could you do outside of that changeover? get things ready?

Or do people get things ready, a lot of it was around moving new equipment closer. So it wasn't so much transport movement around and organizing, keeping work areas tidy. So that was a, perhaps an unexpected thing that happened, the work areas looked a lot neater and tidy because they had to have everything just where they needed it. So there's a lot of good work done there. Some new equipment was needed. So the business invested in that and they wanted to make sure that that worked.

That was quite a big thing for the team. And there were some new roles that were introduced. So actually, there was a slightly increasing headcount, which is perhaps unusual or may seem unusual. Some people think that lean is all about removing people, but actually it's just about improving your processes. So it's identified that actually if people do some different roles, it would make life better and of course, decrease the amount of time taken For changeovers, it is well worth it. The results were there which we'll talk about in a moment.