BC Strengthening Organizational Resilience Through Gemba Report

Select and analyze the areas in need of improvement, and narrow down the list of places to do your Gemba walk.  

Use your SWOT analysis to focus your Gemba walk. Identify and analyze weaknesses and threats to review during your walk. 

While completing your walk, look for ways to eliminate inefficiencies, reduce waste, improve a product, or streamline a process. 

Write a Opportunities for Improvement Recommendation report for management on your observations and recommendations from your Gemba walk, based on your SWOT analysis from Week 3. Complete the following in your report: 

Include a summary of the organization (e.g., products or services, mission, and vision). 

Provide context (where did you focus your Gemba, and why?). 

Explain how you utilized your SWOT analysis to focus your Gemba walk. 

List your Gemba observations: 

What was the goal of your Gemba? 

Where did you go? 

What did you observe? 

Who did you observe? 

• Prepare an analysis of your observations. 
• List key takeaways, providing evidence for each. 
• Choose 1 long-term and 3 short-term opportunities to eliminate inefficiencies, reduce waste, improve a product, or streamline a process within the organization.  
• Cite any references that support your work (e.g., trade or industry publications, government or agency websites, scholarly works, or other sources of similar quality). 
• Video 1 Gemba Walk Explanation
• – You might be wondering what walking, a Gemba walk really is, What does that really mean? Gemba is a Japanese word that roughly translate to “the real place.” What its function is there to help you with  is to help you get connected with the real functional processes  that your staff or your colleague are doing in your workplace. 
• Lots of times, I think people have assumptions within project management that we assume employees follow the policies and procedures and what we find out is there are 2 sets of rules that The explicit rules in an organization of what we’re supposed to do, and the implicit rules of what we do to still accomplish the mission despite the policies and procedures of the organization So, a Gemba is about an opportunity for an evaluator to walk through to look at what the behaviors are in real time  You’re hopefully tying in those observation that are creating an a-ha moment for staff. 
• So you’re taking those moments in observation to really coach a staff member or leader to say we can look at these things a little differntly and in looking at them differently, we can perform our job function, we can change it just a little bit, and the small incremental changes actually make a big difference over the course of a period of time
• One of the elements that youre going to want to look at is who did you speak to? An important part of the Gemba is that you really start to look at the specific staff behaviors. 
• We talked about phrasing question in a certain credit method so that they’re not as threatening for the staff So this is about preaching and practicing a humble approach to asking somebody if there is something that they could improve. 
• Indirectly, a Socratic method is about phrasing the question of “what did we observe?” So it could be something of “hey our budgets didnt come in on budget, we’ve over budget in overtime, “so let’s understand why we’re overbudgeting on overtime Asking narrative questions without rushing to a judgement  allows you to build the case for the idea for your proposal or your plan or to really understand what your observing  Lastly, was there an opportunity to teach during the Gemba walk? So when you see somebody doing something wrong it could be a customer interaction, it could be wasting supplies, where they’re taking materials home for their own personal use, and you have an opportunity to hold them accountable in an instructional way so that they can understand what they are doing and how it harms the organisation When you notice that there’s a problem, how do you validate that problem exists? And you can use an ishikawa diagram, which another name for a fishbone diagram It’ll allow you to create categories of where the principal problem could be. 

Another thing that you could that i like to apply  it’s much easier to do is called a 5 whys And that’s asking a team or your group of people why do we have this problem? And then building on that why to say, when people give you a reason is “Why is that reason a problem? “And what is the next level why?” And by the time you get to the fifth why, you have a pretty good idea of whats causing this So culture is defined by Dr. Schein as the underlying assumptions the espoused values, and the artifact and symbol And I’ll give you a quick example of artifact and symbols that will bring it home for you. 

If I give you flowers, it’s an artifact. 

If I give you a red rose, it’s a symbol. 

So in your organization, we have our flowers and we have our roses. 

So, as a leader, it’s really understanding how those symbols and artifacts incorporate within the cultural dynamic. 

So the underlying assumptions in Dr Scheins triangle are that people that want to work in healthcare care about healthcare. 

People that care deeply about patient care are in the field of healthcare. 

And that’s a nice underlying assumptions that you could have used to build value in your Gemba Walk to get by in So it’s a wonderful thing to say “Hey, we noticed client outcomes are not where we want to be “and most people are in healthcare to  make people healthy And that becomes the social narrative of that conscious capitalistic social value, of them wanting to work in an organisation like that And it allows you to build and get buy-in for the improvements that your trying to do The espoused values are truly the leadership thoughts of what’s in an organization. 

So, if your CEO doesn’t really value money, you’ll get the idea that the entire organisationwould feel that money’s really not an issue  If the leader doesn’t find it to be important then it must not be important for the organisation So the espoused values are really understanding how the whys of your leader are really leading to those whys So if your leader has four or five whys that they focus on as a leadership style, and that could be fiduciary management of the financial assets of the company, it could be maximizing productivity and the value of your employees time during work it could be cultural values like telling the truth and honestly owning negative problems that happen in an organization. 

These could be the whys of your leader.