Patrick Adams  00:00

Hello, and welcome to the Lean solutions podcast. My guest today is Matt Singh. Matt is the Director of Operational Excellence and master black belt for the Department of Administrative Services in the state of Nebraska. Over the last 20 years, he has previously served in a variety of progressive progressive management roles, including sales and service operations and supply chain. He is a he is certified as a master black belt and Six Sigma master black belt in Lean Six Sigma certified as a lean Sensei and holds the Project Management Professional or PMP. Credential. He’s also a returning guest. So he was with us back in episode 54 of season one. So if you’re interested to go back and listen to listen in at his earlier interview, you can definitely do that. But let’s dive in. Welcome to the show, Matt.

 

Matthew Singh  01:22

Yeah, it’s great to be back again. I appreciate you having me.

 

Patrick Adams  01:25

Absolutely. Well, I’m excited for for this next discussion. It’s been a while since you and I have connected but we had such a great discussion about process improvement in the state government, specifically in the state of Nebraska and some of the other things that are happening, you know, both in state and local government. But I wanted to ask you, because you do have a vast amount of experience, not just in the state of Nebraska, in state government, but also in many other areas as well. Overall, what do you think are some of the important elements of a successful Process Improvement Program?

 

Matthew Singh  02:07

Yeah, that’s a great question, over the years had the opportunity to be a part or create several different programs. And I think the, there’s about two major underlying kind of conditions that allow for success. There’s several other factors, but the two that really stuck out in my mind are showing value. So continuous improvement exists to increase value for team members, employees, for customers, for really everybody. However, it’s one thing to actually create the value to show the value, it’s another to communicate that value to the people that you’re trying to help with change management for, you know, if you’re working with patrol, or police officers, or the legal system, that might look one way, if you’re dealing with social workers, Department of Agriculture, any kind of unique, nuanced agency, it can look very different. So I think the the practitioners goal should be to figure out how to best communicate the value that’s being created. You know, we’ve seen situations where, you know, you might have done 30 projects, but we haven’t figured out how to talk about them. So it’s not getting the buy in you’re looking for, or you can do three projects really help communicate, the value added and change management becomes really simple. Which kind of leads into the second bullet point is simplicity. I know this industry, we’re all guilty of it at one time or another tried to make it complicated, whether we learned it that way, or whether we’ve seen it work that way. But what I found in my personal journey, is that the simpler you can make it, the more likely not only are they going to adapt it, but they’re going to sustain it. So if they see the value like hey, this can improve my productivity by this much this can increase my efficiency by this much. And you make it simple forms the very first time they try to do it, there’s some successes, that tends to lead to some very strong programs.

 

Patrick Adams  03:54

Absolutely. Now, those are two really good points. And, and that there’s a big, I don’t know if that I would say there’s a big difference. But I mean, obviously you’re working in state government. And so, you know, in comparison to, you know, some of our listeners are working in the manufacturing industry or in healthcare industry. And so those two bullets, obviously, those make sense no matter what industry that you’re working in, which is which is how a lot of lean, you know, principles obviously work. Specifically for you guys, you mentioned projects. Can you just give us maybe a couple examples of what improvement projects might look like at the state level when it comes to your process improvement program?

 

Matthew Singh  04:40

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We, we function a lot of different levels. In terms of continuous improvement. We believe that everything from the frontline staff using basic core root problem solving tools of visual management, all the way up to certified lean leaders who do, you know, projects, they’re probably two or three days, but it’s something really vital to that work area. We have full time practitioners at the Greenbelt level that do it full time. And they do projects generally for an agency on, you know, pain point that they’re working on operational, financial or political. And then we have black vote projects, which function at the highest level across the enterprise, usually the governor, the governor’s office is the sponsor for it. Those can take anywhere from six months to two years. And we do all that we do all that I think that one on one, this one of the ones that I’m really proud of in the last the last couple of years is a one stop portal project. Then Governor Ricketts was receiving some feedback from citizens that is very difficult to pursue their entrepreneurial goals with several, you know, having reached out to several agencies several different paperworks, where they call the filings. And so what was created as we partner with it, the governor’s office and all the agencies to figure out what all the filings do does an entrepreneur need to know and then we placed them in a one stop shop. So if you’re trying to start a business in Nebraska, you can, you can just go to the website in a couple of drop down menus, and I’ll show you everything you need with links that directly take you there. So I thought that was really cool kind of user design kind of improving the overall experience for the customer kind of improvement. Other ones, we have some less less fun to talk about one. So there’s two billing processes, whether that be Department of Transportation, streamlining their their billing process, or their payment processes, everything from ensuring that there’s higher quality and on time results from lab testing, for the courts, it can take a lot of forms, you know, even frontline stuff, you know, I’m thinking of building division here that administrate services, they have a really neat visual management board right across the hallway. It’s a Kanban. It’s a swim lane. And on the swim lane, it has the different projects they’re working on. But they also put the time, the amount of time that it’s been in that particular section of the Kanban, which is increased overall productivity by over 50% on all projects. And these are you all pretty good project. So I think it can be applied a lot of different ways. And I think that’s the strength of the approaches that allow for kind of a different application of tools and ideas.

 

Patrick Adams  07:15

Absolutely. And every one of those projects ties right into those two points that you made around those those elements that helped make a successful process improvement program. So super powerful. What are some of the, like the results that you guys are seeing with these projects? I mean, are are there some metric improvements that you guys have been able to, to you know, realize, you know, real real numbers, or do you guys track that at the state government level? What does that look like? Yeah,

 

Matthew Singh  07:47

yeah, absolutely. So we practice large, largely Lean Six Sigma. And we do other stuff to lean in Theory of Constraints stuff, but large majority of them are done make projects. In Lean Six Sigma world, we use voice of the customer. So we go to we talk to all the customers, the upstream and downstream, internal, external, the people that do the process, the people that receive the process, we talked to all them. And we asked them the same, you know, five, six questions as follow up questions trying to pinpoint, you know, basically simply quote, what’s good about the process and what needs improved, then we create something called CTRs. It’s a type of requirement gathering. But essentially, it’s a, this needs improved by 50%, this needs decreased by 30%. It’s a very clear goal to shoot for. We put that on our charters as the overall goal and get those signs. So we have the authority to execute the project. Then as we go out there, we collect data. And we have a process map and we collect data to show your time studies, pulling reports, how fast is this going to lead time, the process time, cycle time, even sometimes tack time? So just calculate how long stuff takes? After we do that we have a moment of truth saying, now we heard this was the issue over here? Is the data supporting that that’s truly an issue? Or is it more of a communication thing? Is it more of a? A we just need to clarify expectations thing? Or is there truly an improvement that needs to be done here with the systems, the process and the operations? If yes, then we move forward with problem solving and brainstorming identify areas for opportunity for improvements. And then a climax is all with a wide scale implementation. So we make the changes and then we go collect data again. And we compare the data to what the process is doing now to the CTRs in the original time that we collected up the burden of the project. Generally speaking, most projects we take on we want to see a 50% or greater increase. So if you think about, you know, existing a Veteran Affairs, right, a lot of them prescribe medications for our soldiers who come home and need some support. You know, if that’s taken too long, that can have an adverse effect on them. And we can speed it up by over 50% making sure that they receive the services you know, that they’ve earned. So it’s it’s pretty structured. approach doesn’t have to be, but that’s kinda we we generally proceed here at the State.

 

Patrick Adams  10:03

That’s amazing, I’ll just I love that love hearing the benefit that that process improvement is having on the state. That’s just great, great to hear. And I also have to imagine that it’s having a massive impact on the culture, you know, within the state government there, what would you say would be maybe an approach? Or how does one go about impacting positive, you know, culture change within, you know, an organization like the state of Nebraska?

 

Matthew Singh  10:37

You know, that? That’s a good question. And the reason is, is because, you know, we’ve all seen how continuous deployment was done, you know, 4050 years ago, a lot of times, it was top down with little consideration to the culture. And what we saw, as soon as the leaders left, the improvements left, people went back to the old way of doing it, oftentimes worse than it was before, before it was addressed. These days, we tend to lead with that idea of culture, like you were saying, you know, change management and culture development go hand in hand with continuous improvement, I honestly don’t believe you can do one without the other. And I found that, you know, setting good leadership expectations is, you know, relatively easy to do you communicate it, put them living by what you practice what you preach. You know, if you talk about building trust, then show trust, you know, if you talk about and this continuous improvement, Hey, guys, we need accountability, we need to be sure everybody shows up. Don’t be late if you’re the leader. So I think one of the things and each culture is different for now, like I said, strict rules don’t work here, when we’re here. It’s understand the culture and but if you model the behavior that you think the program needs to see, and that the sponsor say need to happen in the team says need to happen, they will follow suit. Not all at once, right? We’ve all seen the learning curves and in how that works, folks, like the tipping point on Malcolm Gladwell, and some others, it can be a process, it requires persistency it consistency, persistence, and all this kind of stuff. I also found for me, personally, because I’m a very direct communicator, I found that taking a couple of minutes to stop and smell the roses and recognize the winds is just huge, you know, some of these people are super nervous to try something different outside the box, they’re willing to, they attend to Kaizen or they show up the project meetings, or they give their sometimes even contradictory opinions to the common train of thought in the room. That’s a huge step for them. For a lot of them, that’s a huge, that’s a huge step for me sometimes. Sure. So to be able to take them aside and kind of tell them, hey, you know, I really appreciate you speaking up. But you know, it’s interesting seeing the different opinions, buying them a cup of coffee, when the project is over their minimum, just sending an email or quick phone call saying, Hey, thanks for your participation. Neil, please, and thank yous, I found this goes a long way. So modeling the behavior, but then also recognizing those who are also exhibiting that behavior.

 

Patrick Adams  12:57

Yeah, absolutely. And when you say modeling the behavior, you know, normally, you know, for us, we talk about, we talk about Leader Standard Work, and what are the behaviors and actions that that should be, you know, displayed within a lean organization. And a lot of times what we, you know, recommend, as some of those behaviors or actions of leaders are, you know, you know, pis and act daily Kaizen activities, Standard Work audits or developing standard work, you know, gimble walks, TPM activities, you know, and the list goes on and on. Are those similar to what you would see, you know, at with leaders in an at the state government level, like, are those the types of behaviors that you’re recommending, and suggesting when it comes to modeling the behavior? Or are they a little bit different, you know, in the state government.

 

Matthew Singh  13:56

Same exact topics, same exact topics, they do look a little bit different, because it’s government, and even then it looks a little bit different depending on the agency. So again, you go back to agency that’s very kind of regulations driven. Maybe they receive a lot of funding from the federal government, or they receive a lot of funding from certain grants that require that they show us your expectations. A lot of times you do find things like audits are really helpful in that environment, because everyone’s so driven not necessarily by the customer’s desire, but the regulation and what the expectation for the state to meet. We always try to use Goombas we always try to use Gamble’s especially after any kind of significant improvement activity, but also, just because just because and it’s one of those things where as a practitioner, we need to constantly reinforce and be persistent because the executives, the head of the agencies and so forth, have exceptionally busy schedules. I’m sure that’s everywhere. But in government, there’s certain factors like the legislature, you know, that’s always kind of adopted going on. There’s internal audits. There’s the newspaper that you wake up one morning Oh my god. To remember to use a change. And so having that flexibility to kind of meet them where they’re at, but still encouraging them to get out there and touch base with their teams, and setting a consistent culture. So they don’t think it’s like a, we got you. But it’s truly a gimble walk of A, how’s this going? I’m checking it out. I think all those tools, standard work. Standard Work is another great one. I especially like the leadership standard work I’ve seen in the past. Those are really useful tool. In fact, that’s a tool that I’ve been trying to get together here for about the last three or four months. Just kind of give some, you know, thoughts and ideas. And, again, the application of it can vary very much from agency to agency, you know, being direct in the petrol environment is very different than being direct and, you know, the permanent Ministry of services, or, you know, Health and Human Services, you know, but the idea of sometimes this this clear communication, this precise communication, can be can be really important. So, I think all the tools you mentioned, are applied here in some way, shape, or form.

 

Patrick Adams  15:54

Yeah, that’s great to hear. Now, one of the areas that I hear a lot of struggles with, in many different industries, is sustainability of change initiatives. And so I’m curious to hear your thoughts, you know, any kind of insight that you might be able to give our listeners on, you know, how to sustain change, change initiatives, you know, it could be within the state government, but I’m sure that whatever you’re using there probably applies to most people listening in. So what would you say from a sustainability perspective?

 

Matthew Singh  17:53

Yeah, it largely does boil down to the sponsors, and the practitioners and the leaders of this stuff. You know, I, when I started this continuous improvement journey, I was actually an operations guy who, you know, I didn’t believe in it, I thought it was a waste of time. And after my boss challenged me to be exposed to it, I became a believer really quick, the team was functioning better than I ever had, the process was truly amazing. And so I started getting into it. And I started in the private sector for many years before the public sector. And one mindset, I’ve always learned to train others or leading programs or for myself, reminding myself positive affirmations in the morning, are, it’s never done. It’s never done. Sometimes people feel like, hey, if we get for, you know, 40 projects, and you know, 50 million savings, all right, now we can coast. But you know, you apply things like Theory of Constraints, or just the idea that every time you improve something, by default, you’ve exposed another thing that needs improved. Even culture, you know, culturally, we have people that come in, you know, Kevin, members come in these days, sometimes for eight years, and then move on. We can’t get in that coasting mindset, we need to make sure that we get weren’t put to the VP or CEO or whoever, with the executive authority that supports you. We need to make sure we get all people like we’re showing the value for the executives for showing value for the frontline staff. We’re showing the value for the middle managers, we’re showing value for the the different organizations that are stakeholders and partners with a lot of our our companies, whether it’s the people who produce the bumpers and send them to the car factory, or if it’s, you know, the recipients of certain services from the federal side that partner with state government, whatever the situation is, it’s the consistent idea of we need people that are going to come in every day to push you know, and there’ll be some smooth it’s no doubt, but it’s, it’s naturally in organizations are naturally in a backslide kind of mindset. It takes that leadership and that driving to push it forward. And even a healthy healthy organization. All it takes is one or two, you know, adjustments and all of a sudden that healthy culture can disappear overnight. So just that constant situational awareness that constant A desire, we don’t know, we don’t we’re not all 100% Every day, but we can certainly give it our best each day to be a positive force, but also, you know, continue to show them the value.

 

Patrick Adams  20:09

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s got to make a big difference having the governor of the state, you know, you know, driving continuous improvement initiatives and making it a priority for the state, you know, and then obviously, establishing, you know, some putting someone like you in a position as the Director of Operational Excellence. I mean, those are things that, you know, definitely establish a priority, right, for process improvement within each of the different agencies, would you? Do you feel like, that’s something that definitely adds to, to the sustainment of the work that you guys are doing?

 

Matthew Singh  20:44

Yes, and no, I think the idea of having that that very high level support, it certainly does make it easier when the supports there. You know, instead of having three follow up meetings with a, another key executive, we can just have one meeting, invite all the right people, and one way or the other, we’re all gonna have started advice as to which direction to go next, right? However, that if we rely on only that, that can waver throughout the years, you know, especially in government, or even with CEOs and VPS. and stuff, you know, the average tenure in the private sector for VPS. It’s a few years, they don’t usually stick around 2025 years. And so when they come in, they might be all this energy and excited. And then last year, last six months, they might lose some of it. Well, if we rely on the government, I mean, every four years, there’s elections and then right, oftentimes new staff, new executive staff. So if we’re relying only them, I think we might be setting ourselves up for failure in the long run, but it sure makes it easier in the short run. But I think that ties all the way back to Yes, use that support. If you have it, if you don’t have that make that one of your goals, is to actually get an executive sponsor. You’ll notice overnight how different it is, it’s different when you reach and say, Hey, would you like to do this continuous improvement stuff, versus if your VP of operations or logistics reach out says, Hey, I have a guy here I can send over or I can send over that’ll help you improve by 3040 50%. It’s just a very different dialogue. So I would definitely work on getting an executive sponsor, but then don’t coast on the idea of an executive sponsor, make sure you’re personally engaging your teams engaging with the middle managers, the frontline staff, hearing what they’re saying, understanding why they don’t want to do it, or if they do want to do it, what their expectations are. It’s as much listing as is doing.

 

Patrick Adams  22:25

Yeah. Powerful advice. Thank you. Appreciate that. Obviously, you’ve been doing this for a long time, you know, 20 plus years, you’ve had to have had challenges and some wins over the years. You know, could you identify, you know, your greatest challenge? Or maybe your your top few challenges, you know, maybe what comes to mind when you think about challenges in process improvement that you’ve you’ve been faced with over the years?

 

Matthew Singh  22:54

Yeah, you know, I think one of the biggest challenges and the reason it comes to mind is we’re kind of dealing with in the last 12 months here is sometimes people have good intentions, and they want to do continuous improvement. And they think they’re doing the right thing by just going out there and forcing it and saying, we’re going to do this, because I’m the executive, and here’s how we’re going to do it. The problem, at least in a modern day, you know, organizational cultures, people want to be, you know, guided, they want to be led, they want autonomy, they want trust, they want the ability to make, you know, their own decision within a, you know, a framework of what’s acceptable in the company. And sometimes when we lead change efforts, or continuous improvement, was even with good intentions. If we rely on that stuff, or we kind of lead with that stuff, it can do a lot of detriment, they can do a lot of detriment. And here’s the thing with change management efforts, a lot of times, you’re gonna have to fight to make a second a first impression a second time, a lot of times, those first impressions are very hard to undo, and sometimes even takes a different leader on the team to maybe kind of circle back to those folks. So it kind of goes back to my experience, the way I practice the use environment. It says much about the relationships and showing the value and making easy to use. And that’s not one conversation that is a series a series, a series of conversations, it’s mistakes are gonna happen. You know, I’ve seen leaders in pretty high positions that have big teams that let’s do continuous improvement, you know, and which is a good thing in itself. But when they get down to it, it’s it’s basically like a dictatorship that we’re going to do this and it just doesn’t resonate. It doesn’t resonate with the team, which, you know, it’s their team that can do what they want. But if they really want to get continuous improvement to, you know, penetrate the entire organization, or at least their team, we have to focus on the value creation, we have to focus on showing them why, you know, hey, we’re gonna do this, but let me show you why. Look what it did to my numbers when I did it back and this other company, taking time and always stepping back and helping them continue their journey. I would say that’s something that helping coach those leaders has been Challenge. Over the years, it’s something that we’ve had several successes, we’ve had some with marginal success. But it can sometimes be a difficult task to come in each day and give that feedback to the leaders. But it’s a worthwhile task. It is definitely something to take the time on. It’s not always the funnest conversations that go on crucial conversations or, you know, however you want to label it, but it’s stuff that needs said in most the time, in my experience, a year, year and a half down the road, they get it, it takes a while to process, they get it and they actually become some of the best practitioners of this cultural change, positive cultural change, well, doing continuous improvement. So that’s probably the greatest challenge. I think some of the wins, we then I’m definitely proud of the Green Belt program. And the black belt program here at the State. We do use a belt system, but it’s as much as a job classification system. The Green Belt program got off the ground, we started getting a lot of traction with it. And within a very short time period, all the code agency directors, which means underneath the governor, they all started seeing the value of it. So the Greenbelt program really helped us establish that the launch of the black belt program, we are now doing projects at the enterprise level where, you know, sometimes it’s very difficult to do a project across four or five organizations. But now we have the capacity to do so. So that’s that’s probably my greatest. My greatest win is really the development of those two programs.

 

Patrick Adams  26:27

Love it. Yeah, you guys are doing some really great work at State. Love the stuff that you’re doing love the results of the work that you guys are doing. I mean, you guys are really setting the stage for for other state government entities to look at look and say, Hey, these guys are doing it right. So definitely hats off to you guys. One other thing I want to talk about before we wrap up today, Matt? So, shameless plug here, we are hosting the Lean solutions, Global Summit, first week of October, here in Michigan. And during that summit, we as part of that summit, we have four tracks, we have a healthcare track, we have a higher ed track, we have the corporate track, and then we have our government track. And you are one of our track speakers for the government track. So I’m super excited to have you come out and share you know, some some of your insights around the work that you guys have done at the state of Nebraska and maybe share some stories or some some different, maybe some more challenges, some more wins that you guys have had. So looking forward to seeing you, you know, out here in October for that, that the summit?

 

Matthew Singh  27:45

Yeah, very much. So I look forward to it as well. It’s always a great place to connect and network, learn things, learn how to view organizational issues in different ways. So very much look forward to being a part of it and meeting new people.

 

Patrick Adams  27:59

Absolutely. And as far as the the work that you guys are doing at the state, if if someone’s interested to learn a little bit more about the work that you guys are doing from a process improvement perspective, where would they go? You guys have a very specific web page, don’t you that’s dedicated to some of the work that you guys are doing. Yeah,

 

Matthew Singh  28:19

yeah, if you if you Google, Nebraska Center operational excellence, you’ll find the the link for our homepage. Also, if you ever want to reach out to me directly, my email is Matthew Ma, TT GW period Singh, si ng h@nebraska.gov. Govt. Feel free to email me directly. Or check out the website. We have a lot of educational tools there. We have a lot of how to videos, videos on leadership. We have past summits that we’ve had information from guest speakers, all sorts of cool stuff, all sorts of cool stuff. So I encourage you to go check it out. If you have any questions reach out, and hopefully it adds value to your journey.

 

Patrick Adams  28:59

Love it. Love it. We’ll definitely put each of those links in the show notes for this episode. So if anyone’s interested to reach out to Matt, or to learn more about what’s happening at the state of Nebraska, with the Center of Excellence, you can go right to the show notes and grab a link to that. And then yeah, man, I will. I will see you in October. So I’m looking forward to seeing you in person once again and connecting there. And otherwise, thanks for being a guest on the show once again.

 

Matthew Singh  29:26

Yeah, you betcha. Thanks for having me and look forward to seeing in the near future.

 

Patrick Adams  29:30

All right, take care of Matt.