In his book, the coaching habit, Michael Bungay Stanier describes how most coaching programs are considered a failure. Most managers say they are too busy with doing ‘important things’ and therefore have no time to do the coaching in the first place, and when it happens: only 23% of people who have ever been coached say that the coaching helped them.
Stanier offers a solution to both these problems. Coaching should be an information routine that can take less than 10 minutes. In this book, he describes seven questions that when asked directly help the person asked in his or her daily work. This article describes the seven questions one by one.

In his book, Leading With Lean, Philip Holt describes the role of leaders in any organization in transforming the organization in to a lean organization. He does this by dividing the book in five parts: planning to lead, learning to lead, leading at scale, leading excellence and leading with lean. In this article, each of these five parts will be shortly described with the two topics that I enjoyed reading most.

In his book Lean Audit, Joerg Muenzing describes how an effective Lean Audit can help assess the maturity of a lean culture, and give direction for improvement. The book contains five parts. Part 1 presents the concept of the Lean Audit Lean Audit, part 2 explains the 20 keys to world-class operations, part 3 guides the readers through the assessment process, part 4 shows to interpret results, and part 5 explains the certification process.
This article will focus mainly on part 3 and 4 of the book: how to measure performance on different keys and what operational excellence looks like, and how to interpret the results to define an improvement plan.

This is the third article in the series about the D²MAIC project structure for yellow belts. In part 1, we discussed the Discovery and the Define phase.

This is the second article on D2MAIC projects. The first article described the discovery and the define phase of the project. This article will describe the next two phases of D2MAIC: measure and analyse.

Projects are an important part of every lean program. First, you have the small problems that can be solved within the team and then you have the larger problems that can be solved with the use of A3 thinking. There are however bigger structural problems that can not simply be solved within a few weeks. These are the projects. Projects can take up to six months to complete and traditionally follow 5 Phases within (Lean) Six Sigma: define, measure, analyze, improve and control (DMAIC). I prefer to use the D²MAIC structure described by Abramowich (2005), which starts with a Discovery phase before the Define phase. This article describes the first two phases of the D²MAIC structure: the discovery and de define phase.

In his book Design For Operational Excellence (Duggan, 2012), Kevin J. Duggan describes the missing part of many lean programs: creating opportunities for business growth. Yes, lean has to do with reducing waste, but why do we want that? The answer is business growth.

In this book, Duggan describes different questions that help us think about the improvement activities we have and how to improve our improvement plan. This article describes the two parts of the book that inspired me the most: how to design a self healing flow and the 9 steps of value stream mapping in an office environment. Because only when there is a self healing flow, management can focus their attention on growing the business.

Single Minute Exchange of Dies (SMED) is a tool developed by Shingo to reduce change over times on machines. Using this technique, you can reduce set-up times from 4 hours to 3 minutes, which is almost 99% (Shingo, 1985). This article explains the benefit of SMED, the techniques Shingo describes for implementation, 4 steps of the SMED Kaizen event and 3 other tips.