Your employer / client has convinced you of their commitment to supporting a transformation towards a lean culture. They instinctively know that there are opportunities for hard dollar savings and a "tighter" value stream but they just can't pull it all together.
You strike an immediate rapport and you are both aligned with one another (at least you think you are). You dig into the project....do your due diligence; current state data capture, brain storming, kaizen events, quantification of tasks, analysis etc in order to isolate the waste and to prepare your business case for change. Your employer's / client's strong enthusiasm and relentless push to get this work done as quickly as possible is both encouraging and stressful at the same time.
You've done your homework. Your analysis, future state visio flows, quantitative and qualitative benefits, costs and business case have been worked through backwards and forwards countless times. The proposed changes are both low risk and financially beneficial. In your head, this is a "slam dunk"!
You present your findings and eagerly propose piloting your plan in a controlled way with a promise to deliver on the benefits forecasted and then what happens?
They shut you down.
All of a sudden traces of defensiveness begin to surface along with empty reasons why we should be delayed. Some stakeholders even go as far as saying "it will never work"without even taking the time to go through the process flows, business case and understanding how you arrived at the proposed solution(s).
Middle management resistance to change is the number 1 obstacle to implementing lean production, according to a survey conducted by the Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI), a nonprofit management research centre. Over 36 percent of respondents to LEI’s annual surveys about lean business system implementation cited middle management as the top obstacle to lean implementation (the other top obstacles lack of implementation know-how [31 percent], and employee resistance [27.7 percent]).
Questions to Ask Yourself Before Entering into a Lean Project
Why would an organization fund a lean project, push hard for results and then shut the whole thing down once it is time to implement?
Is there a common denominator in terms of the types or sizes of companies this occurs in?
Who are the stakeholders and decision makers?
Does one person have overall authority and are they prepared to over-rule if necessary? What would cause that person to lose that commitment?