E121: Using Lean Principles for Non-Profits and NGOs – ASQ Lean Division

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In this episode, I share a webinar I gave to the ASQ Lean Enterprise Division

I share examples of how Lean tools like process mapping, 5S, and Kanban boards helped improve efficiency and effectiveness for nonprofit organizations focused on societal or environmental challenges. I also share my favorite real-world examples from the City of Denver, New York Food Bank, and my personal experience with Recycling Advocates, Free Geek and a few other nonprofits.

I also discuss the role of Lean in addressing the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals and share resources for organizations that are also promoting Lean for NGOs, or help connect volunteers with nonprofits looking for help.

Listen to the podcast on this page, or watch the entire presentation with slides below, or go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OH3_7E2me_Y

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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

In this podcast, I share a video I gave for the asq Lean Enterprise division. I share some real world examples like City of Denver and New York Food Bank and how Lien is applied to non Prof. Also, tie back to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Also give some advice on how you can get more engaged with local nonprofits to volunteer or set up a volunteer group and connect with others who might be looking for mentoring or coaching. Also linked to the full video, if you want to see the slides that go with it, yeah. Today I wanted to talk about a topic I’m really excited about is bringing lean principles to nonprofits or NGOs depending on what you call them or charities.

But really, it’s the general topic is really around organizations that are not-for-profit or not really focused on money as a primary driver of decisions. It’s about trying to fix maybe a societal problem, environmental problem, something like that. It could be a club or membership that you’re part of where? Really focused on making money. So if you wanna think about it, that generic term, that’s what I’m really trying to gear this conversation towards. So I just want to share briefly some of the work I’ve been able to do over the last couple years around nonprofit or not-for-profit work through the University of Iowa schools through some volunteer work I did as part of a group called Lean Portland, which I, To talk about. Ran a small nonprofit for a few years as well. That gave me a different perspective and Some Insights. And just also someone day volunteering activities with a few different organizations as. Well, I’m now expert at all, but I do have enough that I’ve been trying to compile my insights, share those with others, especially lean practitioners like yourself that are those of you new to lean that may be trying to figure out how can. I implement this into an organization that is really trying to do some. Good work. Talk about the UN Sustainable development goals. That’s kind of a foundation that I use when I think about. The type of problems and issues that are going on. And they are 17 different goals that have been developed over the years, and it’s meant to be a global look at, I guess, challenges and issues that we face across all of our countries, from poverty to hunger to health and education and equality. To sustainability and energy and water and. Peace. You know, all these are constant challenges that are going on in the world and I think is about 10, maybe 15 years ago where the light bulb went off for me that. Know I’ve got skill set and process improvement. I look at data. Understanding lean principles, flow, simplicity, organization. And then looking at these challenges and saying, I think we could use the same skill set to tackle these issues. And so that’s really what got me started and excited about. Trying to figure out how do we bring this skill set? Towards these challenges, and there’s a lot of great work happening in these areas. So I don’t want it to seem like nothing’s happening. So here’s a couple examples and I’ll give you some resources to find more that the city of Denver, they had a challenge of it was taking too long to get unemployment benefits. And it was taking more than five days through a lean initiative. Brought teams together into a work. And they were able to streamline that process, get it down to less than a day, and sometimes just a matter of hours. Someone fills out an application and within hours after they’ve lost their job. They have money available to buy food or pay bills. So just give them a sense of comfort or just some relief right away. There’s a video feat and these slides will be. So you can click on that link and watch a video that they talk about the whole process and how inefficient it was. Set up. The New York Food Bank. Many of you probably seen this video, but they went through after Hurricane Sandy and were able to distribute out. 100 more food boxes per truck. And also just distribute that in less over half the time that it used to take from three hours to down to only a little over an hour with 400 more boxes. And the time to pack up each box was reduced, and that was through a partnership they had with the Toyota production System Support Center TSSE, and they spent weeks with them and taught them these methods. So that’s a great video if you haven’t seen that one. So those are some good. I want to share some personal examples of things I worked on. Who is a non profit in Portland called free geek and on the left is a picture of their mobile device repair area. And so volunteers would come in and there would be a box of. IPhones or iPads that needed to be fixed or repaired or troubleshooted or tested and. They would do is take those and resell them if they could get them working. And so as you go into the area on the left, you can see there’s a lot of OPP. To make that process a little more organized and simplified and easier for a new volunteer. The right chords to find the right software and justice be more efficient so they can process and repair more phones and the more they did, the more money they could raise to close that digital divide. For people in the community. So on the right there was a, you know, got a little rid of a lot of stuff. Better organized to space and then also try to organize the incoming based on what is the actual need and what are people purchasing and we should be repairing those. 1st and not the ones that people aren’t buying. So that was a good starting initiative we did with our organization and we worked with them for many different years on different things like processing laptops and. Other digital. Just a couple other examples too. Organization. And they were excited just having the process map. We were like, OK. This is step one and then Step 2. Three-step 4. We’ll go through. We’ll figure out what to improve. Make some changes. And they were like, actually the process map is awesome. The current state map is what we need. Never had a way to communicate what? As opposed to donors or volunteers and just getting it mapped out was so helpful for us. And so kind of a little disappointed like no, we’re just getting started here, but they’re like actually. A good starting point for us, this is a lot for us just to. A. Map other. We did like a Kanban board where we have to do doing and done a lot of times. Nonprofits get overwhelmed with the amount of projects and tasks that they’re taking on. They got. Passionate people who want to make a huge impact and they take on probably more than they can handle and they get burnt out a lot. A common issue I’ve seen or heard. And so how do we control our incoming number of projects and say I can only do 3 or 4 projects at a time and still be effective and get those done? We know that if we overload ourselves, nothing will get done so. A Kanban board could be really helpful for an organization I. I did a dumpster dive. At a college stadium and we grabbed all the trash containers and laid it all out and sorted through and weighed everything to gather data to know what was being thrown away at the stadium and then look for opportunities to. Switch out certain items or better communicate to the fans where they need to place things instead of in the trash. So that was a really messy, smelly exercise, but very helpful with understanding the current situation and what the opportunities were.

And then the bottom right was a team that worked out the rebuilding center and they came up with a great sorting system. For when people would donate tools or supplies for construction, they had visuals placed with examples of different items, and then color-coded the bins and it’s made that process so much easier. Volunteers to come in and figure out what to do instead of constantly asking where does this go? So it doesn’t require complicated tools, especially if you’re just getting started. Also you can do some data. You can do some pretty advanced stuff if you want questions that came up on the non profit that I was. How are our emails doing when we send out a newsletter every month? And we could look at the click rates versus the open rates and see if there’s any correlation to that. We can look at day of the week. It matter what day we send out the newsletter. Discussions about we should send it Wednesday morning. We should send it Wednesday. We should send it Friday morning, Monday afternoon, Monday morning. We looked at the past data and there it looks like there might be some differences but not statistical difference. So maybe we need more data or it doesn’t matter as long as we have a good clear message and header subject line. That’s more important or time of day. We broke down the data by afternoon, lunch and morning. And see if there was a difference and there was no real difference in our click through rate. So that brings some data to some of the decisions that we’re trying to make instead. Saying I think this is right or I think this is going to work better. Where’s the data that shows up?

A couple different organizations that you might look at or a model you might consider as well if you like this idea. So I would first recommend starting as an individual. But what we had in Portland OR was a group that we set up called Lean Portland. Back in 2010, there was a couple people that got together and started to volunteer with an organization. And then around 20/14/15 I started to get involved and that there was more structure being put into it at that time. And we started to reach out to a few more organizations. So we end up working with six different nonprofits. We taught free workshops to the community about Lean basics and lean 101. We also had a monthly happy hour in person. Through the pandemic and then since the pandemic, we’ve had virtual happy hours so anyone can attend these and I think some of you. Recognize probably attended 1 already and then in December each year we have a lien for social good virtual UN conference that we host and that is geared around this exact topic. What can we do to accelerate or help these organizations learn about our practice? Process improvement and so definitely go to theleanportland.com website if you want to sign up or register for that, but it’s a open topic and that’s what on conference is. It’s basically you decide at the conference what the topics are. And you propose them, and then people show up to those particular. And then I’ve also tried to put a lot of these summaries or articles and videos into a website Lean 6 Sigma for good and you can search by these different topics, but you can go there and see articles and videos and search. By keywords. So you could search in your city or your state or. A specific topic and it’ll pull up. I found the project chart on the more formal like where we know this is going to be a bigger initiative like of the groups we were trying to increase their production of. Refurbishing laptops and they established a baseline and said this is our goal and. This is our timeline and we really work through a whole project Tartar to make sure we all are aligned on why we’re doing this. But other events like doing a little 5S or a gimbal walk or something like that. We didn’t put anything formal together for. So just kind of depend on the effort once we realized it was going to be a big effort then we would put a charter together. I mean, I’ve met a few people who are in a role where they’re in charge of process improvement on NGO or nonprofit. Almost through the lean 360. Others I’ve just met randomly or gotten connected in with or networked or organization of 500 staff. Bigger the nonprofit, the more likely that they might have a position even. If an organization has 500 people, they should have at least one person dedicated to process. It probably 5 or 10 to be honest. Getting. You probably need at least one person. Give 100 people. Probably it’s worth to have one person first is find the nonprofit like to work with. And I do have a free book where it helps you walk through those sustainable development goals. Kind of help you pick. An organization, or at least a goal that you like and then help you search for that non profit. It’s locally, or maybe it’s a countrywide or a global nonprofit. And then go through their onboarding process. Sign up as a volunteer. Kind of keep track of what your experience is like. Might say I signed up two weeks ago. Feels like there’s an opportunity there or like one of the organizations we’ve showed up for the onboarding and we went through, you know, safety video and learned about the organization. And then they said, OK, now sign up for a volunteer time. And I said, well, we’re already here. Why don’t we just have a session right now and like, well, we probably should coordinate that little bit. Yeah, ’cause. We drove out there and then drove back after an hour and then had to come back again for our actual volunteering experience, so. You know, connecting those two together at the same time. Would make more sense. So just taking notes and that was the feedback we gave to them and then go through that volunteer. Maybe it’s the week later or some other time, but when your schedules coordinate and then just make observations, keep an eye on, look for the ways to look for the opportunities. And then just kind of capture those and then if you have a connection with someone in the organization, then you can say, hey, I do this for my work or I have this background or training and I think there’s some opportunities here. Is there someone I can share this with or talk to about it? And I don’t just want to blast that information out to them. See if you can meet with a manager or supervisor. A Leader, executive director if possible, but just say this is my experience going through as a. I’m just trying to give some feedback and this is what I notice and I’d like to help with this as well. Not just giving you a bunch of problems to work on, but could take the lead on one of these. I could work with one of your teams to walk them through this. Maybe it’s a overview of Lean 6 Sigma or process improvement or quality. So you might just OfferUp 1/2 hour or one hour overview training I. My experience is that this is new methods and concepts that a lot of them may not have. Some have business background, some have worked in corporations for profit businesses, but others come in from other. Backgrounds. Maybe they come through social services or through the government and they may not have been exposed to some of these terms or methodologies. So you might start with a little training class and that way you would usually give a one hour training and we would show that New York Food Bank. And then just help them implement 1. Maybe you say I’d like to help with a 5S in this area. I think that could help clean up things a little bit or I’d like to offer to facilitate a process mapping or. Help collect data in a process and say this is an example of what I’m talking about, and if there’s more interest in that, we can decide how to proceed. Again, try to get to a point where you can show some tangible improvements and then always celebrate the success and wins like any could improve it. If you would like to set up something like that in your local community, find other practitioners that live around you or. You work with that might be interested in going together as a group which does make it a little easier if you’re coming in as a group of people, maybe more likely to do it. As much initial fear about doing it. What I’d suggest to people do is set up a LinkedIn group. And start connecting with people in your area and invite them to that group. Start the dialogue and discussion, or have to get a couple names on there and set up an in person meeting and just say this is the topic. This is what I’d like to do. Seems like you’re all interested. Where do we go? Here. You could have regular meetings. We would have meetings once a month. Just to keep us moving in the right direction and end up turning into two meetings, one for the organizing team and the other for general topics. We would rotate where we met, but now it’s all virtual. Identify a lead and a Co. If you do find a non profit that helps so that if people have conflict at work or something, there’s a backup person that’s available that seems to work really well. Start simple with you know 5S process mapping, gimbal walks, huddle boards, you know. You say U-shaped cells. Checklist stuff like that. Don’t have to get super complicated right away. Work with their the. Schedule the difficulty. Sometimes is trying to meet with them during work hours and so that’s why I was asking you about your company’s policies around volunteering. They might wanna meet 3:00 to 4:00 PM. That might conflict with your work schedule though. If they they, they can meet at night and on weekends, that’s great. Most of the time they’re working the same schedule you have. Makes it tough and then anything you can do to capture any successes and if you’re willing to share that, the organization’s willing to share those. That would be great. Lean 360 is an initiative that was set up by Metair. Some of you might know Andrew Paris. He’s been working in the non profit sector for many years. After a long stint with Lockheed Martin and. They are humanitarian based NGO. They go in after natural disasters and help try to. Fix the community and help people in need. And so with a couple other organizations, they’ve put together a coach, coach E program that I’ve participated in. And so. He’s able to do is find people who have gone through a basic. Across. Process improvement course that he’s put together and then match them up with practitioners like us. And we have weekly meetings over a couple months and just talk them through a project or initiative that they’re working on. And so that one’s been really cool. He’s kind of working to get more people who are seeking coaches and then also looking for others. That might be. So you go to lean360.org, you can go and find the part about being a coach, or you can either volunteer time to give a presentation or part of a training, or actually mentor someone virtually. There’s also a group called Lean Agile NGO. By Steve Bell. He’s put together some free training for organizations. And his goal was to make it easy for these NGOs and non profits to learn the basics around process improvement lean and he has a specific focus around Agile. That’s his background and expertise. In the beginning, these training videos on flow and value stream and Kanban and problem solving are generic for any organization. So you can check that out and reference his videos that he’s posted for free for organizations to use and share. And he’s got a library of articles and resources that are available as well. So definitely check out his site. And then the last couple years I’ve been trying to put together these examples or case studies into a book format. The book is Lean 6 Sigma for. Lessons from the Gamba and I found practitioners who have worked with non profits, government agencies or healthcare organizations. And had them share the story of what they worked on and what some other results and their experience and what they would recommend for practitioners who want to get into this space. So there’s two volumes out there. There’s a volume 1. These different topics around fundraiser conference that help put together. Pat O’Connor had one on the flag program for the Optimist Club, I think, and how they distributed out flags on Flag Day and how they picked up those flags at the end of the Memorial Day or Labor Day celebration. Brett weikers. Worked in a organization that caters to blind and deaf, blind employees, and they manufacture products for aerospace, and so he explains how they dealt with employees who can’t see or have trouble hearing. So some really good examples there. And then I had a second volume, I just put out a couple years ago. So a few more examples, including Steve Bell and Tracy O’Rourke Elizabeth Swann. Hope you recognize some of those names.

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