There are many things that go into making a facility run smoothly -- many of which are happening behind the scenes. But at the root, facilities management is dedicated to supporting people. Overall, ensuring the safety, functionality, sustainability and efficiency of the work environment.
Matt Dobbs, Lean Leaders Alumni and Business Services Manager with the City and County of San Francisco's Public Utilities Commission, recognized that in order for his team to work at the best of their ability, they needed to change the way they tracked and managed facility requests. Matt was looking for a way to re-gain the trust of staff in his team's ability to manage the facility. His mission was clear: streamline the facility request process to ensure tasks are carried out efficiently, timely, and establish a tracking or reporting mechanism.
Anchored in a 'learn-by-doing' approach, our Lean Leaders program empowers participants like Matt to directly apply new skills to real-life obstacles in the workplace. This hands-on training encourages trainees to dismantle old processes and engage with stakeholders to drive meaningful, measurable improvements and reimagine a better, more efficient, and even more pleasant daily work life.
PPI chatted with Matt about how he tackled his team's facility management issues and the root causes of these obstacles. Check it out below!
PPI: How did you feel before starting the training? Were there any expectations, questions, or assumptions you had about Lean Leaders?
MD: I was frustrated. I do think I went into it (Lean Leaders) pretty open-minded, but if there was an assumption, it was that I would learn some complicated, secret trick or method.
PPI: Can you describe the problem you were trying to solve in Lean Leaders?
MD: My team is in charge of managing our facility and ensuring maintenance and repair work is done when needed. There was very little organization of work and poor communication. Additionally, repair and maintenance work was taking an extremely long time to complete, if it was done at all.
PPI: Thinking about your project from start to finish, walk me through your experience in Lean Leaders--learning some of the tools and applying them to your facilities management problem.
MD: I think that the process map is a critical part of the overall experience. It forced me to look at every aspect of the process, and allowed me to visualize where the problems were actually occurring. For my project, we were not necessarily experiencing bottlenecks, but things were getting lost or delayed. Once the whole process was mapped out, it was easier to see specific problems and find solutions, while having an understanding of how any and all changes to one step in the map would affect steps that were upstream or downstream.
PPI: What solutions have you implemented, or are currently working on, and what kind of improvements or changes have you seen as a result?
MD: We created a very basic facility management program that involved implementing a tracking system, designating specific staff members as part of the Facility Management Team, establishing a standard communication procedure for requests, developing a set of rules for which Facility Management Team members are assigned specific types of work, and holding a short but regular team huddle.
PPI: What has been the overall impact of the Lean Leaders training on you and your work?
MD: A couple of things. It has caused me to start building a system, and culture, of metrics for all of the functional areas that I oversee (purchasing, A/P, HR, Records Management, Fleet Management). Therefore, I can see problems sooner and have a baseline measurement to gauge improvement. It has also helped me to solve problems by simplifying rather than complicating issues. For me, the answer almost always lies in simplicity.
PPI: What was the most valuable for you going through Lean Leaders?
MD: Long term, it has taught me a process for attacking problems that can be scaled to any area. The training was not about my specific problem, but my specific problem was important for the training to give me practice applying the techniques to produce positive results.
PPI: What advice do you have for others to get the most out of Lean Leaders?
MD: Obviously, make sure you set aside the time you need to attend the trainings, do the “homework”, and think about your process. You are only going to get out of it, what you put into it. More subtly, go in with some humility, and get honest with yourself. It’s quite possible you will discover that you have been making some mistakes or strategic errors before, and that is okay. We are all busy, and we don’t know what we don’t know. What I learned through the root cause analysis was that when my team became responsible for managing our facility, we never established an organized method to perform this function. We just did our best. This falls on me as the manager. I did not focus enough on this function until it became a problem. Doesn’t make me a bad manager, but just reinforces that we all have things we can do better.
Are you ready to level up your problem-solving skills and make a lasting impact in your organization? Join us for our next cohort of Lean Leaders - an immersive, multi-day experience where you'll learn practical problem-solving tools derived from Lean, Six Sigma, Design Thinking, and Agile methodologies.
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