I think the tools and techniques are quite sophisticated. If you are familiar with Lean, you probably know the fishbone and 5 times why. This time me and my colleague facilitated a process walkthrough using the OPERA technique. We scheduled a three hour time slot for the event.
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| Fishbone |
As we are both really new tutors, we went through the exercise before with our mentors. The person responsible for the development of the particular process was also involved in the preparations. The ultimate goal was to update the whole process. But for our session at hand we set our goal on better understanding the current status.
My colleague had done a very good script for the session with timings. We started with a short introduction (15 minutes). The participants also listed their expectations for the meeting. All the expectations were surprisingly well aligned: more understanding about the current status.
In OPERA technique people first write down their own ideas (O) on post-its. Everyone was instructed to write 3-5 things that currently work and similarly topics that could be improved. For this we gave them 10 minutes.
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| Time-Timer |
Next, the participants paired up (P) and discussed their ideas with their pair. For this we gave them 15 minutes. If you visualize the passage of time, people can self manage their timing and you don't need to hurry them. If you can get your hands to a Time-Timer, that's great, but if you don't have one available, you can use for example Online Stopwatch. The countdown works well and you have an alarm in the end.
After the pair work, we collected the ideas on the whiteboard and the pairs explained (E) their findings to the others. For this phase we had reserved 35 minutes. In addition to positive findings and improvement topics we also had a category for ideas.
After collecting the ideas on board we discussed possible themes that could be identified. In 'by the book' OPERA we would have had ranking (R) and arrangement and actions (A), but in our case we pretty much skipped those.
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| Opera, not OPERA |
From the results we crafted a sort of hypothesis for what the current status was. To test this hypothesis, we needed to go check things in practice. In Lean, you would use the principle Genchi Genbutsu or do a Gemba walk. In our case we will examine the current status by interviewing the process actors.
We had done a lot of ground work with the interview questions, so this part didn't take long. But if you start from scratch, be prepared to spend considerable amount of time on this. With a predefined set of questions you get better data can identify patterns from the answers.
The interviews will take a lot of time, but during the meeting we decided who were going to be interviewed and the team split into pairs. Scheduling the interviews were left as an action point and we only agreed on the deadline date. We will have another workshop session when the interviews are done and we can look at the results together.
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Photo by Artur Rutkowski on Unsplash
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