{"id":822,"date":"2023-07-30T21:39:55","date_gmt":"2023-07-30T21:39:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/?p=822"},"modified":"2024-09-08T20:42:30","modified_gmt":"2024-09-08T20:42:30","slug":"powerpoint-sneaky-lean","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/powerpoint-sneaky-lean\/","title":{"rendered":"Powerpoint Sneaky Lean"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the key tools of the Toyota Production System is an \u2018A3\u2019.\u00a0 It\u2019s basically a live project plan on a page. On one piece<\/em> of A3 sized paper.\u00a0 (I failed to communicate the \u2018one page<\/em><\/strong> of A3\u2019 part on a course once and was surprised when 25 x 6 page word documents plopped in my inbox some weeks later. I have not made the same teaching mistake since).<\/p>\n

Much of lean and improvement is based on applying the Plan, Do, Check, Act<\/a> scientific approach to work i.e. Plan \u2013 what do you want to do, Do \u2013 do it, Check \u2013 did it do what you wanted it to do? Act \u2013 yes it did, brilliant, embed it into standard practice. No it didn\u2019t, ok well what\u2019s your next plan?<\/p>\n

I repeat, an A3 is Plan Do Check Act on one piece of A3 paper. They are brilliant because they force you to be succinct.\u00a0 A lean A3 is a live document so everyone can see where you are and how a project is progressing. In organisations that are mature in their approach to Continuous Improvement, an A3 document has real power, enabling budget spend, authorisation of process change \u2013 they become a kind of currency or language for organisational change.<\/p>\n

Despite how genius a good A3 is, to be honest, within my team, the Business School, College and University, I\u2019ve never used one and I wonder why that is?<\/p>\n

Perhaps because I\u2019m fearful that if I introduce the tool to people I\u2019m working alongside against, they\u2019ll think that I\u2019m even more odd than they do already? What strange one page madness is this? We need detailed business case documents that clearly articulate multiple options, risks and detailed project plans!<\/p>\n

Perhaps it\u2019s because achieving success in the Flexible Learning project that I\u2019m working on feels much harder than something that can be contained within the one piece of paper?<\/p>\n

Perhaps it\u2019s because the more and more I care about lean, the more I want lean to be not so explicit and in your face, but subtle, secret lean \u2026 lean by stealth<\/a>. Lean that doesn\u2019t need it\u2019s own headline, just lean that works.<\/p>\n

There is no doubt about it, someone showing up with an A3 to a meeting is tantamount to having \u2018I love lean\u2019 tattooed on your forehead (no I haven\u2019t got any tattoos, lean ones or otherwise). But I\u2019m pleased to tell you, I think I\u2019ve invented a project management tool that is a tad more subtle but almost as clever.<\/p>\n

May I present to you, the weekly powerpoint project update.<\/p>\n

*tumbleweed*<\/p>\n

Ok, it\u2019s not as groundbreaking as say, inventing powerpoint itself, but I am quite proud of it because it\u2019s not only helping me to communicate project progress with everyone who expresses an interest, it\u2019s also helping to structure my thoughts. I fill it out as the week progresses and yes, it does help me to be succinct and focus on what\u2019s important.<\/p>\n

This is what it looks like:<\/p>\n

Slide 1: Cover page<\/p>\n

Slide 2: One page Update<\/strong> \u2013 this is the week in a nutshell, the headlines that I want to share, things that have surprised me, things that I\u2019ve learned that are important, links to further information which I find useful<\/p>\n

Slide 3: Meetings that I\u2019ve had that week<\/strong> as a table. The first column is the name, second, which department they are from, third column, my notes from the meeting.\u00a0 If it\u2019s a particularly juicy meeting, I\u2019ll make my notes in Word and then at the end, review the notes and fill in the meeting summary in the table. With a meeting heavy week, sometimes this table stretches to 2 or 3 slides.<\/p>\n

Slide 4: Meetings coming up<\/strong> slide.\u00a0 This is just a list of all of the meetings that I have coming up relating to the project.\u00a0 Not so interesting you might think, but this slide is important \u2013 it forces me to think about the forthcoming weeks of the project \u2013 have I planned sessions with people that are important to the success of the project? Critically however, this slide is the basis for next week\u2019s \u2018this week\u2019s meetings\u2019 slides, so it is all ready for me to fill out the following week. \u00a0Importantly, on this slide, I keep a record of all the people I have both asked to meet but they haven\u2019t got back to me yet and also, people that I need to meet and haven\u2019t asked. This is so helpful because, when juggling multiple activities as I am, you can easily forget things that you need to follow up on.\u00a0 Having them listed in the weekly update means that when I turn to create next week\u2019s update, I am forced to reflect on them, and push \/ poke \/ action.<\/p>\n

Slide 5: Contact me<\/strong> slide with a link to a Teams Folder of all of the previous weekly updates.<\/p>\n

I mix it up some weeks and include extra information about important things I\u2019ve found out or created such as a map of the University\u2019s different CRM systems, a process flow chart for getting new programmes uploaded onto SIMS and our University website.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s really pleasing to me is how these weekly updates are proving to be a really useful diary of my progress so far.\u00a0 I regularly dip into them when I\u2019m trying to remember what someone said or what I thought at a given point. After 15 weekly updates, they really are beginning to tell a story of my progress.\u00a0 The standard structure of the update provides a consistency architecture which helps to tell the story of what\u2019s happening.\u00a0 Plus there\u2019s nothing intimidating about a pdf\u2019d powerpoint is there?!<\/p>\n

The really important thing that setting them up has achieved has been to motivate me to make progress each week. I\u2019m conscious that I need to create one each week now (holiday weeks apart, plus when embroiled in AACSB reaccreditation visits) so I\u2019m actively looking out for things that will make my update more interesting and forcing myself to summarise what’s happened every week provides me with some really great focus – and yes, an opportunity to ‘check and act’.<\/p>\n

Communicating a project to stakeholders in this way is hopefully (would need to ask people to truly determine this) helping to build an informed consensus of opinion too. Not everyone is going to open the emails, or indeed read every word that I\u2019ve written, but hopefully enough people will so that I\u2019m not on my own in trying to deliver more forms of flexible learning in Cardiff University, I\u2019ve got a team of informed and aware allies behind me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One of the key tools of the Toyota Production System is an \u2018A3\u2019.\u00a0 It\u2019s basically a live project plan on a page. On one piece of A3 sized paper.\u00a0 (I […]","protected":false},"author":151,"featured_media":1065,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5,12,4,6],"tags":[42,43],"custom_author":[44],"class_list":["post-822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lean","category-operations","category-productivity","category-service-improvement","tag-a3","tag-project-management","custom_author-sarah-lethbridge"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/554\/2023\/07\/hiding.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/151"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=822"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":827,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822\/revisions\/827"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=822"},{"taxonomy":"custom_author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/sarahlethbridgelean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/custom_author?post=822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}