Patrick Adams  00:04

No, it was, how can we service our taxpayers better? You know, right now, there’s just so much waste and noise and challenges that are just for whatever reason, just really embedded in how we do state and local government. So for for you guys to take a stand and figure out, how can we do this better? Because the taxpayer deserves it. It wasn’t just about, hey, let’s, let’s crunch the numbers and find the better way to do government. It was, let’s take a look at things and find the better way to serve other people, and the results are going to be a better, more robust and stable cover. Hey everybody, welcome to the Lean solutions podcast. This episode is going to run a little bit different than our normal episodes. What you’re going to listen to Next is a recording of Senator Ricketts, Senator of Nebraska, addressing Congress about the Office of efficiency, and he talks about the work that was done when he was governor of the state of Nebraska and leading a team developing a business system that he used in the private sector and then was developed into what was successful in the public sector at the state of Nebraska. And he shares many different case studies and examples of how Lean and Six Sigma helped create value and add a considerable amount of savings back into the taxpayers lap. So I’m excited for you to listen to this address to Congress from Senator Ricketts, and then afterward, Shane and I will kind of break down exactly what Senator Ricketts is talking about, going a little bit more detail about the program at the state Nebraska. So enjoy

Pete Ricketts  02:01

as well as Elon Musk and Vivek ramaswani, for their effort to be able to create the Department of government efficiency. This is something that is near and dear to my heart, because as governor Nebraska, this is what we did. We focused on how we could drive efficiency through our state operations. Now, if you want to think about the big argument between Republicans and Democrats on a really macro scale, what it is, it comes down to what should government properly do? What should be the size and scope of government? But there’s actually things we agree that government should do between Republicans and Democrats, and for those things, we should do them really, really well. All too often, government fails because it’s not properly managed, because we don’t do a good job. And when we don’t do a good job, then we end up wasting taxpayers dollars. As governor Nebraska, this is one of the things I focused on, to be able to do a better job on take my private sector experiences coming from the business world and applying to run state government, and we show the things it’s doing the private sector will work in running the public sector as well. At the state of Nebraska, we implemented Lean Six Sigma. Lean Six Sigma is a process improvement methodology. There’s a number of them out there. This is the one we chose. What it does you break down an operation, count what the steps are, what the steps should be. Get the front line, people engaged, the people actually doing the work involved in looking at those steps and see if you can cut the waste, the number of steps and everything else, so you can make the process more efficient. And that’s how you can do a better job of actually providing services while reducing costs the same time. And that’s the thing. Every time you get to government said, Oh, we want to cut expenses, blah, blah, blah, oh, you’re going to cut services. No, no, no. In the private sector, you can’t go to your customers and say, Well, I’m going to reduce your prices, but I’m going to also reduce your service because your customer will go someplace else. It doesn’t work that way. So the private sector figures out how to do better job of providing services while reducing their expenses. We can do the same thing in government now, in the private sector, you have competition that’s going to drive inefficient businesses out. In the government sector, it’s going to require people like Elon and Vivek senators here in this room to be able to drive that through our government agencies to get that efficiency I want to talk a little bit about what we did, because it was very effective. I mentioned that you measured the steps. You count how many steps there are, and see where the overlaps are. One area we did, it was air construction permits. For example, we had 190 steps that it took to issue that permit. We cut that down to 22 steps. Days. And by doing that, or sorry, 110 steps, we cut down to 22 by doing that, we cut it down from 190 days to be able to issue that permit to 65 days. Now we can’t change any environmental regulations. That was just a better job of issuing those permits. And when you free up your teammates time, because they’re not wasting time on all those extra steps. They can do more work. They’re more productive and focus on things that are going to be more important, for example, more difficult permits. And we use this in a variety of ways, and showed lots of improvement, for example, in our economic assistance line in August of 2020 August 2014 it was taking about 23 minutes to answer that phone call. We set a goal setting five minutes or less to answer those phone calls. For those people calling in seeking our assistance, we hit that goal all the way up until the pandemic. It was taking us 40 days to issue snap applications food stamps, if you’re one of those families in need and is taking 40 days to process that application, what is that saying about how we think about you? We set a goal of getting those permits done or those applications done in 10 days. We hit that all the way up until we hit the pandemic, and then, even when we got out of compliance, when we started going above 10 days, we knew we were above it, and we could take steps to start getting that number back down again. We were able to do it in a variety of other ways, like, for example, Department of Motor Vehicles getting you your motor driver’s license in our centers of excellence, we were able to get that from 22 minutes down to eight minutes, get people in and out the door our green sheets, which is what we use in our Department of Transportation, to be able to make sure that our contractors are doing the right things with regard to the environment or antiquities or whatever, making sure they’re following all the rules. We were able to cut that from 16 days to get it down to three days, so that those contractors can get into the field faster and get our projects moving faster. Or here’s another one, we would issue reimbursement checks to families with children who had special needs. Often, these special needs children will have to have specialized care. Families will have to travel to that hospital to go get that they get reimbursed for those expenses, but it was taking us 13 to 15 days to reimburse those expenses. Well, what’s wrong with that? Well, that’s over a two week pay period. Those families had to float those costs from one paycheck to the next paycheck. And you know, and I know that a lot of families live paycheck to paycheck that put a financial burden on those families with special with kids with special needs, we were able to cut that time down to two days to be able to make sure we could get those expense checks back to those families in need, so that they wouldn’t have to float that and experience that financial hardship from one payment to the next. Well, what do we have to do? To do that, we had to get everybody on board our entire team. At the end of the day at the state of Nebraska, we trained over 30,000 of our teammates in the Lean Six Sigma process. They were white belts, kind of the introductory one. Over 6200 of our mid level managers in the yellow belt The next level up, we trained 248 executive green belts. Those are the upper level executives, again, more training. And then we trained nine black black belts. Those are the folks that oversee the whole program. And by implementing all of that, we were able to save over 900,000 hours of our teammates time. We did over 1000 different projects. We saved $115 million in hard savings. And because of those processes, for example, we were able to reduce the square footage that we’re occupying to stay in Nebraska by 60,000 60,000 square feet. We took off our roles. We reduced our employment by three and a half percent, and we were able to control spending. Before I became governor, our budget was growing at six and a half percent a year. I would say that was not sustainable. We were able to, on average, while I was governor, keep that growth of our budget to just 2.8% a year, just 2.8% a year on average. And I might just contrast what we’re doing here at the federal government right now. In 2019 we spent $4.4 trillion 2024 that was closer to 6.86 point 9 trillion. That’s a roughly a 55% increase in just five years, folks. That is not sustainable, and that is why this department of government efficiency, the doge and what this incoming administration is going to do is so important we’ve got to be able to get our spending under control. It is a risk to our country.

Patrick Adams  09:56

Hello and welcome to this episode of the lean solutions podcast. My. Name is Patrick Adams, and I’m joined by my friend Shane, who is also one of our Lean solutions podcast hosts. And today we are going to join you in breaking down the video that you just watched of Senator Ricketts talking about the government side of efficiency, the Office of efficiency, and what they were able to do at the state of Nebraska, which is pretty amazing, Shane was actually there, so I’m excited to hear his side of things, yeah, but I think this is going to be a fascinating discussion about government efficiency and how principals from the private sector can actually revolutionize the public sector, right? So Senator Ricketts, in the video that you just watched, he’s addressing Congress and highlighting the transformational impact that Lean and Six Sigma can have and and did have during his tenure as the Governor of Nebraska. And as we you know, kind of go into this next year of 2025 this office of efficiency is going to come about, and we’re hearing about that in the news and and I think a lot, many of us are wondering, what does that mean? What does that look like? And Shane and I do not have the answers to that. We have no idea what that’s going to have a hope. We have. I have a hope. Yes. Yes, there are certain things that we would like to see happen, but we have no idea what that will look like. But what we do know is what actually was done at the state of Nebraska, which is what you just heard about from Senator Ricketts, and that’s what we’re going to break down and talk about. So during this episode, we’re going to explore the takeaways from his address to Congress, discuss kind of the broader app implications of public service efficiency. And, you know, really kind of hear from Shane on his experience being there at the the state of Nebraska while all of this was was happening. So Shane, uh, initial thoughts on the video after you watched Senator Ricketts addressing Congress about the work that you guys did,

Shayne Daughenbaugh  12:10

initially, I was geeked to see it. I was like, what? Because it was funny, because it was in the evening. I was sitting on my couch, and my phone just started going off. I’m like, what’s going on? And we have a really, we developed a really tight community of those of us that were doing the continuous improvement at the state and and, and we still keep in touch with each other, even though some of us have moved on, you know, to other things, myself included. But we were all going back and forth like, oh, rickets is on. What’s going on? Let’s you know, we’re all watching it and then commenting and whatnot. So initially, I was like, Yeah, this is, this is really cool. And I appreciated a lot of the things that he was saying. And I think he did, he did a pretty good job, you know. And I wrote down this, you know, as he was talking, I was like, okay, so what did it What is he saying? You know, the things that were done, like you mentioned in in the in the private things that are done in the private sector can work in the public sector. And I like how he broke it down to this is how we approached continuous improvement at the state of Nebraska. We got to know the process. You know, we involve the people who do the work. We cut the waste, and then we made it more efficient and and if you, you know watching it, you you heard over and over again, him talking about this, really was about, how can we better serve the citizens of Nebraska? That’s what he was talking about in that has, that’s what really excited me about even taking that job almost six years ago, was the service side of things. You know, how can we It wasn’t just about, hey, let’s, let’s crunch the numbers and find the better way to do government. It was, let’s take a look at things and find the better way to serve other people, and the results are going to be a better, more robust and stable government, right?

Patrick Adams  14:06

Yeah, no, I that that came out to me very clearly on Senator Ricketts did not say anything about, you know, we went out there and just tried to cut as much as much of the waste as we could financially, and we laid people off. And we, you know, did this, and the results of that are lower. No, it was. How can we service our taxpayers better? How can we so let’s look at each piece of this, the state, state government office, and where are the inefficiencies? Because, I mean, I think we all can say that, you know, in government, whether it’s federal, state, local, I mean, the inefficiency almost seems unavoidable. Hopefully in the future, that’s not the case. But you know, right now, there’s just so much waste and noise. And challenges that are just for whatever reason, just really embedded in how we do state, local government. So for for you guys to take a stand and say, you know, we’re not going to just cut people, we’re not going to just try to figure out where we can squeeze another penny, but we’re really going to look at how we are, how we’re operating, how we’re conducting our services, right, and figure out, how can we do this better? Because the the taxpayer deserves it that, you know, there’s a certain level of respect for the money that we’ve been, you know, that we’ve been that we’re responsible for, yeah, and now we need to do what’s right with that. And, you know, obviously the results are amazing. So, yeah,

Shayne Daughenbaugh  15:40

yeah, it’s interesting, because he mentioned, you know, in the private sector, competition drives out those who are inefficient. But you know, that’s different when it comes to the public sector, because the public sector requires leadership, it requires vision, it requires support, it requires action. You know, it as as a state government, we didn’t have another state government that was trying to woo our citizens away, you know, with better services. Sure, how? Sure. So it took that, that that leadership and that vision, to say, how can we provide better services while at the same time reduce the cost to do those services. And the thing that that I talked about all the time when I when I was talking working with teams, is it’s likely that no matter how we reduce the process that they’re working on and take away some of the noise and make it, you know, more simplified and shorten the time, there will always be more that needs to be done. I have being being in, you know, in state government, I never saw anyone that didn’t have more than they could do already. So if we could find ways to help them prioritize, help them be able to really focus on those value added activities, the things that really would put our customers and our citizens front and center for what we’re doing. You know that it just helped because, yeah, you can’t, you can’t avoid there’s just, there’s just rules and regulations and bureaucracy and just things that that just kind of add layers upon layers that sometimes you tease stuff out and find out how we can’t change very much, but let’s do what we can change, and let’s try to try to get that focus back on that value add. I love it.

Patrick Adams  17:36

So let’s back up here. One of the things I heard Senator Ricketts say, is that he took what he learned in the private sector and then brought it to the public sector. So obviously he didn’t do it by himself. He had a he had a really great team in place, and you were part of that. And I think you came in a little bit later, after he had come in, and kind of things started to get some traction, and then you were brought in at that point. Do you know anything about the history for Senator Ricketts, as far as, like, you know, where was he in the private sector? And then, like, I don’t know what, what the beginning looked like like, I know Matt Singh was there. Like, what did that look like? To start to put that together and figure out, okay, well, this worked in the private sector. Do we need to make changes? What do we adjust? You know, what do we take? What do we not take with us to create this, this structure for the state of Nebraska? Do you know anything about, kind of, the background or the history of

Shayne Daughenbaugh  18:34

that? Um, it’s, it’s kind of, it’s kind of fuzzy in my head. I’ve heard the story so many times, so many times that, and then just kind of moved on from it. But it did. He did come in, Governor Ricketts. When he became governor, senator Ricketts came in with, and I am going to be incredibly embarrassed if this is incorrect. I believe he was a part of TD Ameritrade, and working in a system, a very large corporate system that, again, you know, if you’re inefficient in the, you know, in the private sector, you’re out like that, will just lead you out. So he came in saying, Hey, I think we can do state government better. Let’s, let’s start applying some of the business sense to how we do state government. And he had the vision to start capturing people that were really good at this kind of thing. You know, you mentioned Matt sing, but he also brought on board Jason Jackson, who is an incredible, an incredible visionary and leader in this understanding, you know, all the things that that need to be. How can we promote this? How can we encourage people do this? How can we support the work there is getting, getting bringing Matt in and starting to develop the system. Because I know they tried to do this with consultants when they first started and they brought in consultants. But you know, I don’t, it wasn’t maybe a year or two that they had consultants trying to do this. Uh, and it just didn’t stick, because they needed to be embedded in the all the agencies, you know, the different 26 to what, however many agencies there are at the state. They we just the governor and his, his, his vision team decided we need to embed this here. We need to create this here and create our own operational center of operational excellence. And that’s, that’s what Matt saying. I know we’ve had him on, you know, a time or two. That’s, that’s what he was able to do with a team that he collected around him. You know, I can think of names like Don ARP Jr, and Jesse Cushman and and he had some great people that helped build that up and actually create Lean Six Sigma in such a way that it was very specific to the state needs, because you use Lean Six Sigma manufacturing all the time, right? You know, we’ve talked about that. And the beauty of Lean Six Sigma is, is it’s adaptable, right? It can change. You can tweak it to to meet the needs of whatever the organization has. And that’s what they were able to do. And it took a while for leadership in the different agency directors to really catch on and to understand that, hey, this is, you know, in your best interest, but also, this is something that doesn’t need to be just the latest trend in a flash in the pan, you know, and we’re just going to come in and then bounce out, you know, this is something that that we needed to, or they needed to pull all of the leadership involved in this, you know, as as part of that team, and just bring everyone alongside with it, not doing it to them, but doing it with them, right,

Patrick Adams  21:37

right? Yeah, that, and that’s actually leads me to a question. Well, before I go to that question, though, I also want to so for you personally, what was your role when you came in in the beginning? What was your role and what were you responsible for during your time at with the state before aspect,

Shayne Daughenbaugh  21:58

you know, the state had a they created a very robust system and and they trained, trained everyone specifically to that robust system. Even if you’ve had a, you know, a background in lean or whatnot, they we, we were able to train everyone to what the state needed. And what we trained them to be was process improvement coordinators. Is what is what we called them, and then so, so we had this dotted line to the center of operational excellence, which was under das Department of Administrative Services, directly connected to the governor, but all of the process improvement coordinators and program managers is what the what we were able To develop into those then became embedded in the agencies, and a lot of the bigger agencies, so that they were there. You know, they had offices there. They sat there. They know that they knew the people. They spent time with the frontline workers, and right? And so that’s what, what my job became, was, was I, I went to the D O T, I was able to go to the D O T, which is amazing experience in working with with the engineers and all the people that help our state roads and highway systems and and the job is to simply come beside and and figure out with leadership. Hey, what are your priorities for improvement? What are some of the things that we can do to improve? Some of those were financial, you know, how can we try to save money? And it wasn’t about cutting programs. Yeah, it was, you know, okay, so where are we spending the most money? Let’s try to identify some of those things, and let’s look at how we can improve that system. Or where are the pain points? Where? Where are people complaining the most? Where do we have the most? We had three things in regards to identifying a project, was it political in that, you know, the public was there was an outcry, or there was news, or whatever it was, but there was attention to certain things and and in Governor Ricketts, he mentioned, you know, like the SNAP program and the reimbursement for for the citizens that have special needs children and the things they had to do, you know, that came through public saying, Hey, this is kind of an issue. So it was political, it was financial. Hey, where can we save some money? Or it was operational. Hey, this just is not working well for either ourselves or the partners that we work with. You know, these utilities or the other agencies that we work with. And that was kind of a long winded way of saying that was part of, that was a big part of what, what we did is continuous improvement practitioners there, or process improvement coordinators. Is what we like, I said, what we called them getting, getting in the weeds with that and working with leadership, management and Frontline in, in finding ways to, you know, to really make efficiency work. Yeah,

Patrick Adams  24:46

so what did that look like for for frontline workers, as you mentioned, you were training them and engaging them in ideas and Solutioning, root cause analysis. What? What did that look like? Was Was it difficult? Were they ready? Were they engaged? Were they excited? Challenges along the way? I mean, because, but you and I both know that how critical it is to in both the private and the public sector, to engage and empower people at the front line of people that are, you know, the experts in whatever process that they’re working in. So what did that look like when you were there?

Shayne Daughenbaugh  25:24

That that was, that was actually kind of a slow go for, at least for and I’m going to speak now, I’m going to, I’m going to, I’m going to kind of narrow down and to speak to my team, because I wasn’t the only, you know, pick or process improvement practitioner, or, I’m sorry, coordinator at the D O T, we had, typically a team of four. Sometimes it varied just a little bit down to three, but we had, we had a road to hoe, to try to win people over, and try to win the hearts and minds of people under and let them know that we’re not coming in to tell you how to do your job. You know, we’re coming in to help you, give you lens and tools to look differently at your job and the things you do, and tools to be able to make the changes that are going to make your job easier, better, faster and cheaper. You know, those, those were often kind of the the four things that we were looking at, how can we make this work easier for you? Because if we can make it easier, you can really focus your energy on more challenging things, you know. How can we make it faster so that you can, you know, get to the things you need to get to, but also so we can get those services to the people who really want it. How can we so easier, better, faster, cheaper? How can, how can we improve the quality and how can we reduce the cost in how and how things work and and once people started seeing that, especially the leadership, because we had very specific ways of going about it, as I mentioned before, in how we our methodology, and we had a lot of documentation. One of them was an ROI sheet, we wanted to know what’s the return on investment. Before we asked leadership to give us, you know, this team of four to five to six people to work on this project, we let them know this is how much it’s going to cost, you know, in hours. Hey, you know, we’re going to have Patrick and we’re going to have John, and we’re going to have Andy, and we’re going to have Catherine, and probably we’re going to be using them for, you know, the next, over this month, we’re probably going to be using them for, you know, maybe eight to 12 hours. So they understood that. But here’s what we believe the return is going to be, you know, and maybe we’re going to cut this process from taking, you know, I think of a very specific one taking 19 days to do. We’re going to take it down to two days. So while you know it, it, we can’t say, oh, we saved, you know, this much money. We can say, look at the service we’re now able to provide to the citizens. They don’t have to wait all those times. And there were times definitely where we were able to save money. Hello,

Patrick Adams  27:58

everyone. I 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 by name or the title of the book. You aren’t a reader. No worries, the audio book is also available on Audible. Now back to the show, sure, sure. Well, of course, that’s a result of the work that you were doing, right? Definitely. And

Shayne Daughenbaugh  28:46

winning the hearts was, you know, that that took some time. You know, it was in my five years there it. It took at least three years before people stopped, like avoiding me, because I’m one who will, who will just kind of wander around, and I want to get to know the people, and I’m going to their offices, and I’m sitting down and I’m listening to them, and we’re in the meetings. You know, that’s what we were all doing. And in those last in my last two years, it was an amazing shift to where people started requesting, and we had this, this list, this wait list, basically, of all these projects that people wanted us to do, and the synergy that we were able to do with the other divisions in the department was was really cool to see. So, yeah, I can say that that while it took time, it’s not going to be a really fast typically, not going to be a really fast turnaround. You know, in regards to getting people to see the value in this, and to win the hearts and minds. But when it happens, it’s, it’s fun, and it’s and it’s really, really cool to see that, and to be able to help people and get them excited about it, and then they start, you know, replicating what we were doing, right,

Patrick Adams  29:57

right? That could be. A whole another episode on winning the hearts and minds of frontline workers or whatever, however you want to say it, because, I mean, think about the the soft skills that are necessary for you know, you as a lean practitioner, to just be resilient in building those relationships, developing the trust, helping people to see the value, and then eventually, at the end of all of that, you know, getting finally, like, getting over the top of the mountain. And now people are requesting and saying, where’s Shane? I haven’t seen him in a while. You know, miss you, right? That’s, that’s pretty awesome. So we could do a whole another episode on that. Maybe we will. But I want to go back to the what Senator Ricketts talked about when he mentioned, you know, reduction in process times. You talked a little bit about it too, specifically in the snap applications and air construction permits. I mean, crazy, remarkable what you guys were able to do with just those two services. What challenges do you think other leaders will have? You know that that to get similar results, maybe at the state level, but or maybe it’s the local level, maybe the federal level, when it comes to the Office of efficiency, what? What challenges do you think they’re going to face that might maybe were similar to yours, that that we need to look out for? Yeah,

Shayne Daughenbaugh  31:19

the first thing is Doubt or unbelief that I mean even myself going into things, you know, when, when, when I was trained, and then how I was able to train it. After experiencing this, the first thing that I had to overcome was the doubt. Are we really able to do this? You know, can we produce the results that we say we can, can we cut it down by half or more, you know? Can we cut the process steps, you know, by this much? Or can we, you know, whatever it might be that was, that was the first thing, was just getting people to trust the system that we had in place, that it was going to give them the results that they wanted, you know, and then in and then in government, it’s another huge challenge. Is just the regulations that are there, and they’re there for a reason, but having to work through those regulations and those policies and a little bit of the bureaucracy was was a challenge, and it took leadership, because part of what we’re able to do is when people would say, Yeah, we can’t change that because of, you know, it’s this regulation that regulation or or maybe it’s a state statute that was written back in 1970 but it still has implications. So many times, you know, we were able to uncover statutes and regulations that state had, you know, hey, we have to fax this, or we have to have a hard copy. You know, we had file drawers, rooms full of fire file drawers that we needed to have because it said we were supposed to keep a physical copy, you know, what it what does that mean? And then changing to the, you know, kind of the new technology, or even Okay, facts, is not terribly new, but, you know, just just those ideas of, hey, this needs to be updated. And when we found those, we were then given an avenue to push those up to people who could make those changes. Because changing state, you know, and federal regulations takes a good while, but if we could bring those to attention and then push those forward to the leadership that could make that difference, the senators and congressmen and all of that you know that were able to say, Okay, let’s see what we can change. That was huge. So, so I guess that also ties into the challenges is selling the idea all the way up. You know, it’s not just going to happen, or it could just happen in your little area, in your little division, but it has incredibly limited yes impact, right, no, and simply because they we need that support system. We need that support system going up to the directors and the executive directors and the lieutenant governors and, you know, and all the other people that are a part of the legislation of the state and of the government, they need to be able to see that. And that was a challenge. It took a while. We had to, you know, show them those results. And so there was, you know, an annual kind of a, I don’t want to say state of the state, because that’s way, that’s, that’s way up here, but there was, like an education day where we were able to meet the center of operational excellence, met with all the state legislators and all of that, and shared, this is what we’ve done in the last year, and this is what we’re looking to do. These are how much we’ve saved and and as governor, senator Ricketts did a great job of continuing to promote in press conferences and in his newsletters. And it was he needed to bang that drum all the time. Right? You know that that’s that’s another challenge when. When you’re talking about a big organization, yes,

Patrick Adams  35:02

you had, I think that’s it’s funny how, how similar the private and public sector is. Everything that you’re saying is translatable. I’m sure there are people that are listening in that are making the connection to their organization. You know, when you talk about Governor, when, when Senator Ricketts was governor, the governor, you know, being the kind of, the cheerleader for you as a like a champion that was bringing your requests and your and taking the roadblocks that you guys were having that you couldn’t take care of at your level. He was taking that up to whoever needed to hear it, or he would remove the roadblock himself. But I mean, that is the picture of what is needed in all of our organizations, from executive leadership support. We need someone in our corner that is engaged, excited and giving us the support that we need in order to move forward, they’re removing those roadblocks so we can keep moving forward. And that is, that’s that makes such a huge difference. I mean, that’s massive. One of the things that he talked about during the address also was, you know, when you think about pushing things forward, moving things forward. I mean, you guys trained 30,000 team members in Lean and Six Sigma concepts and principles. That is a massive undertaking to train that many people, a huge dedication from the governor and from the state. You know that that’s massive, but now we have to be careful here, because so many organizations, you know, they they use number of people trained as a metric. Like, oh, we got, you know, X number of green belts, X number of yellow belts trained. And so we’re hitting our numbers. Like, great job, everybody. And then I always ask the question, like, well, that’s great and all, but what kind of measurable impact are your yellow belts and green belts having in the organization? Right? That’s where the real you know that. That’s what, what we really need to be thinking about is not Ness. I mean, it’s important obviously, having an army of problem solvers, having an army of green belts that are trained in project management and understand how to do root cause analysis, massive. That’s very important, but that’s the first step. The second step is, what kind of measurable impact are they having, not in their one project that they did to get certified, but now, what are they doing continuously, month after month, quarter after quarter, year after year to continue to drive results to the bottom line, or, you know, back to the taxpayers. So my question is, you know, how, how did you guys ensure that those 30,000 people were able to translate their training into real, measurable change. Because clearly, you did, you have multiple case study examples. So how did you do it? And then, you know, let’s just discuss, you know, how, how we, how we can translate into the back into the private sector,

Shayne Daughenbaugh  38:15

yeah, and that was, and we also were well aware of that, like the governor, did have a goal and a vision you mentioned about, you know, having, well, we have this many, you know, we would count, and we did track those numbers, you know, to make sure we did have that army. But how do we deploy them? How do we get them out there? You know, one of the things that helped a ton for us is we had those process improvement coordinators embedded. So we were as as you know, the practitioners. We were always going around and rubbing, you know, elbows with these people and asking them about, Hey, how is it going? What you know, and either asking them how things were going, inviting them into different projects. You know, we also had goals of empowering them to to start stand ups and what we would call huddles like that was one of our, one of our pillars, as as the center of operational excellence. And what we promoted to all the agencies was the daily huddles and getting people involved in that and sharing that knowledge. So it wasn’t just the leader who could do that, but we empowered everyone and encouraged or educated everyone so that anyone at any point could lead a huddle. You know, anyone at any point could point to the huddle board and go, Okay, this is exactly what’s going on. I mean, did we get everyone involved after the training? No, I mean, you mentioned it earlier to me that that term of, you know, it’s just, you know, it’s a vanity kind of vanity, just tricks, yeah, yeah, vanity metrics. We just wanted that classy B, you know, at the end of the name, you know, certified leanle belt, or, you know, whatever it was. And that’s just, that’s a reality. But until you. You get people to have that knowledge first, and then the understanding, and then they see it, how it goes, and then they can start promoting it, and then they can start using it in their teams. It was fun to see, you know, I would walk down halls and whatnot, and see fish bone diagrams of just sometimes seemingly random things, or, you know, hear how other teams are working through some of their issues and how they’re capturing and making it visual. You know, just the the visuals of of their processes and the tracking. I mean, it that that in itself, right there is, is a step up once you start visualizing it and tracking things, you know, rather than just doing your work. And are you? Are you achieving your goal? I don’t know. I come here every day. I punch the clock, I punch some, you know, I hit the keys and then I go home, you know. But we were promoting that, so giving them these these ideas, these principles and these tools was super helpful. But you know, the question that I have to ask, if we weren’t there as process improvement coordinators, would it stick?

Patrick Adams  41:08

That’s a really good question. In fact, I was just talking with someone this past week about the Danaher business system, and we were also reflecting on Parker Hannifin business system, which I was a part of at one time in my career, and the importance of having a, you know, call it what you want, a CI promotion office, a lean promotion office, the Dan or business system promotion office, having a An office of dedicated individuals who are facilitating training, coaching, and they’re helping to ensure alignment, right? You talked about, you know, seeing fish bone diagrams and this and that. Well, are they working on the right stuff? Yes, they are, because we have alignment to the goals of the organization. And we’re this, this kind of, this middle group that’s helping to ensure everything’s cascaded properly, that there’s consistency in what we’re doing. We’re ensuring that people are standing behind, holding people accountable to the things that we’re supposed to be doing. So especially in the beginning of a lean an organization’s Lean journey. And you know when I say in the beginning that could be years and years and years of work where you have this dedicated team of individuals who are helping to support the cause, right? I think about at Parker, we, you know, I was a plant lean manager. I reported directly to the plant manager, and then I had dotted line to our division lean manager who oversaw, you know, a few different sites and and then you know that there was a direct report for from the Division lean manager to the group lead manager, the VP of lean and then the CEO. And the reason why that was important, you know, for a large global operation, is to ensure consistency. Right when I walked into a plant in Kentucky and checked out their site board, and I could see exactly where they were struggling, and I could go to where the problem is. I could find, you know, all the tools that they were working on to reduce or eliminate the problems. I could walk into a site in Poland or, you know, in India, and see the exact same thing, and maybe it’s in a different language, but I can, I can follow the trail right to because of the consistency that was there, embedded throughout the entire organization. And there’s a ton of power in that when you Yeah,

Shayne Daughenbaugh  43:28

that was huge. That was huge. And you know, I’m so glad you brought that up, because we, we we struggled, but we really, really focused on that consistency, whether it be our methodology or our documentation. We made it so that if I was working on a project, and for whatever reason, won the lottery, had to leave and you stepped in, you would know exactly where we were. You would know where the team was, because we always had the same documentation, you know, around the state. We always had the same methodologies around the state. And do we have, you know, the very best one? I don’t know if there is a very best one. You take one that works best for you and for the situation and for your organization, right? And then disseminate that information and that knowledge and that, you know, empowerment, so that everyone is marching in the same way you know, right?

Patrick Adams  44:21

So important, and obviously the goal is, in an organization, you know, is to embed the principles, embed the tools, and, you know, create a culture of continuous improvement, where the frontline workers, the individuals, everyone is contributing to the cause. And maybe that means someday down the road that your promotion office ends up, you know, kind of embedding itself into the organization somewhere and and it goes away. But there’s so much power in the beginning to get the momentum and to have that consistency of, you know, individuals like you that are supporting in training, coaching, um. Consulting. You know, internally, one of the things that, as we kind of start to full circle here and wrap up, Senator Ricketts talked about the he highlighted $115 million in hard savings based on the the initiatives, the lean, continuous crew, initiatives that you guys worked on. How did you guys measure that? How do you validate it is there? Is there a good process that you followed that we can help other companies to understand? Because it is important that we are capturing that information as lean practitioners working in embedded in organizations. We want to make sure that we know the hard, the soft savings that are that we’re contributing to. Because it’s important when we go to tell the story and try to get other people excited and engaged and involved, and even, you know, as you take the the the package from the state of Nebraska, this that you guys put together, and bring it over to the state of Illinois or the state of Michigan, or, you know, it’d be nice to see those, you know, those savings, and how to actually calculate that. So any thoughts on that,

Shayne Daughenbaugh  46:10

the biggest thing I could because, because, if I, if I tell you exactly how we did it, it may not apply, sure, or, you know, the specific tool, because we did have a tool to be able to calculate. But what was behind that tool was collaboration and conversation. You know, the governor and and Matt Singh and the, you know, the, I think probably Jason Jackson was also involved in that. And as well as the budget, the, you know, the head of the budget analyst, and all of all of that, they came together and said, Okay, how can we start capturing these what? What are the things that, what, how? What are the numbers we want to count? How do we know it’s, you know it’s going to work, or that it’s going to hold water? If you know, the public says, Okay, can you prove it? And so they developed the system that we were able to use and the sheet the, you know, it was just tried to make it as simple of a document as we could that just captured, you know, okay, so in, for instance, if it’s a process, okay, we know that it and in the other thing that we added too, so we had the documentation and the system behind it that captured the numbers. But we also had to go out and get those numbers. Get those numbers. So we measured everything we were doing before and after. So if we came in and you were able to improve your process, Patrick, from, you know, 30 hours down to 12. Okay, so what is, what does that mean? How many hours is that? And how many hours what, you know, what’s, what’s the financial benefit of that, right? You know, what would that look like? Well, it’s Patrick’s time, times 30 hours, or however much annually, you know it is. And then we continued to track those for a year as as a as a process improvement coordinator. Every project I did, it may have taken, say, you know, three weeks to do. But I followed that for a year. And every month I would go back to the people who were involved, and go back to the leadership there that was involved in that process, and go, Hey, so let’s talk about what kind of savings do we have? Are we still on board? You know, it was kind of a way of sustainment, as well as ensuring that the numbers we projected, here’s an estimate we think you’re going to be able you’re going to be able to save this much in time or money, whatever it is. We wanted to make sure and validate that by by following up. And so we had, it was conversation and collaboration. It was making sure we were tracking the, you know, whether it be the money, whether it be the time, whatever it is, and then the follow up to validate, you know, all the things that we said we are going to be able to do, love it.

Patrick Adams  48:49

And that’s, I think that’s a lesson for those that are listening in in the private sector, if you’re not, if you’re not bringing along someone in finance, or you don’t know someone in finance or accounting that can validate and help you to get the financials you’re missing. You’re missing a big part here. When you run a Kaizen event, when you do any kind of a project, you have to keep finance included involved, so that they can kind of give that stamp of, yeah, we validated these numbers. This is real hard savings, or, or this is soft savings, this is hard savings, you know, whatever that might be. And, and make sure that that’s you know. Because, again, I’m just telling you from experience being, being in an organization where you know a lot, sometimes you’re questioned on things like, did you really bring that much savings to the bottom line? Well, it’s not just me saying it, Accounting has stamped it for approval, like they’ve gone through the numbers and validated it. This is real. These are real numbers, and that does help you, especially, you know, as a Kaizen promotion office or a lean promotion office, to continue to you spread the knowledge and and you know, work with more departments and organization or more air. Is in your organization, there’s a lot of value in that, right, real, measurable numbers. Shane, obviously, we could talk about this forever. You kind of got cut short. I say that. I feel like I say that a lot in our episodes, because I do you and I both were super passionate. We could go on. But obviously a portion of this episode, you know, was the recording from Senator Ricketts. Hats off to the team, to the senator. And my hope is that we see, you know, some similar work being done. You know, coming from the Office of efficiency at the federal level. How amazing would that be? But state and local governments don’t, don’t wait, jump on board. There’s plenty of case studies and great people like Shane that would be willing to talk with you, to share what’s been done. And what an amazing opportunity that is for state local government to, you know, put that value, that back into the the taxpayers lapse, and just really be able to showcase the amazing work that’s happening at that level. So again, thanks Shane for all the work that you did there, and I appreciate you going through all the details of that and really look forward to seeing what happens next.

Shayne Daughenbaugh  51:18

Yeah. Me too. Me too. He’s a great experience.