How you can develop simple tools to handle complex projects....
The problem: The engineering department would like to understand for each of the projects who needs to do what by when taking into account the available resources (man and machine in the different departments). Lead time is impacted in case wrong decisions are taken because information is missing or incomplete.
What you need: A group of engaged engineers and technicians who are willing to continuous improve through practical learning and a simple board, magnets and markers.
How you need to start: Start from what you already have. In this case the engineers were using an excel file.
And try to understand what the issue is with this file.....
The problem with this excel file was that the information was hidden in the computer. It was not straight away visible for all involved colleagues and not easy to read as a lot of information needed to be shown on one screen: the timeline used by the engineers is several weeks. Update was only done by one person during the weekly meeting.
Next step: There was an unused board, we bought magnet strips of different colours, cut them in smaller pieces. Each column is a week, each row is a project, each colour is a functional role/ department, on the magnet the task is described. This all based upon the existing excel file. To keep history a picture is taken weekly and stored on the fileserver. Each project leader is having standing meetings at the board reviewing the tasks. Whenever a task is completed, the owner of the task marks it on the magnet. Whenever a task is moved, a marker is used to make “this problem” visible.
Next improvement step: After having learnt from the board, the users found out that every 2 weeks or so a new sheet needed to be attached to the board and magnets moved. So therefore a new board was designed: instead of a big board with paper, separate slides on wheels were made that can be moved from right to left. No need anymore to move magnets...
Conclusion: It is all about looking for simple tools, trying it out and continuously improve. And never forget to make problems visible so they can be solved for once and for ever.
Thanks a lot to the Helvoet Engineering team to develop this simple tool! It was great learning! Keep on doing the good job!
