Building Their Future
A leading global building products company reached out for assistance with a strategy session. When I spoke with Vince, the sponsor/team leader, I listened to his pain points and suggested facilitating a Value Stream Mapping (VSM) session for his team. He told me VSM wasn’t how he wanted to proceed. Even though I thought it would be the best approach, I listened to his concerns and modified my approach for his needs. I’m glad I did.
In the weeks leading up to the event, we strengthened our alignment on approach and expected outcomes and Vince engaged his team in preparation for this critical event. You see, they were intending to build their roadmap for the next 3 to 5 years. This could be worth millions of dollars and significant market share growth. We had to do it right.
The session was to begin on Tuesday, so I flew in and met Vince at the airport on Monday morning. We spent the first part of the day touring their local manufacturing facility. During the tour, I identified many improvement opportunities I thought might tie into the strategy session. Vince was intrigued by some of my ideas, including reliability and changeover improvements.
On Monday afternoon, we set up the meeting room and met some team members. We continued to talk about the upcoming session and some of the ideas from the plant tour. In the evening, we continued the conversation and alignment over dinner.
On Tuesday morning, we kicked off the session with a Voice of the Customer review. We then developed aspirational statements for the business. We would use these to help us design our strategy around for critical categories: safety, employee experience, customer experience, and manufacturing cost structure. The statements were impactful and compelling and inspired the team members.
Next, team members identified pain points and gaps in their current process keeping them from achieving their aspirational vision. Afterwards, they brainstormed actions and projects to eliminate those pain points and gaps. Many ideas were generated, including some thoughts around reliability and changeover reduction. We filled the walls with ideas. The room looked like a Post-it tornado had come through.
The team prioritized their many ideas down to the vital few they could develop and implement in the next three to five years. Reliability and changeover reduction made the cut. Following this, they created concept sheets to describe the critical work to achieve their future. After reviewing and aligning around most of them (2 were eliminated), they built a road map for the work on the one remaining wall in the room that wasn’t covered in Post-its.
As with many road mapping exercises, the team saw they had front-loaded the work in the most recent quarter and year, and some people were overloaded. This isn’t unusual and that’s why I like to make this process visual. They rearranged the work, and it looked more manageable.
Satisfied, the team felt they had built a compelling future they could stand behind. Proud of their work, they decided to keep everything on the walls for a corporate leadership review to be held the following week.
During the report out, they talked about their experience and how the visualization helped them align around a future they could be proud of. They also mentioned how they were able to focus and accomplish in one week what typically would take months to do.
Following the session, I was asked to support their reliability and changeover reduction efforts. I am looking forward to helping them achieve their vision.