What You’ll Learn:

In this episode, hosts Andy Olrich, Catherine McDonald, and guest Ryan Weiss discuss Ryan’s Optics System, which aligns people and processes for enhanced organizational performance. The system uses a five-step process: identifying the work stream, understanding its purpose, scope, and gaps, creating a SIPOC (Suppliers, Inputs, Process, Outputs, Customers) framework, defining quality, value, and speed expectations, and establishing an accountability and responsibility matrix (ARM).

About the Guest: 

Ryan is a former global executive with experience leading large multinational teams (180+), managing a global chemical technology portfolio ($500M), and living in multiple countries (Singapore, Philippines, USA).

He left the corporate world in 2016 to become an entrepreneur for a second time. Since the founding of EPS, his team has created the OPTIC(S)(TM) system, developed a software platform to enable the system, launched a #1 Amazon best seller, and interviewed nearly 100 business leaders on his podcast OPTICS in Action!

Links:

⁠⁠Click Here For Catherine McDonald’s LinkedIn⁠⁠

⁠⁠Click Here For Andy Olrich’s LinkedIn⁠⁠

⁠Click Here For Ryan Weiss Linkedin⁠

⁠Click Here For Ryan Weiss Website⁠

⁠Click Here For Ryan Weiss Book⁠

Patrick Adams  00:00

Welcome to the Lean solutions podcast. This is the podcast that adds value to leaders by helping you improve performance using process improvement solutions with bottom line results. My name is Patrick Adams, and this season, I’ll be joined by three other amazing hosts, including Catherine O’Donnell from Ireland, Andy Ulrich from Australia, and Shane got involved from the United States. Join us as we bring you guests and experiences of Lean practitioners from all over the world.

Andy Olrich  00:32

Hello and welcome to the Lean solutions podcast led by your host, Catherine McDonald and myself. Andy Ulrich, how are you? Catherine,

Catherine McDonald  00:38

I’m great. Andy, great. How

Andy Olrich  00:40

are you I’m fantastic, fantastic. Really keen to jump into the episode today. So we’ve got a great guest on today, and we’re going to be talking about the intersection between people and process. So regardless of what we’re trying to do in an organization, whether that be lean or other types of changes or things that we want to do for our customers, there’s always that place where the processes that we are looking to deploy or maintain have to intersect with the people doing the work or connected to the work, and that’s the process. So we’re going to be talking to Ryan Weiss today, and I’m going to let you do an introduction. Catherine, would you like to tell us a bit more about Ryan?

Catherine McDonald  01:20

Yes, I’d love to so. Ryan is a former global executive with experience leading large multinational teams, managing a global chemical technology portfolio of $500 million and living in multiple countries, including Singapore, Philippines and USA. He left the corporate world in 2016 to become an entrepreneur for the second time, and since the founding of EPs, his team has created the optics system and developed a software platform to enable the system, launched a number one Amazon best seller, and interviewed nearly 100 business leaders on his podcast, optics in Action. Welcome to the show, Ryan,

Ryan Weiss  02:01

thank you so much. Catherine and Andy. It’s a pleasure to be here. I’m excited to have this conversation today, same,

Catherine McDonald  02:07

same. I mean, I’m all about the people behind the processes. Anybody who knows me knows that, so I am very excited for this topic as well. So Ryan, I guess your business is all about aligning people and processes, as Andy said earlier, for enhanced performance in organizations, and you set out to do that with your system called optics. So I guess, before we go anywhere, can you explain to listeners what optics is, I guess, at a high level, and what inspired you to develop this. Yeah,

Ryan Weiss  02:42

so thank you for the question. Catherine, that’s a great question. So I’ll give you sort of two parts to this answer. One, the I’ll start with the definition of the word optics, which might seem a little odd, but the word optics has two definitions. The first one is the study of light. It’s the physics, the technical processes, the technical element of the study of light, the second one. And oftentimes, people don’t think about the second meaning or the second definition of the word optics. It’s the perceptions of people about a situation, or the perceptions of people about something that they’re observing. And so I really sort of fell in love with this concept of optics, having a technical component and having a people and perceptions of people component. So it’s really that intersection of people and process and and so what the optic system is it’s all built around. Some of your listeners may be familiar with a tool called the SIPOC. It’s a suppliers, inputs, process, outputs and customers. So you’ve got two people, indicators in there, suppliers and customers, and a process one in the middle. So that acronym has sort of this people and process intersection. And we’ve built a five step process that we help organizations and teams to identify work stream, understand the people and process in network stream, talk about the quality, value and speed, the expectations that work stream and then the accountability, responsibility matrix. So we’ll go through those five steps a little bit later, but it’s really about alignment of people and process to accelerate performance.

Catherine McDonald  04:25

Excellent. Wow. Okay, can’t wait to hear more. Andy, any thoughts?

Andy Olrich  04:29

Good. Thanks, Ryan. So I had the pleasure of meeting Ryan at the the recent lean Solution Summit, and I’d been following Ryan’s work for a little while before that, I’ve, I’ve got the book on optics, Ryan. So that that was, it was great to meet you and sort of unpack that a little bit more. And yeah, we touched on how important it is, whatever the process is, that the people have got to be connected and aligned and even clear on where they fit in. So you touched on one of my absolute favorite tools to especially to get the motors running, and that’s the. SIPOC. You know, I’m going to let you talk about that and why. Why is the SIPOC fundamental? And you know, how is it so powerful, engaging people with the process. Can you unpack that a little bit more for us, please.

Ryan Weiss  05:15

Oh, absolutely. I really got excited learning about the SIPOC very early in my Lean Six Sigma sort of journey, probably going back on 25 years ago. And at the same time that I was learned, I learned that framework, the SIPOC framework, I was also going to something called the Dale Carnegie training, How to Win Friends and Influence People. I was learning about communication and engaging people. And this, the SIPOC was really a great framework to start doing that. I started building them with people. I’ve built 1000s of them over the last 20 plus years with everybody, from a diaper manufacturer in Shenzhen China to a piano teacher to a banker to manufacturing folks at all levels and organizations, from the boardroom to really the operation the shop floor, and I’ve literally built 1000s of these over the years, and what I found is that it provides a framework for people to start bringing together the things that they know. But it’s in such a simple way. You can build it on a whiteboard, Excel spreadsheet, you can build it in such a simple way, and at the end of it, people start to really understand what they maybe couldn’t otherwise articulate, in terms of the bottleneck, in terms of the people and the impact and the process problems that they’re having.

Catherine McDonald  06:35

Yeah, that’s such a good explanation. Because I sometimes find, I don’t know if you’ve you’ve you guys find this, both of you, but when you go into an organization and you start talking processes, so many people don’t include what you’re talking about. People, aside from us, sometimes don’t think in process. They don’t think in process steps. They’re just on autopilot, doing the work that they do every day. And it’s really only when you get together with people and like that, you use a SIPOC or a flow chart or a map, or what a VSM or whatever we’re using, and you break down the steps that people, it just dawns on people what’s involved in their work, and really that, like SIPOC and all of those, that those tools are so useful for helping people to understand what they’re doing, which is the platform for improvement, because when they don’t have that understanding, it’s very difficult to improve or go upwards. So it’s so, so powerful and and I love that you you’re using that tool. I love it myself. Can we go back a step? Um, if possible, Ryan, you mentioned that there’s five steps. And SIPOC, I believe, is the second step in your work stream, okay, can you just give us an idea of, say for, can we take maybe a practical example of what happens with an organization or a team when, let’s say you, your company, goes into work with them, and you start out on this five step five stream, so you start at work stream. So maybe tell us a little bit about that, and then we’ll see where sitebook comes in after that, just to make sense to people and so they people understand what it is you’re doing in your offering.

Ryan Weiss  08:11

Oh, absolutely, that’s a great question, because, yeah, the first step is we identify the work stream. We’d identify a core work stream that we want to improve. So as an example, one of my manufacturing clients, they told me that they were having invoicing problems. They’re having trouble with their invoicing process. Well, the reality is that it wasn’t just the invoicing process that was causing the problems. There were things upstream, several steps upstream, where the problems were actually starting. So the first thing we did was we identified a work stream. It was really their order to cash work stream, where they were looking at everything from order entry all the way through to that invoicing process and collecting on those invoices. And as you think about the key steps that need to happen, from order entry to the stock, modern make type process to actually manufacturing, to shipping. Then coming back to the invoicing process, one of the things we found was that their invoicing process was actually really, really quite simple, but it was upstream, four or five steps that order entry process, where they had actually four different methods of order entry. They had a Google Sheet, an Excel spreadsheet. They had a mass 90 a, you know, a accounting software that would enter. And they had this CRM where they had projects. So they had four different methods of order entry. They were causing all kinds of complexity going through the system that would end a result in these invoicing problems. So the first step that we do is this, identifying the work stream, order to cache identifying the purpose. Why is this work stream important? It’s always so important to start with that. Why is it important? The scope of it, where does it start and end, and the gaps. What are the pain points? What are the problems you’re experiencing in this work stream? Today. So the very first step that we do when I work with an organization is we identify a work stream that we can solve some problems around. Then we get into the purpose, the scope and the gaps and and go from there. Yes,

Andy Olrich  10:13

I Yeah, it’s such a powerful thing. And yeah, identifying just where to start. I, I’ve got a great mentor down here in Australia, Stewart that I work with. And he, he’s very strong on the Psycho and he, he describes it as the big, shiny object that distracts everyone when real process improvement begins. And it’s, you know, it’s really around. You’ve got all these people in the room. Some may be really keen. Some may be wondering why they’re there, and just walking them through that, that that exercise, all the conversation, or all those things you can you can get it, get them calibrated and aligned very early, and it all it helps. What I what I find great about the SIPOC is, especially that process column, is it helps you book end when you talk about scope and the risks of scope creep, it’s kind of like what we’re talking about between here and here. That’s the problem with here. And then it’s just like, from now on, let’s just think about from here to here, instead of world hunger, as they talk about with with the greatest respect. So yeah, I’ll just love it, Ryan, but yeah, it’s and then I guess to flow on from that, Catherine, we’re going to walk through some of those other steps. Yeah,

Catherine McDonald  11:19

yeah. I just had a thought. There just, it’s so I guess, well, what I’m imagining is because I know usually when I use sipox, it’s visual. So so much of this is made visual in the beginning to people. I guess, would you find that? Or would you is that the way you practice that these this is just put up in front of people. People work on it together. Is that how it works? Oh,

Ryan Weiss  11:39

absolutely, to me, that’s one of the most interesting things about it. I could give a quick example. I built a SIPOC with a diaper manufacturer in Shenzhen, China. It was quite a number of years ago when I lived in Singapore. I was there and we, we built this SIPOC on a whiteboard, right? There was no software program. It was nothing fancy. It was on a whiteboard, and we built it in Mandarin Chinese through a translator. So I’m like writing the English word. Somebody else is writing the, you know, the Mandarin characters up there on the board. And at the end of about an hour and a half of working with this leadership team and working through this, the owner of the company stopped the meeting and he looked at me, and in English, he said, You understand my business better than my team does, and that’s still to this day, still gives me a little bit of a chills, because I realized just how powerful this framework is to break down a process I had never seen. I had ideas of how I thought diapers may be made. I’ve been in manufacturing a long time, but for him to stop the meeting and look at me after 90 minutes and say, you understand my business, didn’t say you understand my process, or so you understand my business better than my people do, simply because I had circled some things in red, some outputs, some process steps, some suppliers. Or I circled a handful of items up on the board in red. When I saw the team start debating about specific areas that they’re like, No, that’s not how it works, I didn’t even understand what they were saying. But the ability to discern that these are the key areas of your business that you need to focus on to solve the problems you’re working on became so clear that even through translation in a foreign language, I was able to see it, and they were able to see it and internalize it absolutely.

Catherine McDonald  13:27

And I think that’s one of the biggest, I suppose, things that any quality management methodology hasn’t should have in common. We talk about the differences. We talk about which is better, which is worse, but visual management is key to them all, you know, no matter what. So absolutely, that sounds fantastic. So like we said, this is, this is a pretty structured methodology that you’re using here. So you’ve talked us through the first well, two steps, really, we did sidewalk, and then we went back to work stream. So we have the work stream, then we go into the sidewalk once we’re clear on what we want to work on, the priority, let’s say processes and for improvement. So talk to us then about the next step. Brian, please,

Ryan Weiss  14:11

sure. So the third step is the quality, value and speed. I call it qVs, and I take those swim lanes that we create in the SIPOC. And I asked the question, what are your expectations in terms of quality, value or cost and speed or timeliness? So qVs, quality, value and speed of each of the swim lanes that you create when you’re building that SIPOC together and and I sort of stumbled on this actually, when I lived in the Philippines, I was, I was looking at all of these teams. I had all these teams were reporting to me. I had about 180 employees, and I was, I was getting sort of overwhelmed with looking around the office and realizing I didn’t know what was going on in all of their computers. I didn’t know how I could measure all. Them consistently across all these different various departments that I was managing. And so I came up with this sort of idea at the time. It was quality, cost and timeliness is what I had up on the board. We just built a cork board outside of my office, and I looked at every one of the eight teams. I had them come up with a metric, come up with some expectation that they wanted to improve around quality, around cost and around timeliness, and that’s evolved to quality, value and speed over time. But this concept of you could take any key process step or any key process and you can ask that question, what are your expectations in terms of quality? What are your expectations in terms of value or cost? What are your expectations in terms of speed and timeliness? And then we start highlighting again and read some of those key areas that people are struggling with or frustrated with. And so it’s just sort of that third step of the evolution of digging into the SIPOC and understanding it better. Hello, everyone. I

Patrick Adams  15:56

am sorry to interrupt this episode of the lean solutions podcast, but I wanted to take a moment to invite you to pick up a copy of my Shingo award winning book, avoiding the continuous appearance track in the book, I contrast the cultures of two companies I work for, and though each started with similar lean models, one was mechanistic and only gave the appearance of lean, while the other developed a True culture of continuous improvement. The contrast provides a vivid example of the difference between fake lean and true lean. You can find the book on Amazon. Simply search my name or the title of the book. You aren’t a reader. No worries.

16:32

The audio book is also available on Audible. Now, back to the show.

Catherine McDonald  16:37

Andy, I like that. Do you like it’s so structure. I love structure. I don’t know, but I just, I love the structure I do. I as a facilitator of this kind of work, I just think you have to have structure. So I love it. What do you think? Andy, yeah, I

Andy Olrich  16:52

absolutely. So, you know, some people sometimes get a bit scared, and when you put a tool or a process up in front of them, and you’re saying, no, no, we just talk about this bit I need. We’re going to go in these steps. And some people are just ready to go, wow. So that there’s a framework there, but there’s freedom within that and and so I love it. And I what I like about the the next step that you talked about, Ryan is, not only does the SIPOC help people clear up where they fit in, or there’s always a customer or a supplier. When we talk about the people, where people go, oh yeah, forgot about them. Or actually, you know what, I didn’t even know they were involved. Oh, wow. And so if we talk about change management for whatever’s coming, it’s like, and we need to talk to these guys because they’re touching this, then what that so that gets a bit of clarity and alignment for the people as well. But then that next step you talked about is it absolutely uncovers whether you have any meaningful measures at all, or whether they are telling us the right things about what we’re trying to improve. So when you talk about improving, are we comparing with Apple apples, with apples at the end, or we just kind of went in saying we need to fix this invoicing process, and we got to the end, did we actually compared to what? So it absolutely clears up again, if there isn’t a measure or a standard there, before we get too excited, let’s try and level on something that we can take forward and understand how bad it is to start with or which part and then, yeah. So I that that’s that, that structure is absolutely critical. Because I think whilst it does kind of up, does stir some people up. Sometimes, if you can get them to go through and see how that’s all starting to fit in, they it’s like, yeah, I couldn’t articulate that before, but now I can see and the visual management side of things. So yeah, I you can tell I love this stuff. So I’ll stop there. I’ll let you

Ryan Weiss  18:42

continue. You touched on something there Andy, that I think is really important. And that’s this sort of realization as people are going through the SIPOC that, oh, I didn’t even think about that customer. I didn’t even think about that supply. Oh, I didn’t even realize they were involved at this point. And there was a workshop I did just in the last couple of months where there were a bunch of different people as a media team, media buying and selling, a media Trading Company, and the finance person was in there. And the empathy that people started to develop for the finance person that maybe prior to that, they were frustrated, like, why is this finance person always asking me this question and asking me that question? And all of a sudden, all these people from these different teams, from a digital team, from a, you know, from an out of home team, or, you know, a local team, all of them started to look at and realize that they had these different processes that the finance team was just trying to sort through, and the empathy that came from, just like, it’s sort of weird to think about, that we built a process and people became empathetic. But that’s this true intersection of people and process. It’s not just about like, here’s the steps you need to take. It’s. About understanding who needs what and why do they need it, and that type of thing that come really starts bringing it together.

Andy Olrich  20:07

Yeah, one really powerful example in a workshop was we had that, that moment that you just talked about, there was some, let’s say there of administration type roles that were supporting 24 other teams with the delivery of one particular outcome. And it was always that things like, Oh, why they chasing me? Or, why do they say? Why are they banging on about this time? And when we actually got there and mapped it up, there was like the most senior leader in the organization went over to them and sort of because they were sitting down in a chair, he sort of crouched down on his haunches, and just said, Look, I just want to apologize on behalf of everyone we we had no concept that we were doing this to you, because we were just sort of stuck in our little sub process here, and we just fired it off and thought everything was fine. It is, yeah, the people part that empathy, and it really does hit them in the fields. And I think Ryan definitely coming through strong. And one of the challenges I find for any sort of myself or lean or whatever practitioner, when using the SIPOC is there’s a real skill in not just, you know, fill out these columns and off we go, is like asking those deeper questions, or you get a sense that, hang on this. I think there’s something else going on here, and we’ll just dive into that a little bit before you move on. So if anybody’s out here thinking of just send me this template, Ryan, and I’m going to rip into a psycho. There is a real skill, and you’re unpacking that for us here now. So it is. It’s absolutely about people and and how we can get them to see so yes, thank you for for that.

Catherine McDonald  21:40

Just a question on the measures. So I’ve sometimes found it’s difficult to get measures for what’s truly important. Let’s say it’s easy to get measures on the technical pieces, on machines, on the usual lean sort of lead time, cycle time, whatever it might be, tack time. But if we’re some organizations don’t have a lot of measures, and they really don’t. And some organizations, they have measures, but they’re not the right ones. And some things are just hard to measure, like communication, flow, collab, the quality of collaboration, like not just what we do, but how we do it. So do you ever find with the measures, Brian, that I guess, have you come up against challenges like that? And if so, how have you managed them? Oh,

Ryan Weiss  22:28

absolutely. And so the framework in the way that we lay it out, the way that even our software enables it, we talk first in that first step about the purpose, scope and gaps. What are the gaps that you’re feeling? What are the gaps that you’re seeing in the in this work stream? And those gaps are really the pain that people are feeling. So then we want to try to tie those quality, value and speed expectations or metrics to closing those gaps. And there’s no doubt that sometimes it’s incredibly difficult to put some quantitative measure on exactly what this quality mean, but it enables us to at least start that conversation and start moving in that direction and and get to a point where we can talk about not only These maybe measures that are data quantitative type things, but also the qualitative what’s important to you, what’s really important in terms of quality, what’s really important in terms of value at this process step, what’s really important in terms of speed and timeliness, and why are those things important? And as we have those conversations, we start getting a better sense of what’s really important to you. It’s not just about like, let’s find a way to measure and hold somebody accountable a specific measure. It’s really about what’s important to you and why, and building that common understanding across the team. Yeah,

Catherine McDonald  23:54

excellent. And just one other quick question, just as you were talking it just made me think of the importance of psychological safety here and trust and in the beginning. So is there anything in particular that you would, let’s say, do or check to make sure that teams are in the right position and at the right maturity level before they go into something like this? Yeah,

Ryan Weiss  24:17

that’s, that’s a that’s a great question. So I often tell sort of a little bit of a comical story, and Andy’s familiar with this because I had, I don’t have it with me, but a little story about an orangutan. And

Andy Olrich  24:31

this is awesome. I was going to bring this in because you continue, but I’ve brought Eddie along, so you’re going to talk about Fu Manchu. So

Ryan Weiss  24:43

Catherine, this is, I appreciate that question so years ago, like when I first started into lean and training and black belt and all these types of things, I was in a corporate role, I had this one PowerPoint slide that said, what’s required to change? Change. And there were three things with a triangle that said skills, tools and mindset and and at the time, I didn’t really think much of it. I would teach from it. I would talk about it. But I went to the zoo with my children, and we were standing it was the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha, Nebraska, and they had this plaque, this big plaque, up on the wall, and it talked about this orangutan that lived there in the 1960s his name was Fu Manchu, and so I have to tell this story to sort of an icebreaker for teens, because Fu Manchu kept escaping from the cage in the head zoo keeper, like the CEO of the Henry Doorly Zoo, was getting angry at his employees, like, why are you letting the orangutans escape from the zoo? And I’m like, reading this story, and the whole story is about Fu Manchu, like they he they finally saw, one day that he had broken a piece of wire off of from the light. He used that to pick the lock. He opened the lock, got out of the cage, and he took the wire, and he hit it by his dumb line like a retainer, so that the zookeepers couldn’t find it. And I’ve often, and I always bring it back to these three things that was required to change even, even orangutan can figure this out, even I can figure this out like an orangutan, that there’s tools, skills and mindset. He needed that piece of wire that he used to pick the lock. Once they took away the piece of wire, he could no longer change the second thing is, he needed the skills. If you gave a key to a zebra, right? If you threw a key in the zebras Gage, you’re not going to figure out what to do with it. He’ll sniff around, might try to eat it, not going to the Fu Manchu had to develop the skills. And the third thing was he had to have a mindset that he wanted to get out of the cage. If Fu Manchu was happy sitting eating bananas and having someone clean up after him, then he would have never gotten out of the cage. But his mindset was so strong that he went and he got himself a piece of wire, he taught himself to be a locksmith so that he could get out of the cage. And so when we talk about things like this and weave these stories in about this is, you know, in order for us to change, in order for us to have some psychological safety, we have to appreciate that. We need some tools, we need some skills, and we all need to have a proper mindset to move things forward. So that,

Catherine McDonald  27:17

obviously, is just as is part and parcel of the whole process. And I just had to mention because I didn’t want to not mention it and just talk about the process of what we do, because it’s not that easy. Always we know this. There is a lot of psychology and human understanding that goes into all of this. So you know, that was a super explanation. I don’t think I’ll ever forget

Andy Olrich  27:41

that. It. Only listening. What I had is just a little bit of a backstory when I travel, especially overseas, my son gives me a little chimpanzee, Teddy, which I’m on the video you can see me holding. This is Eddie. So, yeah, I was at the Lean Solution Summit, and I have to put Eddie on certain locations and landmarks and send photos home, right? So I walked into the the exhibit area where Ryan was a sponsor of the the summit, and here’s this toy orangutan. So I was straight over for the photo, let alone the story that he just told. And I was like, you. I was like, I am never going to forget that. So I it was, it just all came together. So actually, I said to my son, I’m talking to the guy that’s got ferment you. So where is, where’s Eddie and so thank you for Catherine, for leading us into that. That’s so true.

Catherine McDonald  28:29

Yeah, the power of stories. It’s just so amazing. I know people talk about it, but it is. You never forget when someone tells you something in a story format, you know, story that’s humorous and sits, which is so brilliant. Yeah, I love that. Okay, so we’ve got to the stage where we understand that you the five steps. So we’ve got the first three steps, we have the work stream, we have the side Park, and then we’ve Q, v, s, okay. Quality, do you say velocity,

Ryan Weiss  28:55

value, value, quality, value and speed

Catherine McDonald  28:58

and speed, value and speed, okay? And then, so the next step we’re moving into then. So at that point we we’ve got a lot of work done. We understand our steps in the process. We have looked at our measures and understand what our measures are to tell us how the process is doing, and probably a little bit of an analysis, and that can be done at this stage, but the way you have it written is and described is AR M, so would you like to tell us what that stage stands for? Then, Ryan, yeah,

Ryan Weiss  29:29

yeah. So that’s the concept, this arm. I like to talk about it and think about it’s like, you know, your arm is like a part of you as a person, but the arm that we’re talking about here is the accountability, responsibility matrix. And so at this point, what we’re doing is we’re asking for each of the swim lanes, for each of the key process steps in that SIPOC, who’s accountable for making sure that that swim lane is running well. And oftentimes we start finding that people are like, well. Nobody really. It’s kind of like this department and that, well, if nobody’s accountable for making sure that this is happening, and you’re telling me that you have problems in this work stream, then the problem might have something to do with the fact that nobody has accountability for making making sure each of the key steps is running well and and that we’re getting what we need out of them. So that’s the accountability. Who’s ultimately accountable for each of the key steps in the SIPOC the second piece of this, then, is responsible. Who’s responsible to do something that supports or that moves that process forward? And what are they responsible to do so typically, for each swim lane, each of the key process steps in the SIPOC, I like to push people to find one person who’s accountable for making sure that process step is functioning well. And then there might be multiple people inside of a process step that are responsible to do various activities in order for that whole thing to flow and to function. Well, so, so that’s really the fourth step. Is this accountability, responsibility matrix.

Catherine McDonald  31:11

It’s like a shortened version of the Rasi matrix.

Ryan Weiss  31:15

That’s right, exactly.

Catherine McDonald  31:16

This is really where the people part comes in. Then, is it like, I suppose, in terms of how people are aligned to what we’ve already talked about right now.

Ryan Weiss  31:24

Yeah, that’s exactly, that’s exactly right. I mean, you’ve got, you got the people, sort of coming in at the SIPOC, suppliers and customers. These are the stakeholders of the process. But now we’re driving and looking at it through a different lens, which is who’s accountable and responsible for making sure that this work stream is flowing. Well, wow, wow.

Catherine McDonald  31:44

And then when you’re filling that in, would you fill that in with people? So you will ask the team, let’s say the cross functional team. You would work with them and ask them, Who is responsible, who is accountable? Is that how you would do it? Yeah. And what? What happens if they don’t agree, or

Ryan Weiss  32:01

they don’t know, it’s a big part of facilitation, to get people to move to a consensus that, you know, sometimes people will joke around and say, Well, I don’t want to be accountable for that, right? Just because you don’t want to be accountable for something doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be, or doesn’t mean that, you know, it’s it’s really about facilitation and bringing people together to a common understanding of who needs to do the things that need to be done, so that this work stream can flow well. And it’s really essential for teams to start getting clarity about this, so that they can hold people accountable and so that they know clearly who’s responsible for doing what, so that we close the gaps that we talked about in that first step. So, so really, as we go through each of these we’re pointing back to those gaps we talked about in step one and saying, you know, some of the gaps might be because you don’t have anybody accountable, or might be because there’s a responsibility that nobody’s picking up, or because you don’t have metrics, or because you haven’t figured out the key steps and how it flows and the handoffs that happen. So what we’re doing is we’re really pointing back to those gaps that happen, the purpose and the gaps in that first step to move the team towards a solution and towards alignment.

Andy Olrich  33:23

Yeah, so powerful. And in particular, so yeah, that you talked about where there’s no one, no one responsible or accountable. That’s, that’s you can see that that’s okay. But also that, that saying, If everyone’s responsible, then no one’s responsible. I Yeah, it’s so powerful when you’ve got three names up in the Accountable section. So hang on. Really, the buck stops with someone or some role. And those moments where you might have a room, say, with 10 people in there, there might be one person who’s accountable for eight things, when you actually boil it all down, and then it’s like, whoa, okay, well no wonder that person’s not in a good place. And that that freedom to then go, well, actually, that’s, is that really their role? Or, hey, yeah, we need to help this person out, because that’s that we can’t function like that. So it’s, yeah, there’s no nowhere to really hide if you can get them to come along and that, again, you touched on, I think, Catherine, that skill in the facilitation around keeping them on track to to make that visible. So it’s, again, it’s, it’s really focused at looking after people and just giving them that clarity. So, yeah, this is good stuff.

Catherine McDonald  34:30

And then the last step is the actions. But I guess that comes out of your all of your conversations. In the other four steps along the way, you’ll be documenting, I’m imagining what needs to be done, who, who needs to be responsible? What does that mean? What process step needs to change? So I imagine there’s like, as you go through the process, the actions will become care. Yeah, the

Ryan Weiss  34:51

actions sort of come out of each of those meetings, each of those facilitations and those actions, sometimes the. Include creating some standard work, creating a job breakdown. So I know prior to the podcast starting, we were talking a little bit about training within industry, and one of the things that we’ve done is we’ve incorporated the job breakdowns of twi into the actions the way that you can enable the creation of standard work and standard operating procedures in support of the work stream that you’re working on. So those actions that come out of every step, every one of those four steps, as we go through the work stream, identification, purpose, scope and gap, SIPA, qVs, arm, every one of those starts to generate some key actions that need to happen to close those gaps. And some of those actions are creating standard work that’s or updating standard work that’s in support of the work stream flowing better. And so all of that stuff kind of comes together in that fifth step of let’s execute. Let’s do the actions that need to happen so that we can close the gaps have been identified,

Catherine McDonald  36:04

and that’s how it’s done. Andy, such as fantastic. It’s

Andy Olrich  36:08

brilliant. And that that last one, again, is like you can run a fantastic sci fi and get everyone clean and aligned on certain things. But if there’s no call to action and actual things to go away and do at the end of it, can, it can just sit in a in a PowerPoint slide or a mirror board or something for for them. So I love how you ran that out with, okay, that’s, that’s great. Now, who’s doing what? By how much by when? Let’s go. It’s just a fantastic framework, Ryan, and as we’ve talked about it, it threads in some well known tools and methodologies, but yeah, it’s just really about getting that to flow in the way that that maximizes the value. So I just you touched on twi and and where that fits in. I’d really love to if you could just, if you could break down into an example of how you’ve used that to assist customers at the end of that process. So what, when you got to that action point, yeah, what you did, and how that added value to the company and the people,

Ryan Weiss  37:07

yeah. So if I, if I go back to sort of the first, I think it was the first sort of case study I started talking about, which was that manufacturing company had issues with the invoicing process. And we looked at the SIPOC, looked at the handoffs between all the departments. Looked at where the problems were really happening. What we found was that the invoicing person who is struggling with doing all these invoices. I watched her do about 30 invoices, and about 20 of them were very, very fast, like less than a minute each. It was just open up the software system. They looked at it. They clicked on it. Said, Yes, ship. You know it was shipped. Click on, send invoice to customer. The other 10, she set off to the side. And those 10 were really the pain that she was feeling. It was, let’s go back and find out what happened. Where in the production process did we lose this one, or where in the shipping process did we actually ship everything? We said there’s some note on here, like all those problems that exist, all those exceptions that that existed at the end. One of the things we did was we created a standard methodology on the front end for order entry. We created what’s called a job breakdown in twi and in training within industry, within Twi, they talk about something that’s really important, that gets missed in a lot of organizations today. And that is, they talk about, what am I supposed to do? How do I do it, and why is it important? And so many companies skip that. Why is it important? It’s like, I just want to explain what you have to do and how to do it. It’s that third piece, why is it important that brings us all the way for full circle, back to the purpose of a task, linking up with the purpose of the work stream. And how do we make all that stuff flow? So in that, in that example, creating a standard job breakdown, a single standard job breakdown, no matter how the orders came into their organization, we created a single job breakdown for a standard process for order entry, with what to do, how to do it, and why it was important. And what happened is, just a few weeks ago, in fact, I was working with this client. I’ve been working with them ongoing, and one of them brought up, they said, you know, are we don’t even talk about invoicing anymore. Invoicing isn’t even we didn’t even touch the invoicing process. We didn’t even like there was nothing. We didn’t do the we solved the problem that was upstream with a job breakdown, with a standard for everybody to follow, and that solved the problem that they’re feeling in invoicing. And so that combination of the SIPOC and the job breakdowns, so that the work stream flows, is really essential for organizations to succeed.

Andy Olrich  39:49

Yeah, how often do we see when you talked about they didn’t touch the invoicing? I guarantee there would have been someone somewhere, maybe not there in other places where there’s similar. Example where it’s like, you know what? We need to automate that. Let’s buy this digital thing, and we’ll, we’ll, we’ll spruce up our invoicing system. And it’s that makes it worse a lot of the times, because we haven’t cleaned up and understood what’s happening. 2345, steps up, that’s actually causing that garbage in, garbage out. So, yeah, digital transformation is something alive and well, and, yeah, we’ve got to be mindful that hang on. What’s lifting up to that process for you. And this is what I see, this, you know, this optic system absolutely does, is when you get to that actions point, you’ve actually identified a process owner or who’s accountable for that where that change may or may not occur. So it gets everybody again, tuned in that we’re going to do this action, and you actually own that process. So we’ve got to, yeah, do you know that? And so we don’t just get excited and jump to what we think is the where the solution lies. So the great example, and I’m sure it’s nice to hear those sorts of things from your clients, where they’ve stuck with you in the process, and they get have that? Aha, uh, absolutely. I’m sure you got a million more examples of that, Ryan, it’s, it’s fantastic, but we’ll, I think we’ll wrap up, yeah, just looking at the time here. But Ryan, I’d love for you to tell us a bit more about how people can not only as I’m holding up here, I’ve got a copy of your book, optics, Amazon bestseller, but also how they can get in touch with you learn more about optics and all of that magic. Yeah,

Ryan Weiss  41:29

that’s great question. So if they go to optics book.com they can, there’s a lot of information about the book. They’re able to order it there, leave reviews or reviews things like that. So optics book.com, if they’re interested in the book, they can also, you know, connect with me on LinkedIn. I go by Ryan C Weiss, so I got my middle initial in there. It makes it a little easier to find me in the in the sea of people that are out there on LinkedIn. So if they look me up at Ryan C Weiss on LinkedIn, then they will, they’ll find me there, and I’d be happy to connect with folks and and continue this journey. I’m on a mission to align people in process and make people lives better, their work better, their outcomes better and and so I just love connecting and chatting. So thank you for having me on today.

Andy Olrich  42:17

We love it, and we’ll have those links in the in the episode. Links at the bottom, I’ll throw over to my wonderful co host, Catherine, any final remarks that you’d like to put in there?

Catherine McDonald  42:28

Just huge Thanks, Ryan, just I just love your passion. App does absolutely shine through. And I’m sure your work is brilliant, but I just think you’re brilliant as well. And I it’s been lovely chatting to you. You’ve put this, laid this out so well for us all to understand. And I’m sure that there are people listening who find this really, really valuable. This is what a lot of people struggle with when it comes to improvement. Is just understanding what to do, where to start. And you’ve laid it out so well. So thank you so much. It was lovely to meet you.

Ryan Weiss  43:01

Thank you. My pleasure.

Andy Olrich  43:02

Okay, great. Good to see you again. Ron, say later, Catherine, and we’ll catch you all next time.

Catherine McDonald  43:07

Yes, see you next time. Bye, guys.

Patrick Adams  43:09

Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of the lean solutions podcast. If you haven’t done so already, please be sure to subscribe this way you’ll get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined, please give us a review. Thank you so much.