Lean from the Trenches

Managing the Rate of Change

Each weekly process improvement workshop caused a flurry of change, mostly changes for the better. However, after a while, we realized that we were changing too much, too fast.

This was an interesting problem. In most organizations I’ve worked with, the problem is that there is too little process change—everyone is stuck in their current ineffective process. Here we had reached the opposite problem. We were making lots of changes, and it takes days or sometimes weeks for a significant process change to ripple through a 60-person project. Many team members got confused (and sometimes frustrated) when the cross-team introduced new changes before the dust from previous changes had settled.

So, we introduced a little ...