Lesson for small teams taking small steps. Alright, so we spent quite a lot of time on that first one. And a lot of what we've talked about there will help you with a lot of the other behaviors. So we talked about making sure that everybody understood the benefits of ci and what the processes were, and what ci means and some of the language around it, and getting some practice of doing it. And understanding how they can get involved. All of that stuff is going to help you now with the rest of these behaviors that we're going to be observing.

So I'm going to take the next two together, smaller, flexible improvement teams actively doing things and small incremental improvements to the way things are done. So that's what I expect to see in a culture of ci. So just want to pause for a moment and just acknowledge that you and your team are part of or probably part of a wider organization. And that wider organization might have a CI drive. So you might already be involved in continuous improvement. Maybe there's already something going on.

So if there is, then use those existing processes, I certainly wouldn't advise doing your own thing. If it's already being done in the business, why not use the businesses drive to help drive ci within your own team? to obviously do that? If the answer is, well, we don't have any ci drive within our team. We don't have any lean stuff, we don't have any continuous improvement. Then you need to think about your options about how you influence your team to form smaller improvement teams.

Now of course, it also depends on how many people you have in your team. So if you only have two people, then I'm guessing most of your improvement teams will Pretty much everybody. If your teams a bit bigger, you might think about right how am I going to get people involved in small improvement teams? How am I going to make that happen? So one way of doing it is you can go down the Six Sigma route, and I'll talk about what that is in a moment. You can have some informal arrangements, or you can invent something bespoke for your team.

All right, so what's the Six Sigma route? Well, I'm not going to go into loads of detail, but basically, Six Sigma is a complimentary approach to lean and these days Lean and Six Sigma tend to be lumped together. So although they came from slightly different places, and they have a different emphasis, they tend to get lumped together now. And Six Sigma takes a belt approach. So you have white belts, you have yellow belts, you have green belts, and you have black belts, and each one of those levels has a different level of understanding and that activity. So I'll explain what those are.

All right, so white belt is somebody who has basic knowledge. And they might work as a junior member in problem solving teams, but they would definitely be involved in coming up with ideas and opportunities. So remember, we talked earlier about having everybody having a basic level of understanding about what CIA is, what waste means, what value is, all of those sorts of things? Well, I would suggest that everybody really should be up to that level. So everybody should be trained to what would be called white belt in six sigma. The next level is yellow belts, and these people have an intermediate knowledge.

So they have the same knowledge as the white belts and perhaps a bit more, but more importantly, they'll be active so they'll be working as a junior member in a project team. The green belts so where all the legwork happens really and they have a good full working knowledge of how to manage your project. But they'll tend to do the smaller projects. So they'll understand all the principles and be able to use the simple improvement process, be able to do the measures and do some analysis of that and lead a project team to improve. And finally, we get to the black belts and they have a more advanced working knowledge, they will lead larger projects, they might have a number of green belts under their wing if you like. And they are helping them manage their projects.

They'll be a more senior member, if you like of that continuous improvement team. So that's one way to go. If you're going to do that, then I would say that's most appropriate if you have a fairly large team because you'll want to have everybody to white belt level you might need two or three yellow belts, a green belt and black belt at least to make that worthwhile. What that means is that you've got people with an understanding of what they should be doing. At that level, but it will also mean training. So you'll need to train people to those very specific levels.

You can go on black belt courses and green belt courses, yellow belts and white belts, you probably do that online. That's the cheapest way to do it. But you do need a bit of a budget, I would say for going down that route. The principles though you could of course use without using that terminology. So what else could you do? Instead of calling everybody by these black belts, yellow belts and so on, you could have an informal arrangement where you basically just formed teams, as and when needed.

You just let people know that they are now part of a team and you give somebody with the responsibility to lead that team and you press keep involved yourself. Now in the early days, I would suggest that that is absolutely adequate. So you can make sure that the right people are involved. And I'll talk in a moment about a possible way through doing that. So the informal teams are probably the way to go right now. And you can form different teams across different jobs and in different departments.

Again, depending on how large your team is, you might want to involve lots of different people. And we'll talk about that in a moment. So the final one is you could have something bespoke or a bit of a hybrid, I'd be careful of using the black belts and green belts titles, if you're not going to train people properly. As somebody trained in a black belt approach, I know that people who have that title if you like are quite jealous and making sure that it is worth something and it's a value so you're gonna press not make many friends if you start calling everybody a yellow and a black belt because somebody's gonna soon say Just a minute, what do you why they call it a black belt. So if you're gonna go down that route, train people, if not Then call people something else, if you want to have your own framework, my advice is really to keep it simple.

And just to form teams as you want them is probably your best bet. However, this is a cultural question. So it's worth having some formal recognition of what's happening. So if you're going to have teams make sure that they know they are part of an improvement team. And this person's responsible to deliver. And actually everybody's responsible to come up with ideas.

So you're really just making sure that there is a formal understanding of what people's roles are, and what they're supposed to be doing as part of this team. Just make sure there's a certain level of formality to it without going over the top because you want people to understand its importance. Create some routine and ritual around it. So maybe have a monthly get together. The way you discuss ci, while you discuss the improvements that people have come up with, and you look at the improvement teams, what they're doing currently and where they're up to with their projects. So you have some routine and ritual around it, maybe a CI, weekly review, and create some different options at different levels of engagement.

So make sure that everybody knows that there's lots of different ways to get involved from just coming up with an idea to leading a major project. So there's, there's these different levels, and actually, there's something for everyone. Alright, I'm just going to take stock for a moment with you and just pause for a moment. Think about what we've talked about so far, and a possible route of creating a continuous improvement team. So the first step is to communicate and do some basic improvement awareness training. So make sure that that people have that baseline understanding of what you're talking about.

What do you mean by continuous improvement? What is it? What is waste? What is value? Why is it important? Why is it a benefit to them individually?

Why is it a benefit to the business? And so secondly, identify some high potential people to be part of this first project. So out of your team, it depends how big the team is, but look for some individuals that you think would respond well to this. So start easy start with people who are going to cooperate again to help develop multiple routes for opportunity generation. So what I mean by that is develop multiple ways for people to come up with ideas and to start the ball rolling. So maybe it is a suggestion box or maybe it's a an E email system, maybe it's something on your intranet.

Maybe it's simply talk to your manager about it. Lots of different ways for people to come up with ideas. Identify a pilots and choose a team, including a team leader. So identify something that you can improve. So we've already said find the right people, for your small team, also find the right improvement, something that you know is a pretty sure bet that you're going to get a good result and include a team leader now you might want to lead it yourself. If possible, it would be better to get somebody else to have that team leader role, although you would coach the team.

So you'd certainly support now you might fail in the early days that there isn't anybody that can take that lead, in which case and you'll have to do that. But you don't want to keep it to yourself. If you need your team to do it, so coach the team, using the simple improvement process, the one that's earlier in this course starting with what's the business reason for the change? looking at what's the current state analysis? What's the goal, identify actions and plan, implement and review. Next, deliver the improvement and publicize the results.

So work with the team, follow the process, deliver the improvements, measure the results, and publicize them. Next, you need to find another idea finds another improvement. Now hopefully this time it will come from somebody who's come up with an idea and repeat the process. And if possible, introduce new team members to your improvement team. Hold weekly review meetings where you can talk about these improvements, talk about ideas that are coming through the pipeline, and what you're currently doing. Some visual updates stuff on the walls a great idea.

Or it could be stuff on TV screens, however you want to do it, but make sure that people know what's happening. And continue to improve and support small improvement teams. So just keep that whole thing going. Now, that's a good start. Once you've got some of those happening, you can start to delegate more of those tasks to others. And you'll also see ways that you can tweak your processes to make idea generation easier, and also find the sorts of projects that you can work on