One Minute Blitz

dwanehollands

Well-known member
A few people have made comments about the buearuacracy (it's too early to care about the spelling) of lean manufacturing principles and how much time it takes to organise. Some one also made the point about applying 'time management' techniques took more time than without them. Possible hyperbole - but again a valid point.

Add to that the fact that just about everybody hates long meetings. Particularily production staff.

I also heard an interesting video presentation yesterday by Dan Kennedy. Dan's the guy pretty much responsible for Guthy Renker's success. (can you say "pro-active"?). Guthy Renker is about 200 million turnover - mostly thanks to Dan Kennedy.

Not to get too off track, but Dan had heard many years ago on vinyl record that most entreupreneurs (too early still) organically reach a point when, figuratively, "The sun, moon and stars all align and everything just works. Your sales explode, you get heaps more new clients, everything just works exceptionally". But it only happens usually for a limited period of time and although it happens naturally, not many people understand what triggers it and more importantly how to make it stay.

So he continues that we've been institutionalised to think that "slow and steady wins the race". In reality he said - the Hare wins, not the tortoise. We're an impatient society that wants our dinner in less than 4.5 minutes or we're freaking out. We love fast, but hate slow.

However, when it comes to our businesses we still seem to think that slow & steady will win the race. Not necessarily in production do we think that. But in implementations of new technologies or techniques. Beauraucracy is a fine example. Have a long meeting to discuss it and then someone will spend a week thinking about the meeting and then figure out that we need to schedule another one. And so and so forth.

Dan mentions that "Most of you have probably gone to many seminars and come back with great ideas and then return to the office to find that the first thing the staff will say is - we'll implement it slowly" If you do anything slowly it's going to die. It's not going to get completed. That's why there are so many failed attempts at implementing new techniques.

Of course one of the biggest problems (actually I'd argue to say that it IS THE BIGGEST PROBLEM) that most business owners face is - WORKING ON THE BUSINESS - NOT JUST IN THE BUSINESS. Of course a cliche because it's such a prevalent problem.

We're getting to a point don't worry...Dan also says that limited resources are a problem for implementing change. We're all familiar with that. I need more staff to be able to get this done. I need more TIME!!!!

Not enough hours in a day. A problem we all face.

I'd be interested to know his solution to the problem, but at this stage I'm not prepared to fork out the usual $1000 for a course to find out that I could have come up with that if I wasn't so lazy and thought about it.

But let's think about this. How do we do more with the resources we have. How do we get things implemented quicker? But we can't add extra staff. We don't have any extra time. Those are the constraints.

What about a One Minute Blitz? Anyone heard of anything like that?

By this I'm referring to:
1. Problems that need to be solved
2. Decisions that need to be made
3. Implementations of new methodologies

An individual can only work so fast. So how do you get more done? Call a 1 minute blitz? Where a bunch of workers all jump on the problem with the intention of getting it solved in a minute. Now 1 minute is high bar to reach, but so is Single Minute Exchange of Die (SMED). But it's the target to get times coming down. The blitz would be where everyone is highly focused, tasks are quickly allocated by the Blitz leader and things get done fast. Get it working and up to speed again.

An example of 1 minute blitz could be a roller problem on the press. A press blitz is called. 2 guys jump on it, rip the rollers out, deglaze, change bearings, whack it back in, reset rollers. Or 8 guys jump on it and do it to 4 decks?

What about a 5S blitz? Bindary Blitz? The focus is to get it done in one minute. Obviously a 6 hour hand folding job won't be able to get done in 1 minute. But while some are folding, the others could be problem solving the folder perhaps.

Of course the first comment is probably going to be "What about what I was doing before the blitz was called. Or my job is more important than the blitz issue". These are prioritirising issues. A hurdle to overcome in the concept.

Would it be chaotic? Perhaps. I've heard working at the googleplex is like 'controllled chaos'.

The concept needs work, no doubt, but the focus is on 'Blitzing the problems'. Get the problems solved (and keep them solved) quicker than your competitors and go on to the next hurdle to success.

P.S.

I had a customer from the aviation industry (medium company) comment about how hard it was to break through to the next level and he's amazed at these companies which just explode. I agreed with him, yes it's difficult. But in hindsight after hearing Dan's words about the hare winning the race in real life, I partly understand his lack of progress. He took 8 months to decide on a business card design and then after we printed it (signed off, ok) he still wasn't sure of the size of the logo. "Should we reduce it another 1mm.

Taking 8 months to get your business card design done instead of 2 days is a waste of time. Could you imagine what this guy could have achieved in those 8 months instead of spending hours agonizing over the design? In reality, did that 8 months worth of 'agonizing' over his cards make his cards any more effective in getting him work? Absolutely not! So it was a waste.

The most indecisive person I've met to date.
 
I like the idea a lot, but I must disagree with it.

Going about a problem very quickly is doomed to fail before it began. "1 minute blitz" is a nice catch phrase, but the idea of the Single Minute Exchange of Die (SMED) never specifies to get any work down to 1 minute flat, but to under double digit minutes. This means less than 10 minutes, so 9 is actually a successful implementation of SMED.

A lot of concepts on how to solve problems in 1 minute blitz to me is doomed to fail all because of the fact that unless you are a seasoned worker who has been running the "blitz" for a long time, you are prone to make mistakes. Doing any type of work in a hurry is always mistake prone, and it gets worst the faster it goes.

An example, if I asked a programmer to write a simple program and I gave him 1 minute to do it, he might be able to do it, but it would probably not work all too well. It could be riddled with errors and so on. However, if we trained him/her properly to do certain programs in that speed then the programmer could do it.

This brings up a good point. SOME work can be done in less then a minute, good example is in a lean office to find anything in less than 30 seconds, but a lot of work cannot. Solving issues can be fixed quickly, but getting to the root problem of WHY the issue occurred takes a very slow and methodical approach. A great example of how to solve why the issue occurred is to implement the 5Why method. This might take awhile just trying to find the root problem.

Blitzing the problem to me just isn't a viable solution. Soon enough you'll have everyone in your company trying to make results quickly just to get the problem solved quickly. Was it the best solution? Did we think clearly about the problem? Did we examine the solution? Does everyone understand the problem? Does everyone understand the solution? All these factors have to go into the solving phase in order to find the "best" solution. Sure, people might come up with a solution but if it isn't the best it isn't going to work very well. Project Management is focused along that guideline, we aren't trying to find any solution, but the best solution.

To come to the best solution you need time to think on it. Throwing wet wood into the fire will not help it to burn through the night.
 

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