A successful workshop
Well, the problem solving workshop was today. And guess what…it worked very well! Thanks again to all of you for your ideas and assistance. A belated thanks to Charmed and Tim Folkerts for your ideas, and I apologize for not responding earlier.
The scope and novelty of the workshop had me more than a little worried. It started at 7 AM with approximately 110 participants working in 17 different groups—the entire plant for the entire day. The feedback from participants was very positive and everybody seemed to have a very good time. And most importantly the participants now understand problem solving much very better than previously. Here are the things that I learned for future offerings of the workshop:
*** The coffee-maker premise of the course worked well. It had just enough technical variables to challenge everyone and keep everyone engaged. This was the first time I had done the workshop using coffee makers.
*** The first coffee making exercise involved defining a problem statement. At least half the groups incorporated some “causal analysis” into their problem statements. Of course, this was a good illustration of how people jump ahead of the problem solving method before they’ve
*** The groups had to be shuffled so that at least one “coffee aficionado” was on each team. I was a little surprised by the number of people who didn’t drink coffee. A group with zero coffee fans would have made it difficult to evaluate their coffee.
*** The idea of forcing interaction between groups by limiting their resources was perfect. This underlined the concept of teamwork across functions of the plant, which was one of the weaknesses of the facility. Thanks, Roxane.
*** The idea of contaminating some of the coffee grounds with onions (red onions, specifically) was excellent. The coffee made with these grounds was absolutely putrid, and the smell of the grounds was not too much different from regular grounds. The only hitch was that a few people were not that turned off by the onion coffee! One guy even drank two cups of the awful brew. Whooo-weee. Thanks to Quality101 for the great onion idea.
*** I didn’t spend much time explaining how to construct a flow diagram, because I figured everyone was already intimately familiar with the concept. That was a mistake. At least a third of the class had never assisted in the development of a flow diagram and they struggled during the exercise.
***Turning on seventeen coffee makers at the same tripped circuit breakers in the facility, adding an unintended issue for the teams to deal with. It worked itself out, though, and became another driver of cooperation between teams.
*** I had not planned on using overhead transparencies for the teams to use during debrief. I switched gears in midstream and we used overheads, which was very positive. Only 5 or 6 teams debriefed in each exercise.
*** Next time I will ban the use of powdered non-dairy creamer. A couple teams brought this into the room. The creamer only made the coffee harder to drink.
*** I used decaf coffee, since I knew I’d have to act as the “customer” for 17 groups making coffee.
*** One of the groups that had been issued whole coffee beans simply used the end of Leatherman tool to crush the beans! I was surprised by the resourcefulness. Their coffee was quite good.
*** I didn’t have a slide at the end of the presentation that summarized the key points. This was a mistake that I’ll correct next time. I improvised, but it would have been helpful to have the key points on the slide.
Tomorrow is the in-plant application of what we learned today. The management team selected 4 problems that were provided by the group in exercise 1: “What are some existing problems that plague the facility?” Each problem will have 4 groups working semi-independently on it, using the problem solving method and tools we employed today. It should be interesting.
Thanks again for all your great ideas and assistance.
Craig