Lean Toolkit introduced at Systems2win

Systems2win a supplier of Excel Templates for Lean Kaizen Continuous improvement tools has introduced the Lean Starter Toolkit that includes a selection of downloadable templates, videos and instructions. This is a free downloadable trial package that covers 5S, A3, Kaizen, Project Management, Flowcharts, Six Sigma, Value Stream Mapping, Standard Work and Lean Training. This offering is part of the larger series of templates and visuals offered by Systems2win and our relevant to any type of organization pursuing a continuous improvement effort.

The overall goal of the Lean Starter Toolkit is to educate how lean tools and concepts can be adapted and used in the user’s environment. Users will self-validate their knowledge, raise awareness on which and how the tools are utilized, and be introduced to Lean and other continuous improvement tools. There are eleven different categories that your Lean journey takes from an Excel Starting page to customization. These categories are:
1. Get Started
2. 5S
3. A3
4. Kaizen
5. Project
6. Flowcharts
7. 6Sigma
8. Value Stream Mapping
9. Standard Work
10. Lean Training
11. Customize

Dean Ziegler, founder of Systems2win says, “If you are new to Excel or the Tools of Lean, Systems2win offers one of the largest collections of on-line training resources free during your trial period. This is the strength behind our product offerings and there is even built in support features each and every time you open a document. So don’t hesitate, use the training if nothing else to start or expand your Lean Journey.”

“We want you to know that many of our Systems2win templates are just plain simple. However these template create add tremendous value in our product offering but they were just so simple that we hesitated giving them away as a trial. You may have created a small portion of these already and know the amount of time it takes to do this. The advantage of having a single flexible model will create clarity for your staff and better execution. Utilizing these templates will ensure that you spend your time on the application versus creating or updating a document. Well, we are giving a few away and review the list about, it is only 20% of our total package. If you would like, you can test drive the whole package for 30 days,” added Ziegler.

This is part of a News Release that I have just completed for Systems2win so it is promotional but the Trial offer is pretty cool just if you just choose to use it for 30 days to get a feel for Lean Tools and how to use them. By the way, I use this product everyday!  

Technorati Tags: Value stream Mapping,Lean Development,Lean Healthcare,Lean Toolkit,Standard Work,A3 Reporting

Your first Step in Achieving Expert Status

In every industry, there's a powerbroker in the background an advisor who is known to just a handful of people, but who helps build empires for the top "stars" who are household names. 

I discovered such an advisor. Her name is Janet Switzer -- and for the last 16 years she's been quietly creating empire-building campaigns, products, promotions, deals and distribution for many of the biggest celebrity experts you've heard of. Jack Canfield...Chicken Soup for the Soul...David Bach...Jay Abraham...Mark Victor Hansen...Les Brown...Yanik Silver... All these stars have been her high profile clients.

I have been using Janet’s system and found it to be the quickest way to gain expert status. She has an unprecedented 21-day program to guide through each of the steps it takes to build your own empire around your area of expertise is unlike anything I've seen -- ever.

You can experience the same advice and expertise Janet’s famous clients enjoy, when you participate in this FREE 21-Day Client Acceleration Course.  The 21-Day Client Acceleration Course is a strategies, marketing campaigns, documents, product creation techniques and other action items that have transformed the careers of clients that routinely pay this information and advice. At first I was a little perturbed, I paid for it!

This is the outline, I use in developing your Expert Status. The 21-day Client Acceleration is simply a great place to start and is actually serves as a great primer for our Achieving Expert Status program.

Technorati Tags: Expert Status,Achieving Expert Status,21-day program,Black Belt,Consultants,Coach,Lean

Do you think velocity can be the key ingredient to Marketing success?

Look up velocity in Wikpedia,  the free dictionary.

Velocity is a quantity in physics which is related to speed. The word may also refer to:

• Velocity (novel), by US author Dean Koontz
• Velocity (newspaper), a weekly alternative newspaper in Louisville, Kentucky published by The Courier-Journal
• Velo-city, a series of bicycling conferences held biannually in Europe
• Apache Velocity, a Java template engine
• USS Velocity, one of several U.S. Navy warships
• Velocity SE, homebuilt entry level canard pusher aircraft from Velocity Aircraft
• Velocity XL, homebuilt high performance canard pusher aircraft from Velocity Aircraft
• Velocity of money, a monetary economics equation
• Velocity (comics), a comic-book character
• Velocity Tower, a tower in Sheffield
• WWE Velocity, a professional wrestling television show
• VELOCITY Broadcasting, a broadcasting network in the United States
• Velocity (album), debut album of The Vels
• Velocity = Marketing Success

In physics, velocity is the rate of change of position.

It is a vector physical quantity; both speed and direction are required to define it. In the SI (metric) system, it is measured in meters per second: (m/s) or ms⁻¹. The scalar absolute value (magnitude) of velocity is speed. For example, "5 meters per second" is a scalar and not a vector, whereas "5 meters per second east" is a vector. The average velocity v of an object moving through a displacement (Δx) during a time interval (Δt) is described by the formula:The rate of change of velocity is acceleration – how an object's speed or direction changes over time, and how it is changing at a particular point in time.

From the VersionOne Whitepaper The Agile Project Manager By: Mike Cottmeyer:

In Agile, velocity is measured by the time interval and represents the throughput of the team or the rate at which the backlog can be completed. Ideal velocity describes the rate at which the team must complete features to deliver the project within the time and cost constraints determined by the project stakeholders. Actual velocity is determined by measuring the true throughput of the team during each time interval. The difference between the ideal velocity and the measured velocity is a primary indicator of how well the project is progressing relative to the expectations of the business. The closer the measured velocity is to the ideal velocity, the more likely the project will deliver the entire backlog within the time allowed.

Teams with predictable velocity can reasonably calculate when they will fully deliver the project backlog. If time and cost are fixed constraints, they can determine what features can be delivered within those constraints. Teams with unstable velocities are not predictable and typically result in varying project outcomes. Measuring team velocity over time allows the Project Manager to understand how likely various project outcomes might be to occur.

In the Agile Product Marketing concepts that I have evaluated it seems to me that Velocity is the single most important way to measure your marketing and sales efforts. So if that is the case, I may have to start at the beginning.

The instant velocity vector v of an object that has positions x(t) at time t and x(t + Δt) at time t + Δt, can be computed as the derivative of position:

I have defined velocity as well as I can without discussing marketing. Do you think velocity can be the key ingredient to Marketing success?

Technorati Tags: Agile,Agile Marketing,Velocity,Marketing Cycle

Related Blog Posts: Throughput Search on Business901 Blog

P.S. I added the last entry in the Wikpedia list!

Is Differentiation the same as Business Survival Ebook

Roy Osing of Brilliance for Business is an experienced Business and Marketing Consultant and the former Chief Marketing Officer & Executive Vice President for TELUS, Canada’s second largest Telecommunications provider. He is also the author of the book Be Different or Be Dead, Your Business Survival Guide'. This is a transcription of our podcast and includes some great answers to these types of questions:

1. What if it is difficult to be different? How do you go about that when you're, let's say, a dry cleaner’s? 
2. How do you get someone to really focus on that Only statement?
3. You talk about serving customers rather than providing customer service. What do you mean by that?
4. You also have an organizational assessment quiz on your website. What does that entail and what will I learn from it if I take it?

Is Differentiation the same as Business Survival -

Podcast: Is Differentiation the same as Business Survival

Press Release

Technorati Tags: Differentiation,Survival,leader,consultant,Author,Expert Status,marketing

Agile Marketing – Maybe?

Software development teams have been using Agile Project Management for several years now; this process has assisted them in their planning, execution, and feedback cycles. Could your marketing learn from them? Answer these questions:

• Is your marketing become more complex?
• Have you added multiple new product lines?
• Have you added different channels of distribution?
• Have you added additional pricing structures?
• Do you multiple external and internal stakeholders with competing priorities?
• Do you need to have better communication?

Your marketing team may have a much more solid plan of attack for its work, and will be able to control their marketing agenda, getting input and feedback from stakeholders to help shape it along the way. Cross-group communication and transparency will increase and as a result productivity should rise and disgruntlement decrease!  The above material was derived from an article by Matt Blumberg of Return Path, Inc. and was published on the OnlyOnceBlog. 

How would Agile Marketing work?

• Plan your marketing in releases,
• Each release has 1-2 core themes
• Planning session up front with the powers to be.
• Each release has several iterations where corrections are completed
• Track team members utilization on projects
• Daily stand-up to review progress and identify roadblocks.
• Build slack in the system that can handle a couple of last-minute opportunities

I have been implementing and using the agile process recently and have started to see positive results. What I like is of course, the “agility” of the process especially with long term projects. We are able to schedule iterations and planning sessions and develop future stories quickly! It also has reduced the ownership concept into more of a team function versus an individual and solved a few of these process. The story is still out on plus 90 day projects but I have already seen benefits. Whether they are sustaining and prove to be productive we will have to wait. Better yet, iterate one more time to make it better from what we have learned!!

Related Posts:

Marketing is about Content and Circulation not Cute and Clever

Start your Marketing with a User Story

Technorati Tags: Agile,Agile Marketing,Agile Project Development,Value Stream

Big Book of marketing from Atlas Air to Boeing

I had the pleasure of interviewing Anthony Bennet editor of the new book, THE BIG BOOK OF MARKETING released in January 2010 by McGraw-Hill on the Business901 Podcast. the book is based on material developed for one of Georgetown University Business School’s most popular marketing courses, THE BIG BOOK OF MARKETING is a unique and comprehensive guide to essential marketing practices from the world’s best marketers. The 86 companies represented in the book are industry leaders representing a range of goods and services, high-tech and low-tech industries, and industrial and consumer fields. Each chapter offers their real-life lessons and practical takeaways on every topic necessary for marketers to master today.

As Tony said in the podcast it is not a book filled with ideas from PHD’s. It is a book filled with authors that have CEO, V.P after their names and companies from Boeing to Atlas Air and BzzAgent to Ogilvy. What I found interesting in the book is the diversity of the content. I called it a book of short stories! Great reading, Great knowledge of information. 

Anthony G. Bennett (Washington, D.C.) has worked in marketing for over 22 years, including as an international marketing research analyst with Union Camp (now International Paper), general manager/vice president for Hunt-Marmillion Public Relations (now Ogilvy), Special Assistant promoting the first Bush administration’s National Energy Strategy, and marketing consultant to small companies and national organizations. He now teaches marketing at Georgetown University.

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Related Posts:

Your first Step in Achieving Expert Status
Marketing is about Content and Circulation not Cute and Clever

Technorati Tags: Branding,Public Relations,Product Life Cycle Extension,Quality,Sales Cycle

How much planning is in PDCA?

I find it interesting how many disciplines recommend that you spend fifty percent of your time planning.

1. School = Homework/Testing
2. Sports = Practice/Games
3. Toyota’s PDCA = Planning/(Do/Check/Act)

We grow up thinking it is a necessity? What happens?

Where does your Company fit in?

Technorati Tags: Toyota Production System,Plan,PDCA,Practice

A Simple Exercise to Differentiate Yourself

Everyone tells you to differentiate but are you comfortable that you are different enough. A tool that I use to make a strong impact on a client is one that is from the book, The Chasm Companion: A Field Guide to Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado (Revised).  Here is how you complete it:

The benefit your service/product is to the user:
    A. Provide Modest Enhancements
    B. Add substantial value
    C. Gives dramatic productivity gains.
    D. Changes the competitive field

The pain of obtaining the benefit to the user:
    4. Significant reengineering, new systems 
    3. Major changes to existing systems 
    2. Modest changes to existing systems 
    1. Integrates with existing systems

When completing this of course the more opinion and arguments the better. You will have to create a consensus, however and a decision reached. Sometimes positioning the competitor’s products/service around yours can assist. Are more changes required, do they add less or more value? If you end up at square A4, no Gain with a lot of pain, you can probably throw the product/service away. It simply will not work. In fact A2 and A3 should probably cause the same reaction. The truth to the matter is that unless you are doing a startup, you probably end up in the twilight zone. The problem being in the twilight zone, according to author Geoffrey Moore is that these offerings will cause little market movement. In other words, they are not COMPELLING. The other areas follow this pattern:   

• D4, you are in an early market category.
• D2/D3 is about market segmentation and making the pain a favorable trade-off to that group.
• C1/D1 means that your product can move to widespread adoption and you are ready for that transition.
• A1, B1 is being accepted in your target market and an easy solution. 

This description is a take-off from the book but to fully understand you have to read the Crossing the Chasm. It is a must read and still today it is one of most cited books in the innovation area. I have bought the book around 5 times. I keep giving it away.

However, the point to this entire exercise for me is differentiation relative to the gain and pain of the customer. It is an exercise that enables you to look at your product/service more objectively from your customer’s eyes. Are you really that different if all you are doing is complicating their life without making a significant gain? Another item it addresses is your market segmentation. Are you targeting a customer that your product/service causes little pain? If you are in the twilight zone, where are you headed? What will it take to move you to the outer perimeter? It is a simple answer make yourself more valuable by making the gain greater or the pain less!

Related Posts:

Evaluating your Marketing Funnel, Only Seven Levers matter

Lean Marketing, The Toyota Way

The Marketing Funnel using Six Sigma DMAIC – Define stage

Technorati Tags: Differentiate and Dominate,Differentiation,Marketing Segmentation,Define,DMAIC

Holding successful Kaizen Events, part 1 of 3

This weeks Business901 podcast, featured Karen Martin the co-author of  The Kaizen Event Planner: Achieving Rapid Improvement in Office, Service and Technical Environments. Karen shared so much new information that I have split the podcast in 3 parts of 20 minutes each. These podcasts are a wealth of information on Kaizen Events and a great companion to her book. A lot of “How to” was explained. We even discussed, how to pick the right people.

Karen Martin provides Lean transformation support to organizations of all types, with particular expertise transforming office, service, government, knowledge work and creative environments. Her broad understanding of operations design and business management stems from her experience building the operational infrastructure for several start-up operations with annual growth that ranged from 50-100%.  Her expertise also includes a keen understanding of customer value, which she honed while serving in sales and marketing roles, and legal and regulatory issues, which she developed while working in highly regulated and litigious environments.

As a consultant, Karen is known for her keen diagnostic skills and rapid results-focused approach to meeting client needs.  A skilled change agent, Karen builds energy within work teams by helping them focus an organization’s key performance goals – faster delivery of higher quality products and services at lower cost – while simultaneously boosting workforce morale.  Clients also give Karen high marks for helping them create continuous improvement cultures and support systems so they may become self-sustaining as quickly as possible.

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Karen’s Website: http://ksmartin.com

Related Posts:

Are you running numerous Kaizen Events, should you be?

A Kaizen Event is one of the most popular ways to rapidly improve a process and make the gains stick. Or is it?

A Preview to Kaizen Week

Technorati Tags: Kaizen,Lean,White-Collar,Office-Environment,Kaizen Event,Kaizen Template

Be Productive, Be Visual Ebook

Dr. Gwendolyn D. Galsworth is an educator, implementer, and a researcher with more than 25 years in the field of Workplace Visuality. Considered by many a leading visual expert, Dr. Galsworth is the author of a number of books on organizational improvement and workplace visuality, including Visual Workplace/Visual Thinking, recipient of the Shingo Prize for Research.

This is a transcript from two different podcasts and is packed full of stories and information on Visual Thinking.

Be Productive, Be Visual -

Related Information:

Original Podcasts:

Be Productive, Be Visual
Be Productive, Be Visual, Part 2
Start your Visual Thinking Process with Mind Mapping
Power of Visual Thinking in your Visual Workplace

Related Book(Amazon Link): Visual Workplace, Visual Thinking: Creating Enterprise Excellence Through the Technologies of the Visual Workplace

Technorati Tags: visual,lean tools,visual workplace,visual controls,visual standards

Using Excel for Value Stream Mapping Discussion

Systems2win a supplier of Excel Templates for Lean Kaizen Continuous improvement tools has introduced the Value Stream Mapping section of the Lean Starter Toolkit that includes a selection of downloadable templates, videos and instructions. This is a free downloadable trial package that covers Value Stream Mapping, and is part of a collection of over twenty templates in the Lean Starter Kit. The Systems2win Word and Excel templates and free online training are relevant to any type of organization pursuing a continuous improvement effort.

I had a chance to catch up with Dean Ziegler, founder of Systems2win and had this discussion about his new Lean Starter kit and more specifically the Value Stream Mapping Templates . Disclaimer: There is a business relationship that exist between Business901 and Systems2win at the time of this writing.

Joe Dager: You use Excel as a drawing tool. Why?

Dean Ziegler: Once someone completes the 13-minute video to learn how to use Excel as a drawing tool – they will wonder why they ever bought Visio. Drawing is the easy part. Excel has all of the drawing capabilities of Visio, but Visio can’t do math. And once your managers get over being enamored with the pretty pictures, they are going to start asking the tough questions that are the entire reason for making a value stream map in the first place. ‘How much will we save? Why are we focusing on this instead of that?’ And that’s when people realize that their entry-level drawing tool doesn’t really answer the questions that a value stream map is intended to answer.

Joe: What if I am new to Excel or even Lean, can I still benefit from your templates?

Dean: If you are new to Excel or the Tools of Lean, Systems2win offers one of the largest collections of on-line training resources free during your trial period. Free online training is one of the strengths behind our product offerings. There are built in support features each and every time you open a document. So we encourage newcomers to use our free training if nothing else to start or expand your Lean Journey.

Joe: If they are just Word and Excel templates, why don’t I just create them?

Dean: We want people to know that many of our Systems2win templates are just plain simple. In the past, we only gave away our most complex templates as trials, but now we’re giving some of the simple ones too. Our best prospect is someone that has already spent several late nights attempting to create a few of their own home-made templates, and can now truly appreciate how much time these save – and how much more professional the end results.

There has been a few discussion that I have participated in on the use of templates, so I thought I would go straight to the horse’s mouth per say. We have an expanded version of this discussion that I will release soon but thought that this was a good viewpoint on the use of templates.

Technorati Tags: Lean,Value Stream Mapping,Six Sigma,Excel,Word,Templates

Related Posts:

Value Stream Mapping
Draw your Value Stream Map in Excel