E119: Applying Lean within Municipal Electric and Water Utilities – Interview with Jennifer Peterson

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Posted on November 27, 2024November 27, 2024
Posted in Carbon Footprint, Consortium, Employee Engagement, Energy, Government, Lean Six Sigma Tools, Management, Nonprofit, Podcast, Water

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In this episode, we interview Jennifer Peterson, the manager of Continuous Improvement at Muscatine Power and Water (MPW) in Muscatine, Iowa. She discusses how she got into continuous improvement (CI) and the impact it has had on MPW employees and customers.

She highlights the importance of:

Creating a culture of continuous improvement: encourages employees to identify areas for improvement and provides them with the resources and support to make changes
Using data to drive decision-making: using metrics to track progress and identify areas where further improvement is needed
Engaging employees at all levels: involving employees in CI events and empowers them to make changes
Learning from others: MPW is a member of the Iowa Lean Consortium and has learned from other organizations, including Mary Greeley Medical Center

Jennifer also shares several examples of successful CI projects at MPW, including:

Improving the travel process: MPW implemented a new software application that streamlined the travel booking process and reduced frustration for employees.
Eliminating a cumbersome process: MPW identified a process that was no longer needed and eliminated it, saving time and resources.
5S-ing a maintenance shop: MPW improved the organization and ergonomics of a maintenance shop, making it a better place to work.

She also shares some examples of apply Lean at home for conducting youth softball tryouts, and how she has helped continuously improve it year over year. She also was excited when her husband wanted help organizing his garage after many years.

Jennifer’s insights provide valuable lessons for any organization looking to implement or improve its CI program, especially if you work within a government or quasi-government agency like a utility company.

Listen to the podcast on this page, or watch the video below, or go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bq7FPM9nMYI

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Have you ordered the book, “Lean Six Sigma for Good: Lessons from the Gemba (Volume 2)?” The book is made up of 8 chapters written about experiences from Lean and Six Sigma practitioners, to give you tips and tricks to help you work with nonprofits in your area. All proceeds donated to charity. Now available in audiobook as of Feb 2024. You can also order Volume 1 released in 2019.

Transcript

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Okay, welcome everyone. I’ve got Jennifer Peterson here. She’s the manager of Continuous Improvement at Muscatine, uh, Power and Water. Thank you, Jennifer, for joining us. Would you mind giving us a little introduction about your work and how long you’ve been at MPW and how you got into this lean journey that you’re on? Sure. So I grew up in Iowa and moved out west for a couple of years and came back and ended up getting a temp job at Muscatine Power and Water. And I was really excited because I just started as a technical writer. I had a bachelor’s degree in English and an mba. And I’m like, all right, this uses one of my degrees. I’m super stoked about that. And over the course of, uh, various things happening, I was asked if I wanted to go to a Lean in Government conference in Des Moines. And I said, sure, like, I didn’t really know anything about it. And I went there and it was eye opening. And so my, uh, boss and I came back to Utility and we shared what we had learned and really kind of just let it simmer a little bit. And at the end of the day, we ended up starting an entire lean team, building on, um, a previous team that was already in place at the utility. Well, we’ve been doing this since 2006. We went to the conference in 2009 or 10. Since then, it’s been one of the primary focuses of my job. And in the last, let’s say seven or eight years, it’s been the primary focus of my job. I’m blessed to work with really creative, smart people that they’re always looking for ways to make things better and looking for ways that we can do the work in house. Instead of maybe hiring a consultant or buying a piece of software or buying a tool. We try to see if we can do it in house and then if, um, we can’t, we obviously go outside. But that’s how we, that’s how we do continuous improvement at Power and Water. And it’s really just been an evolution of my career over the last seven to 10 years at power and Water of, um, learning more about the utility, learning more about CI. I went and got my green belt. I’m now a lean six Sigma black belt. I’ve got my PMP certification and it’s just a great place to do CI. Muscatine Power and Water is a municipal utility. We serve a community of about 22,000 people. We have approximately 1200 customers and we provide electric service, water service, telecom services, which for us encompass video, Internet and phone. And then we also have our own generation. So we service all facets of utility life in Muscatine. And mandated by the state, I believe, um, for our electric service territory. But our water territory and our communications territory can be outside of the city limits. Okay. Yeah. And Muscatine is on the border of Iowa and Illinois, on the east side of Iowa. Yep. For those that don’t know. Yeah. Right on the Mississippi, I guess. You said you got your mba, so was there any training on process improvement? I’ve heard some people get like a one Day Lean or Six Sigma overview, maybe. Was that part of your program? No, I actually have an MBA from Western Illinois University. And it’s the focus programs that I went for were international business and marketing, which I’m thinking, like, why did I do that? But, uh, you know what, I came, I came in and I think just the knowledge that I learned getting that degree coupled with my English degree has just really served me well. No, I didn’t know anything about Lean or continuous improvement before I went to that conference. And since then, Power and Water is a founding member of the Iowa Lean Consortium, and I try to get a group to go to that conference every year. I’ve been lucky enough to serve on the planning team for that for a couple of years. And it’s just a great way for businesses, especially in Iowa, to learn about continuous improvement. The membership is very reasonable. The conferences, the conference and the class rates are very reasonable. And it’s just an easy way to pick up knowledge at whatever level you’re at. You can go and you can be somebody who has had a lean program for 30 years, or you can go and be somebody who has never heard about Lean and you pick up so many nuggets of knowledge that then you can take back to your company and share, or you make those connections with other people and then you reach out to them and they share their story with you. And that’s how I’ve learned about continuous improvement. That’s how I’ve grown my own knowledge. And that’s how the utility has really been able to take continuous improvement from where it was in 2006, 2007, when they started their business improvement team. That’s how, by learning and by being part of the Iowa Lean Consortium and by leveraging various conferences, that’s how the utility has been able to move forward. Absolutely. Yeah. I think if anyone can get to an Iowa Lean Conference, definitely, um, recommend that. Uh, I’ve been to a couple, not as many as I’D like to just because I’m not always living in Iowa. But, um, yeah, I think it’s, uh, an excellent, uh, way for people to network and hear other people’s stories. And I feel like we met maybe at one of those events. I can’t remember which one. But, uh, yeah, it was just kind of cool to see these non corporations working on improvement and finding that this does apply. Maybe you have to think about it a little differently in our work, but some of the examples in your training are probably heavy manufacturing and making widgets and stuff. But you can get over that part and see the office processes and the service part of it, and helping people make that Translation is pretty important when it doesn’t really fit the training material. So a couple of years ago I was, I think I was cruising LinkedIn and I landed on a post that said it was a utility change conference and a utility process excellence conference. And I was like, I’ve never heard of this and I thought it was fascinating. So I, I talked to my boss at the time and I said, would it be okay if I went to this? I think it’s only utilities. And he said, sure, let’s try it. So I went to the conference and it was awesome. There were only utilities in the room. They focused on change management and process excellence. And I learned so much. And I have been back to that conference a couple of times. Um, I’ve taken my boss, I’ve taken co workers. This next year I’m going to be taking a couple more coworkers with me. And I presented on our Baldrige journey, um, along with, which is tied in with our continuous improvement journey at this most recent conference. And it’s always interesting because you get a room full of utility people and they are not usually competitors. So there’s, there’s no way Musking Power and Water is going to compete with somebody from Sunflower Energy or Duke Energy. We are just completely different areas, different sizes, all of it. But I can go there and I can learn from them and they can learn from me. And I gave, um, a presentation on our Baldrige journey and I, uh, had so many wonderful questions. It was, hey, what, what does this mean for a utility? What, what are you doing for continuous improvement? How are you leveraging change management in all of this? And those kinds of conversations are great because my department may not have the budget of a larger utilities continuous improvement budget. Uh, but I can do similar things and I can take the things that they, that they did that worked well and I can Apply them and they can take the things that work well for me and they can apply them. Malcolm, uh, Baldridge Quality Award is a presidential award. It’s the only presidential award for quality. It was started in 1989 by President Ronald Reagan and it was named after his commerce secretary, Malcolm Baldridge. And it focuses on six process areas of your company. And those are leadership strategy, customers, knowledge management, um, employees, workforce and operations. And then all five or all six of those are wrapped up with a results category as well. So there’s seven total categories in the Baldrige criteria and it is a non prescriptive criteria. So it gives you a, um, series of questions that you answer based on your organization. And in most states, when you submit an application, you will be visited by an examiner team who has read your application and reviewed it. And then they will come and they’ll do like a deeper dive. They want to make sure that what you put on paper is what you actually do. So then they’ll score it. And depending on the state structure, you might get an award, a trophy, whatever it is. And then only the top winners in each state can apply at the national level. And the national level you go to D.C. and it’s a, um, it’s a huge deal to apply for the national award, but you can apply at the state level however many times you want. I had heard about the Baldrige program at an Iowa Lean conference and I was like, this is pretty interesting. It’s very related to continuous improvement because it’s how do you get better? So I want to look into it. So I looked into it a little bit and kind of sat on it and I asked if I could be an examiner one year. My boss said, sure, no problem. So I spent some time, I went and was um, an examiner and I brought back so many lessons. And I talked to our leadership team and I said, hey, look, I think this is uh, this is something that might be really beneficial. What do you think? And they, at the time, we just had so much going on. It just wasn’t a really good time for the utility to do it. And we were getting ready to do some strategic planning. And I brought it up again and I said, I think this might be a good time to do this because it can show us some things that we’re doing really well and give us some ideas for our next strap plan that can take the utility further. And our leadership team was so supportive. They said, great, let’s get a team together. We’ll support it and we’ll see where this takes us. And so last year we put in our first state level application, kind of a mid tier. Like we didn’t go all out, but we didn’t go just really basic on it either. And we had an examiner team come and do the site visit and they gave us a feedback report. And that feedback report was so worth it because it gave us a list of things that we can look at on our own timetable, within our own, um, with our own operations and our own work that we can then make better. And we are getting ready to do another application next year. So we’ve had a lot of fun in the last two years, you know, kind of working on things and applying what we’ve learned and making sure that our results are going to be where we want them to be and just kind of putting in some best practices that we’ve learned through this Ballridge journey. Looking at it at an enterprise level and not just operations, which typically is where we start. Improvement work, do you feel like that has helped maybe accelerate or expand some of the improvement work? Or do you feel like it’s just. Yeah, I guess maybe it’s the connection between the improvement program and going through this Baldrige assessment. Uh, so what’s awesome about Baldrige is when you’re evaluating a process, um, you’re looking for four things. The first thing is, is there an approach? So do you have something that you do to. For this process? And yes, you usually have an approach. Well then if you got an approach, do you deploy it? Is it deployed throughout the entire organization? If not, why not? And if so, is it truly out across the whole organization? And then third is learning. So are you looking at the results and making changes based on the results? Are you learning from the activity that has happened? And are you making changes to your approach and deployment based on what you’ve learned? There’s that CI stuff all right there. Like why would you do a CI event? Well, you do a CI event because you expect your results to be here and you’re actually coming in down here or because your results are up here, but you’re not really sure how you got there. So why are you doing improvement? Well, you’re doing improvement because of learning. And then the fourth thing you’re looking at is what is called integration. And it’s. Are those, is that process, is that integrated throughout the entire organization and integrated with the other things that you say are important to you? So the acronym in Baldrige is adli. So it’s approach, deployment, Learning and integration. And that’s on the process side that gives us some continuous improvement opportunities. What gets us some continuous improvement opportunities on the results side is an acronym in Baldrige called letsi. So let’s see. Is, uh, levels. Do you, do you measure what you’re doing? Do you have a numerical scale? Does it show up on a chart? And then the T is trends. So do you have three data points? And it doesn’t matter if those three data points are minutes, hours, weeks, months, years, decades. Do you have at least three? Can you tell if they’re going up or down? What’s favorable, what’s not favorable? The, uh, C is comparisons. So do you have a comparison? And this is where it’s awesome because you’re looking for that benchmark and it doesn’t have to be in your industry. But if I know another utility does a similar process or has a similar function, maybe I’m going to look at what they’re doing. Uh, maybe it’s number of customers per, uh, 100 employees. How do they measure? Where does power and water measure? And are, Are, uh, we accept. Do we accept that? Do we want to be where they are? Do we, should they be up where we are? And then the E. And let’s see, is integrations. Oh, again, are you integrating those results across all aspects of your business? So between ADLI and letc, you really get a lot of opportunities for improvement. And it can be as, as simple as creating standards for reporting or for graphs that you use for your metrics. Um, one of the simple things that we recently did was we put a little green arrow on our strategic plan metrics so that we know which way is good. If the arrow goes up, then up is good. If the arrow goes down, down is good. We also looked at a couple of our strategic plan, well, most of our strategic plan metrics, and we try to identify a target. Now, is it a benchmark? So are we measuring ourselves against the American Power Association, Public Power Association’s top quartile? Okay, is, is that where we want to be? Um, is it a goal that we have set? You know, we want to have X number of customers subscribing to this particular telecom service, um, or whatever that measurement. We want that measurement to be. Do we have a goal? And so we’ve identified those. And you would think that’s pretty simple stuff. Like every chart has that. Not every chart has that in utilities and a lot of people, it can make them feel uncomfortable to put that target or that benchmark on a chart. And so we’ve really Worked hard over the last couple of years of, hey, you know what? Targets aren’t scary. Um, benchmarks aren’t scary. We already do them for some things. Let’s just leverage them on the strategic plan as well and some of the other charts that we’re doing. Yeah, I think that is a, ah, common fear. Um, even just helping people with their projects. It’s like, I don’t want to sign up for that goal or target. What if I don’t meet it? So then that, uh, kind of goes back to our management approach and our safe psychological safety and things like that of we’re just striving for improvement. We’re trying to challenge ourselves, but where we end up, um, hopefully we’ll be better. Even if we fall short of a goal, it’s just, it’s just a goal, you know, but it can be scary if that’s been used to punish or to reprimand, um, people for not meeting a goal. So they just want to set very small goals and then you don’t really get the improvements that you’re really could possibly make. Yeah. Um, a great example is that for years and years we measured our electric reliability to the average for the American Public Power association was the average for our size, the average for our customer size, whatever it was, was average. We were always blowing that out of the water. And I don’t remember where I heard about, I heard something they were talking about, well, what are you measuring yourself the average for? Like, challenge yourself a little bit. And so we had a couple of conversations and we decided, let’s see what data is available. And so we found that top quartile was available. So now we’re measuring ourselves to top quartile. We’re still blowing that out of the water. We have really, really great reliability here. But it’s that small incremental change. Right. So now instead of measuring ourselves to the average, we’re going to hold ourselves to a higher standard, measure ourselves against the top quartile. And I, um, still think that we’re even way better than top quartile. Yeah. And I think that’s what helps people get those breakthroughs is when they feel like, oh, we can’t just tweak or kind of nudge this process a little bit to get what we want. We really have to step back and rethink it and reevaluate and challenge. Is this the right way to do it today? Even if it was a couple years ago? Things change. Right. And so I think that’s what the opportunity might be. Is really allow people to step back and say, let’s not just try to make small changes. Maybe we need to make something more dramatic instead of it being maybe forced on you. You’re trying to do, do that proactively. Well, and it’s, and it’s like in the Six Sigma world, you talk a lot about getting to, you know, six five nines or six, six, nine, six nines. And it’s really hard to get to five nines. It’s kind of easy to get to one nine or two nines. But then you’re like, okay, well now I need to get 99.9. All right, well that’s a little bit harder. 99.99 is even harder. And it sometimes takes an outside view to continually make that change. And we’re very blessed that, uh, we have a Baldrige national award winner in Iowa, Mary Greeley Medical center in Ames. And they have been absolutely wonderful to kind of give us advice or um, share their learnings. We, we took a group to go visit them in March and learned so much and they were so generous with their time. And you might think, well, it’s a hospital. Well, they’re a municipal hospital, so kind of similar there. But we can still take things that they do at the hospital, take the concepts behind them and apply them to power and water. The same thing that we do in Lean when we take things from manufacturing and we apply them to knowledge based processes. It’s just a matter of taking the concept and applying it to the work that you’re doing. I mean, I even apply lean in softball, so I mean, you can’t take it. I, you can’t take the lean out of me at this point. So any, uh, examples you can share? I think those are awesome to hear because it helps people. I love the idea of lean at home and just to get people to think and even just for me to explain it to my family and friends. Can you share something about softball? Yeah, I’d love to. So a couple of years ago I have two daughters and they play travel softball. And uh, one of my co workers actually started a travel softball organization. And he was like, I want you guys on our teams and you’re going to help me run the organization. And I said, okay, not really knowing what I’m getting into. And so the first year we do tryouts and he and I are sitting there and we’re like, this could be better. And he’s on, he’s been on the lean team at Power and Water for years. Like this could be better. And so the first year that we had our. The first year that we did the trials, he and I did them together. Um, we actually got all the stations set up, and then we did a walk through. We had a couple of girls come in, and we’re like, all right, you’re going to do this, and then you’re going to do this. And we tried to see how the sequence would work. We made some tweaks. And then we did the actual first tryout. And the first tryout, we’re like, okay, there’s a huge backlog in this one area. So the next night, we did tryouts. We got to change something here because this isn’t quite right. And then after that first tryout, like, I wrote standard work for the tryouts so that I refer to every year. He doesn’t, but I do because I got to set things up right. And even now, we’ve been doing tryouts together for probably five years. Five or six years even now, uh, right before tryouts, we’ll get on the phone together and we’ll be like, all right, this is what we’re going to do. What do you think? We talk it through. And then after that first night, we always have a debrief. He and I and the coaches have a quick debrief, and it’s like, all right, what didn’t go well? What went well? How can we leverage it better for tomorrow night and go from there? And we’ve done the same thing in our indoor facility that we practice at. So, um, when I give the coaches their equipment every year, it’s a kit of equipment. They all get case of balls, a couple of practice, a couple bucks, buckets of practice balls, two nets, two tees. Like, it’s a kit that they get. The building itself is set up so the hitting is in one area. Balls are in specific size buckets. So 11 inch balls are in one bucket. 12 inch balls are another bucket. Like, we are just incredibly process focused, and we’re also data focused. So we take a look and see, like, what are the stats for all the girls? How can we make things better? That kind of stuff. So my husband, you talked about lean at home. My husband builds guitars and basses. And so he has a big pegboard in his garage with all of his stuff on it. And, um, he was like, can you come home and, like, put labels up and organize my pegboard? And I was like, boo. Yay. He works at power and water as well. And so it’s like a running joke that he’s like, okay, you can bring your, you can bring your label maker home now and anything to help people understand the basic concepts and then try to translate that. I’m sure you have some training that you’re doing in house, but what, what do you think has helped people make that translation to the work that they’re doing? Uh, and maybe it’s different for water and telecom and energy, but. Well. So all of our employees go through a class called CI101 and it teaches them why power and water does continuous improvement. What continuous improvement is, we go through a 5s exercise, we go through the 8 wastes, we talk a little bit about visual management. And the thing that I stress with them is that they are already doing this. They just don’t know the lean name for it. It’s the same thing. I do a five, uh, tools class. They’re already doing brainstorming and pdca. They just don’t know that that’s the name for it and that we try to get the hook in with them. Um, they’re supposed to take the class within the first 60 days or as long as six months, depending on the position that they come in as. And our general manager usually is the one who kicks the class off with why power and water does continuous improvement. Some of that is, hey, you know what? This is our ratepayers money. We want to make sure we are able to maintain the lowest rates we possibly can. We want to be good stewards of our money, of our resources. And then the hook for our employees is they got into the field that they got into for a reason. You became an accountant for a reason. You became an engineer for a reason. You became a lineman for a reason. We want to give you the opportunity to do more of the work that you want to do with less frustration. So if we hire uh, uh, a person to come in as a lineman, we want them to be doing lineman work. They want to be doing lineman work as much of that eight hour day as possible. So how do we, how do we remove the frustration from their work so that they don’t go home frustrated with their work? I think that’s a great way to kind of get them to think about it because, uh, sometimes it can be too much around, how am I going to apply value stream mapping? Um, how am I going to do a kanban? But if it’s just, let’s start with the problems. See the problems, see the waste. Um, maybe you already seen it, maybe you aren’t seeing it. Let’s at least make sure, we can see everything. And then, um, what are the frustrations and what can we do to remove them? I mean, I think that’s pretty simple. It should be easy for people to say, yeah, that makes sense. One of the videos that I show at the end of the class is, um, Paul Acres has a video that’s like 72 lean improvements in two minutes or something like that. It’s about a five minute video or something, something like that. And he just, I’m going to make chemicals with my coworker, and these are all the changes we made. And he ends that with, we just fixed what bugs us. And that’s all I tell the people. I’m like, fix what bugs you. Because work should be fun, work should be meaningful, work should not be a struggle. That’s what he, that’s what he says in that video. And that has been my mantra for the last, uh, almost 10 years, is you should come to work and have fun. You should come to work and the work you do is meaningful. And gosh darn it, work should not be a struggle. If you’re struggling at work, then there’s probably something there that’s frustrating you. And let’s figure out how to eliminate that frustration. I’ll give you a really good example. We have a lot of employees at Powerwater who work here for 35 to 45 years. Um, and a gentleman was retiring a couple years ago right around Covid, and he’s like, you know what? I do this process every year. I’ve been doing it for like the last 10 years, and it takes me 80 hours a month to do this process. And I get so frustrated when I do it. And I said, that’s not cool. And he says, I don’t want to leave this process this way after I retire. And we find that a lot at Power and Water. People who are retiring, they’ve just kind of like been doing the same thing, but they don’t want to leave it in that condition for the next guy. And so they’re like, well, how can we fix this and make it better? And so we did a continuous improvement event on this process. And at the end of the day, we made a couple of phone calls to state revenue offices and looked at our processes and stuff. And we took this 80 hour process that this guy had been doing for, let’s say, 10 years. Frustrated him every year, got it down to it’s probably two hours or less. And he was so happy by the end of that, he did, he’s not going to reap the benefit of that like the department was. But he wasn’t. But he was just so happy that we took that frustration that he felt and we fixed that process. So nobody else is going to have to experience that. Yeah. What a great story. You know, just even the, you know, not even being able to recoup some of the results personally, you know, but just not letting that pains continue on to someone else. It’s very cool. Yeah. Any other, uh, examples that you shared or, you know, maybe some key projects to help people kind of understand the type of improvements that are being done? Yeah. Uh, so we did a. We have a. We have our own power generation, so we have a power plant. And there was this. I actually wasn’t part of this project, but it comes up in my CI101 class all the time. Uh, because I show pictures of it. Uh, they did a 5s on a maintenance shop. The maintenance shop beforehand had all of the. A whole bunch of stuff in it. It was just not a really great place to do work in and probably not very ergonomic, uh, when it comes down to it. And so my predecessor looked at this and, and was asked to 5s the shop and make it better. And it is a night and day difference between the before and after. They brought in some hoists, they painted, they improved the lighting, they got a whole bunch of stuff out of there. And now it’s. It’s a better place to work and it’s. And it’s better for our employees. A couple years ago we were having, um, we looked at our time entry and our payroll processes because people were just really kind of struggling. Um, it went from a, a handwritten process essentially for a lot of our employees to uh, during COVID they had to enter on spreadsheets and there were some data entry things and just a cumbersome process. And so we looked at that and we ended up implementing a new software application and really streamlined how some of that flows. Probably going to do another continuous improvement event on it in the next year just to see what we can do to take it one step further. Most recently we took a look at our travel processes. Our travel admins were spending a whole bunch of time booking travel for people and multiple touches throughout the organization on the same pieces of information. And there was just a lot of frustration. And so we spent three days doing a continuous improvement event on our travel process. Ended up implementing a piece of software called Concur, SAP Concur. And with that we’re able to leverage a whole bunch of best practices that we weren’t able to leverage before. And the first person who did their own booking in concur, they were like, uh, I love this. Where was this before? And we were like, yay, a win for us. But sometimes it’s not even making a wholesale change. We did a, uh, continuous improvement event on the interaction between two areas that it’s pretty important that they work well together, and they do work well together. But there was some information flow between the two that was just kind of clunky. So we got a group together and we mapped out the process and identified the frustration point. And while we didn’t change anything, just the fact that the key stakeholders were in the room, they all heard each other and understood what was needed by the others. That went a huge way to making that process better. We’ll probably take a look at that process in the next year or so, because I heard that there’s going to be some changes coming. Um, like a piece of software that they use is adding some functionality, so they want to see how they can leverage that. So we’ll probably take a look at that again. But it’s really just, how can we break down some walls and get people in the same room to hear things? If you got time for one more example, of course, yeah, we did a continuous improvement event on a process that our customer service reps did with our water department. Uh, and they were like, this is really hard. It takes me all day to do these calculations. There’s got to be a better way. And so it’s the only time this has ever happened. But I got the group together and we’re sitting there and we’re like, okay, well, we mapped out the process. We’re all talking about it like, uh, well, what are our options? And somebody pipes up and says, what if we just don’t do it anymore? And everybody kind of. I remember, like, everybody just kind of looked at each other around the room like, is that really an option? I said, let’s run with it. So let’s. Let’s present senior leaders with three options. You know, option A, B and C. And one of those is, we don’t do this anymore. And that. If that. If you guys think that that should be the recommendation, then we’ll make that be the recommendation. But we’ll have these other two in our back pocket. And they were like, okay. And so we. We went ahead and we did that. We presented to them. And wasn’t. It wasn’t the whole CI team, it was the people who were doing it. They presented to Senior leaders. And they said, we don’t think we should do this process anymore. And it’s just not a high volume process, not a lot of activity, but it was really cumbersome to do. And they said, sure. And so we eliminated the entire process. It wasn’t a big process. It was a little tiny thing. But the people who did it, they were frustrated by it and they didn’t see much value in it and our customers didn’t see much value in it. So just don’t do the process. And I think we’re still doing it for. We’ve got one customer that’s still left on it. I think we’re. And they’re going to be done with it soon. But yeah, we eliminated the process and it’s only time I’ve ever had that happen. It was so cool. Yeah. For an entire process. Yeah. Inside a process. A lot of little things we can take out. But yeah, that’s great to be able to completely wipe out a process. Um, um, I have seen that done with like reports and things where they’ll say, don’t send it out. Just see if anyone even complains or asks for it. And you go a couple weeks or months and no one complains. No one’s asking about it. Okay. I guess our customers have spoken that they don’t care. I did that. I did that one time. We had a, um, our old billing system had all of these processes and we had mapped them all out and there were so many reports and they would go like one report would go to 10 people. And I’m like, why are we doing this? What are they all doing with this thing? Because when we did the maps originally, we just captured that the report came out. And then the next time we did the maps, we said, okay, well these five people get this report. And so I said, well, let’s look and see what those people do with the report. That was the third iteration. And we found so many times those people like, well, it just sits in my inbox for a month. Or I look to see if it’s blank. I’m like, okay, so we’re printing blank sheets of paper. That’s great. Um, but we’ve done that a couple of times in various systems and it’s amazing how much people appreciate it when you can take something that they don’t use and it’s just noise and you can eliminate it. Um, we’ve gone through the effort or gone through a number of efforts in the last couple of years to move many reports, not all of them but move many of the reports to Power bi. Um, now if somebody wants to use it, they can just go to the Power BI service and they can consume that report how they need it. Um, that’s been really useful for us. Yeah, a couple of things you said. Um, the, you know, I think sometimes when we’re trying to make these process level or bigger improvements, it’s hard for people to like, want to jump right into that when they’ve got all these pain points and things that are bugging them. And so I think it’s really key to get some of those out of the way first and also, you know, kind of show them that we’re, we’re trying to help you. It’s not just about reducing cost or things like that. So I think that’s, that’s really helpful. And then that frees them up to say, okay, now I can invest a little time on this process improvement or come to an event or take a training or uh, you know, so I think that is really important to get free, uh, help them free up their own time first so they can invest some time into making a larger process or something bigger, um, to kind of get into that a little deeper. So I think that’s, that’s helpful. And then the other thing I was just going to say was around the process mapping where you’re bringing different groups together and they all kind of share what they do and what they need from each other. I agree. I think you could have an event and just do that and walk away with no actions, no improvements. And you will get some benefit out of that. Just because I know that person, I’ve heard what they do. I understand the whole process now. Maybe I only knew my part or my piece. There will be improvements from that even if no actions were taken or changes were made. Um, so I always say like just having this process mapping is going to be an improvement. Now let’s take it further and try to make changes and really document those. But even if it completely nothing happens out of it, there is value being created there, uh, and improvements being done. It’s just uh, kind of uh, just through the communications and knowledge. Now I really like it when we do a process mapping. And one um, of the things that we’ve standardized over the last two years or so is that um, when you do, when we do a process map, the process is yellow post its, frustrations are red post its and ideas are green post its. And you can sometimes feel the frustration in the room when you give them the red post its. And Say, put the frustrations on the map where they happen. And then you look at them, uh, after they’ve done that, and you can just feel like they’ve taken the frustration out of them and they’ve put it on the wall. And then it’s like, then you open up that map later and you’re like, I can feel all that frustration, but it’s that transfer. And then you start to identify the ideas on how to address or eliminate those frustrations. And you can kind of feel like some, Some breathing room be created in them that they know that somebody’s there to help and, uh, that somebody is listening to them and they’re not being. Change isn’t being done to them. Change is being done with them. And that is huge for me. If I do a CI event, I don’t want to do change to people. I want to do change with people. I don’t want somebody to feel like they’re under attack. Um, one of my key ground rules is always it’s the process, not the person. Um, and it’s. I want the key stakeholders in the process to walk out of the room at the end of the event feeling as though they are honored in the work that they’ve done and that they were worked with instead of against. And I don’t want them to leave in silent disagreement. I want any concerns to be brought forth. I’ve had, um, lots of people be part of CI events over the years in the utility that have come, um, at the end of it, they’re like, I had no idea all of this was happening. And the person who’s doing the process, I’m just there to facilitate. The person who’s doing the process is like, yeah, yeah, it’s been happening for 10 years or 20 years. So I like that idea of, like, giving the transferring kind of that pain to the sticky note and onto the wall and off the employee’s shoulders and, um, as a ceremonial task there to start, um, this process of trying to free them from those frustrations. So that’s really cool. If you don’t have a CI program, start small. Just learn. Learn something about continuous improvement and see how you can apply it in your work. Um, don’t think that you need to go in full gangbusters and, like, transforming the entire thing. Even if you can make some improvements in your work, you can then be that example, and then other people will see that. It’s like, it’s like the Toyota Kata stuff. It’s. It’s. Make it. Make yourself the example and work all work on all of that in your own work and then naturally grow it out. Um, we kind of joke sometimes it’s called the silo of excellence because if you can do all of these things, then as you kind of finesse them and fine tune them, you can share them out and it’s up to people if they want to pick it up or not. And if you’ve got, if you’re in an organization and you can get senior leader support for it, that’s going to go um, a long way. And somebody asked me one time after a conference, how do you get senior leader support? I heard somebody told me one time, I remember this, ask them what keeps them up at night and then try to work on that. Because if you can make a change in something that they are worried about or that they worry about a lot, then you’re going to get that person, um, in your, in your corner. Yeah, that’s great. That is ideal to get the top management, you know, support on these programs, but also find someone who has some influence that you can work with and find that advocate and say, why don’t we start in your area and maybe we build some success stories and then try to go sell that too. But it’s a, it’s a longer road that way. It’s, it’s better if we can go right to the top there. But I, I’ve also heard people say, well, I don’t have a connection to the CEO or the president. And so, um, start in your area and work with the teams and the people you work with. And then it can grow from there. But definitely it takes longer, um, and probably more frustrating, but it can be done. It’s possible through some groundswell grassroots efforts. Uh, I’ve seen it happen. So it is possible that way. But it’s easier if you start at the top. Yes, it is easier if you start at the top. But, but, and I am, I would say that I’m very lucky. I report to um, a senior leader. The continuous improvement Department support reports directly to a senior leader. And so we’ve got that connection, um, that’s not available everywhere. And I think that that’s also part of why our Baldrige journey has been, um, maybe so maybe well received in the utility is because we have that, the department has that connection to senior leadership and senior leadership sees the benefit in it and it’s across the entire organization. It’s not just in one area and it’s not just, oh, this is a manufacturing thing or a, whatever, you know, this is Baldrige is non prescriptive, it’s non denominational. There’s, there’s three different criteria. But you can do it if you’re a utility, you can do it if you’re a hospital, you can do it if you’re a bank. And uh, it’s all about how, how can you make yourself better. So find that program, whether it be a combination of CI and Six Sigma and Baldrige and Shingo and all of these things. Find a program that works for your organization or a framework that works for your organization and leverage it to the extent possible. And if you have to change, you have to change, but start somewhere, that’s great. If someone wanted to reach out to you, connect with you, is LinkedIn the best place or LinkedIn is the best place? You should be able to find me under Jennifer Peterson. Uh, Muscatine. This is great. Yeah, it was great talking to you. Thanks, Brian. Yeah, talk to you later. Bye. Thanks. Bye.

E119: Applying Lean within Municipal Electric and Water Utilities – Interview with Jennifer Peterson

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