This action is related to fatal errors and is the most common. The essence of this oversight is that one person or department concentrates many functions, such as managing lean projects, organizing work with employee suggestions, training and professional development, operational improvement, etc.
Total delegation indicates that the organization's top managers or department heads are not involved in the process or adhere to a strategy of minimal support.
Delegation of this type can reach up to two types of workers: “super-expert” and “extreme”.
Mistakes in implementing lean manufacturing
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Super-experts are most often teacher data package specialists invited to the organization from outside. They have experience working in a more developed lean company and are brought in to cooperate as consultants or hired workers.
With proper interaction with such specialists, their help can bring a lot of useful things for the correct organization of work.
When choosing an expert, it is necessary to pay attention to such a quality as the presence of experience in implementing lean manufacturing. In other words, the specialist must personally go through all stages of the project development. Those experts who began their activities at enterprises with an already established lean culture cannot fully possess the necessary skills for implementation. The following analogy can be used as an example: you should not hire a professional driver when creating a car, it is enough to invite an excellent designer with mediocre driving skills.
It is important to remember that when launching a lean project, involving employees, and building a project management process, completely different competencies are required than when conducting regular and standardized work on improvement in an existing system.
It is quite difficult to correct the situation in the system of total delegation, even with the involvement of super-experts. This requires the efforts of system leaders and managers at all levels. Only with mass involvement can positive results be achieved in the area of forming a new type of culture.
All of the above also applies to delegating to a "fall guy", only in this case the situation will be even worse. As a rule, the fall guy is a young employee without work experience, who has an insufficient level of social authority. He himself would not mind delegating lean tasks, but the problem is that there is no one below him on the hierarchical ladder. Moreover, the fall guy can be not only a person, but also a department.
This error is quite easy to identify. To do this, you only need to ask one question: "Who is responsible for achieving the goals of lean production?" If the answer is from the area of "Lean office" or "Department/management of production system development", then this is a direct indication of the error.