Session descriptions
The complete conference schedule, session descriptions and links to presenter bios are below. Use this link if you would like a printable version of session descriptions.
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Conference Opening
8:00 - 8:30 |
Registration |
8:30 - 9:00 |
Welcome |
9:00 - 9:30 |
Opening remarks by Governor Chris Gregoire |
9:30 - 10:30 |
Opening keynote by Dr. Robert Mecklenburg, Virginia Mason Medical Center Transforming Healthcare: Better, Faster and More Affordable For years, Washington State has been a leader in enlightened health care policy. We are now aligning with provisions of the Accountable Care Act that will welcome many additional citizens into our health care system. This opportunity, however, comes at a time when the entire health care sector is struggling with the issues of affordability, access, and quality. The months ahead will require new attitudes and new tools to achieve rapid, comprehensive and coordinated change. In 2000, we concluded that Virginia Mason Medical Center was part of a much larger healthcare system that was heading in the wrong direction in terms of priorities, efficiency and effectiveness. Over the last decade, we have reoriented our attitude to aspire to create the perfect patient experience. Such an aspiration required new tools to bring out the best in providers: the tools needed to create a quantum improvement in safety, quality, affordability and access, the tools necessary to create reliable systems. We found these tools in an unlikely place: a Japanese automaker. Applying attitudes and tools learned from Toyota have allowed us to become a leader in health care quality and innovation. This presentation will illustrate how we can work together to apply the attitudes and tools to make all we offer to our community better, faster and more affordable. |
10:30 - 10:45 |
Break |
10:45 - Noon | Morning Breakout Sessions
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Getting Started with Lean |
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Lean Thinking, Tools & Techniques |
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Lean & Performance Leadership |
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Starbucks Teaching Model Using Training Within Industry (TWI) The objectives of this workshop are to:
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Herding Cats: A Practical Exercise in 5S No one knows how to herd cats. In this practical exercise, participants will give it their best effort, and in the process learn the value of using “5S.” 5S is a simple yet powerful Lean technique used to increase efficiency and effectiveness by promoting visual management, organization, standardization, and continuous improvement. From this exercise, participants will understand the power of 5S and how to use this classic Lean tool. |
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Leading a Lean Organization There are key differences in traditional Leadership and Lean Leadership. During this presentation you will learn the key roles of Lean Leadership and how make the changes necessary in your day to day Leadership style to become a Lean Leader. |
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Build Your Management System First, Then Optimize Lean: The Department of Retirement Systems Case Study The NOW Management System® is a highly visual and integrated set of management best practices and tools. The system connects every employee to their portion of an agency’s routine work and strategic initiatives. Traditional management systems usually are simply budgeting and performance management tools, which fail to engage employees. One of Mass Ingenuity’s primary principles is that if you haven’t yet driven out the waste in your routine work (which averages 30-60% for most processes), then you can’t optimize on your strategic initiatives because resources keep getting pulled away from the initiatives to plug the many holes in the routine work. It is called the “NOW Management System” because executing in the “now” requires a management system where “every employee can act on every opportunity every time” to improve citizen outcomes, the customer experience, and reduce costs. After successful implementations at eight Oregon state agencies, John Bernard’s firm is now working in Washington with the leadership team at the Dept. of Retirement Systems (DRS). This presentation describes the rationale for the Management System and the exciting results DRS is achieving. As Marcie Frost, DRS Deputy Director and co-presenter with John, puts it, “This is changing how we perform and is having significant impact on connecting every employee to our success.” This workshop will feature a short and compelling video to visually explain the NOW Management System and a very interactive discussion of the DRS journey. |
Lunch
12:00 - 1:15 |
Enjoy lunch on your own at one of the many restaurants within walking distance or purchase a meal from the convenient, on-site Grab & Go stations. |
Leadership Panel: Lean Partners – Leading Practices in Lean
2:45 - 4:00 | Afternoon Breakout Sessions
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Getting Started with Lean |
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Lean Thinking, Tools & Techniques |
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Lean & Performance Leadership |
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The Critical First 60 Minutes of a Rapid Process Improvement Event Every Rapid Process Improvement Event is a chance to improve a process and develop employees. Often, process improvement is the only focus. By paying attention to the first hour of an event, whether it's a one day or five day event, the leader can increase the probability of success of both process improvement and people improvement. This presentation will present the dos and don'ts in a way that will be easy to replicate. There will be plenty of time for questions and discussion. |
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Value Stream Mapping: Helping Your Team See the Future State This workshop will help new practitioners facilitate a team's transition from analyzing the current state map to envisioning the future state. |
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Toyota Kata Most organizations on the lean journey are busy planning rapid improvement events, making progress in their improvement journey, yet with limited, long term, sustainable results. If this is true for you, perhaps you need to enhance your efforts, create new improvement patterns and build the leadership behaviors that lead to long term, continuous improvement. In this learning session, we will provide a deeper look at two particular behavior routines: The Improvement Kata – a repeating routine of establishing challenging target conditions, working step-by-step through obstacles, and always learning from the problems we encounter. The Coaching Kata – a pattern of teaching the “Improvement Kata” to employees – at every level – to ensure that leadership and staff learn, grow and thrive in a lean environment. |
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]Problem Solving: The Lean Business Practice It had been determined by one of the leading Lean organizations that PDCA Problem Solving is the primary Business Practice for Lean Organizations. In this presentation you will learn how the PDCA is applied at 3 levels of Problem Solving with a focus on the A3 Problem Solving methodology. You will also learn how to determine if the key gates have been closed before we move from one step to the next. |
Closing Sessions
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
8:30 - 8:45 |
Welcome |
8:45 - 10:15 | Morning Breakout Sessions
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Getting Started with Lean |
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Lean Thinking, Tools & Techniques |
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Lean & Performance Leadership |
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Lean Leadership Orientation: A Case Study
*NOTE: This workshop extends until 11:45. A break will be included.* |
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Lean As a Human Performance System Every employee is a human performance system. This workshop will help you understand how to establish important thinking and behaviors leaders and employees need to implement and sustain lean practices. |
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Improving Service, Changing Culture: Implementing Lean at University of Washington Finance & Facilities Efficient, effective, ever-improving… that’s a tough reputation to maintain when budgets are shrinking and enrollment is up. Using Lean, Finance & Facilities (F2) has launched over 90 improvement teams since 2010, addressing a “small city” of services: accounting, parking, carpet-cleaning, internal audit, copy and mail services, and purchasing—to name just a handful. More broadly, F2 is on an operational-excellence journey, garnering over 13,000 new ideas from employees and pursuing a culture of engagement and daily innovation. This session will outline F2’s implementation to date, and the cornerstones of their success. |
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Governor’s GMAP Forum on Transportation Government Management Accountability and Performance (GMAP) is the tool that helps Washington state agencies measure, improve and report their performance. It is designed to hold state government and agency leadership accountable to customers, taxpayers, and citizens for the quality, efficiency, and effectiveness of the services Washington state government provides. The Governor holds regular, public GMAP forums where agency directors report on performance in several key policy areas. This forum focuses on education, primarily measuring the performance of early learning and higher education. Find more information about what will be included in this forum. |
10:15 - 10:30 |
Break |
10:30 – 11:45 | Morning Breakout Sessions
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Getting Started with Lean |
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Lean Thinking, Tools & Techniques |
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Lean & Performance Leadership |
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Lean Leadership Orientation: A Case Study *NOTE: This workshop continued from 8:45.* |
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The 7 Wastes To give practical help to see waste hiding in plain sight. Waste can appear in several forms and often it looks like useful work! In a Lean culture, waste is defined as anything that doesn't add value to your customer. How well do you know your wastes? |
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Lean Service Innovation: It's All About Relevance How relevant are your services to the public? How relevant is your work to your organization? Lean Service Innovation tackles these issues directly. Use Lean Service Innovation to: (a) make sure that when you Lean a process, the process is relevant; (b) develop a plan to utilize freed up resources with new, relevant service offerings; (c) address employee resistance and fears of excess capacity. |
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Making Lean Part of the Culture: A Staff Engagement and Outcomes Driven Strategy Successful use of lean principles requires a fundamental shift in thinking-not only among leaders but among staff as well. This workshop will cover key principles to managing change, engaging staff in lean thinking and using outcomes as a way to build commitment and focus. |
Lunch
11:45 - 1:00 |
Enjoy lunch on your own at one of the many restaurants within walking distance or purchase a meal from the convenient, on-site Grab & Go stations. |
Leadership Panel: Washington State Government – Lessons
Learned in Leading Lean
2:30 – 3:45 | Afternoon Breakout Sessions
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Getting Started with Lean |
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Lean Thinking, Tools & Techniques |
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Lean & Performance Leadership |
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Doing More With Less: Creating the Capacity for Innovation and Growth If you could improve your key processes by 41%, what would that mean to your organization? Lean Office Innovation is a well-documented, transparent process designed to uncover capacity for growth and streamline your operations. You will learn a simple, methodical approach to do more with less, freeing up capacity to do more exciting things—like develop new services. This process is simple enough that it can be taught to your employees so they can learn to fix their own problems. |
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Lean Visual Management How do you solve a problem if you can't see it? How do you build a culture where people doing the work feel safe surfacing problems and tap into their creativity in coming up with the solution? Visual Management is a foundational Lean concept focused on making goals and actual results visible so that they can be solved. Come join us and learn about some simple things you can put into practice right away to engage and inspire your team to see every problem as an opportunity. |
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The Energy to Cause a Movement . . . Lessons From a Lean Leader A movement isn't created overnight. This session will explore the dual role of Leadership: doing and being. In time, as leadership stays committed and the movement gains momentum, the culture comes to own Lean – it becomes part of the organization's rootstock. Join this session and learn to be aware of and know how to manage people who won't change as well as people who are change agents. |
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Is Lean Earning its Keep? As the Toyota Production System has left the shop floor, evolved into Lean Thinking, and has spread across industries, we have to wonder: is it still robust, does it still do the job? Lean tools work exceedingly well to capture the production process. A stopwatch, a value stream and seeing with your own eyes uncovers production waste and exposes areas for improvement. It isn't so easy to see the value stream of a patient visiting a doctor. According to some experts, almost three quarters of lean initiatives fail to produce added value. One source puts that number at only 2%. We have to wonder if Lean Thinking has been stretched beyond its areas of usefulness. |
Closing Sessions
3:45 – 4:45 |
Closing Keynote by Dr. Sanford Melzer, Seattle Children's Hospital Implementing Lean Management: Lessons Learned from the Front Lines of Organizational Change Implementing a Lean management system in any organization is a challenging undertaking. Success requires vision, strong leadership, and the patience and persistence to facilitate the significant cultural and operational changes required to initiate and sustain improvement. Drawing from lessons learned over a 10 year lean journey at Seattle Children's, Dr. Sanford Melzer will describe specific key strategies that managers can use to introduce lean into their organizations, engage staff, promote value stream thinking and develop the daily management systems needed to support continuous improvement. |
4:45 – 5:00 |
Closing Remarks |