E126: Using Lean Six Sigma to Make Wishes Come True with Kristle Bulleman

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In this episode, I share an uplifting interview with Kristle Bulleman, Process Manager at Make-A-Wish. She shares insights into her process improvement role at this well-respected nonprofit, outlining the impactful work done by Make-A-Wish to grant wishes for children with critical illnesses. We dive into her experiences in using Lean and Six Sigma tools to enhance process efficiency across and between various departments and chapters. She also discusses her background in volunteering, her path to Make-A-Wish, and the importance of fostering a continuous improvement mindset within nonprofit organizations. Hear firsthand how she and her team are tackling process improvement projects, developing and expanding Lean Six Sigma training, and the rewarding journey of wish granting for children and their families.

00:32 Kristle’s Role at Make-A-Wish
01:49 Process Improvement at Make-A-Wish
04:34 Kristle’s Background and Journey
09:13 Volunteer Experience and Wish Granting
13:03 Current Projects and Process Management
19:25 Training and Development Programs
26:09 Empowering Champions and Collaborative Culture
29:23 Conclusion and Contact Information

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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
Note: may contain typos and errors, generated with AI

Brion: Hi, everyone. Welcome. I’ve got a great guest today, Kristle Bulleman. She is a process manager at make a wish. She works on the strategy department. Welcome, Kristle. It’s good to have you on the podcast finally.

Kristle: Excited to be here. OK.

Brion: Tell us about your role at make a wish, and then we’ll hear your back story of how you ended up there.

Kristle: Yeah, sounds good. Like you said, I am a process manager at make a wish. I do want to differentiate. There is make a wish national make a wish America and 59 chapters across the United States make a wish. International has 40 plus affiliates similar to our chapters. They have affiliates in different. Countries, sometimes our kiddos here in the United States wish to travel abroad and kiddos in other countries wish to come. Make a wish is an organization that grants the wish of every eligible child children with critical illnesses can receive a wish if they qualify. Their wish can be anything from the shopping spree to meeting a celebrity, getting a new playground set in their backyard, or to travel, you know. Disneyland is probably one of our biggest ones. Disney World is huge. It’s really wonderful, fulfilling work. It’s such a joy to know that. Every day kiddos are getting wishes. It just means a lot to know that we’re doing such good work in the world and it’s very fulfilling. I work for the National Office, all of us at national make sure that all the chapters have what they need to grant wishes. OK, so back to my position. Process managers are three of us. The majority of our work, probably 75%, is purely process improvement projects across various departments. We work with HR, branding, marketing, corporate alliances, finance. Is there any department that we haven’t worked with? It’s actually kind of cool because I feel like our team is seen as like firefighters, like everybody loves firefighters, right? We come in and we figure out what the problem is. And help that department, we’re using lien tools. We’re using 6 Sigma tools. We’re making sure that we’re systematically addressing problems and solving them. That’s the majority of my work. The other part of that is training other national and chapter staff in Lean 6 Sigma, we have a yellow belt training. We have a white belt that people go through as they come into the organization, so it’s a mandatory part of their onboarding. We do a quarterly yellow belt training and right now we’re in development for a green belt training. We’ve trained at least somewhere in the ballpark of 250, make a wish staff in yellow belt. We’re definitely getting to that point. Where a continuous improvement mindset is expanding within the organization, we have at least 200 and some employees at national and then thousands across. The nation, but it depends on the chapter. They may have three people there, or they might have 30 people there, and that’s across the United States.

Brion: We started meeting about a year ago. We connected and you’ve been filling me in on some of the projects you’re working on. I think it’s been really cool to learn more about the organization. I was excited that you have three people that are in a process improvement role and just to see that the organization is investing in this and sees that there’s opportunity. Reason also to your team that you’re having good success, that they’re continuing and wanting to expand that program. So I think it’s exciting to see, especially for a great organization like make a wish.

Kristle: Yeah, it’s definitely expanding. The continuous improvement mindset is really starting to become a thing for most of the employees that they’ve at least heard about it. But as they’re taking our training, we’re getting emails from folks who are like, look at this process map I did for my department. We’re working on this issue. Like, Oh my gosh, how exciting. Yay, they’re using the tools. I actually just had that this week. Someone I can’t remember which department it was, but she was saying we were working on this thing. We didn’t have any detailed process steps, and now we do. She sent me her deck and it looked amazing. She really dug into the process mapping. That was great.

Brion: What is your background? Did you go to school studying process improvement or did you make your way here like a lot of people?

Kristle: I went to SDSU and majored in theatre set design minored in business management, but while I was at SDSU, there were these big fires that happened and everyone was fleeing to Qualcomm Stadium. I went down there for a few days passing out sandwiches, diapers, walking around with pizza, just helping out wherever they needed me to. And I realized I actually really helping people, especially when they’re in need. And that sent me on a completely different trajectory than theater set design, which I still love. From there, what caught fire was just this. Wanting to volunteer, wanting to help, wanting to be a part of social services, humanitarian efforts, things like that. I did a lot of volunteering during college, after college. I did a year of service in San Francisco through the Vincentian Service Corps. That’s like AmeriCorps, but. Half like version of it. I was there for a year working with the homeless at a Wellness Center, just trying to help people detox and things like that. I was like, wow, I still really like this helping people thing.

I joined this organization, Marinelli Missioners, and they send people overseas kind of like the Peace Corps. I was a volunteer for 2 1/2 years in Tanzania there. I did a lot of public health stuff. We did training on hygiene, burn seminars, first aid seminars. I helped coordinate eye and dental clinics getting donations from the US. We were able to hire local doctors who did all of the eye and dental clinic stuff, which was awesome because we wanted to keep putting the money back into the local economy. It was one of the best, most stretching, crazy, challenging, wonderful experiences of my life. I was there for 2 1/2 years. I’ve learned Swahili. I don’t remember much of it anymore, but I do remember that Hakuna Matata does in fact mean no worries. So a little fun. Back there if you don’t wanna sound like a tourist, you say Hakuna Ishida. It basically means the same thing, but they won’t be like tourist. I was there 2 1/2 years, loved it, and then when I came back I was like, where do I want to put my roots down in southern? Tanya. Definitely my happy place from there. I got some various jobs and then I got my job. Previous to the one I have now, which was working for front porch communities and I was a project coordinator but also a like a teacher, a trainer for senior adults living in senior communities. On how to use innovative technology. So like Alexa devices, virtual reality robotic pets, things like that. And so there was a lot of project management there, but also that training piece. So I got both of those skills through. My job, and from there I realized that I could study and work towards the PMP. The project management professional degree, because I had all that project management experience, I was able to qualify and sit for the. Exam which I. Past which was. Difficult exam. It’s tough. I would say the Black Belt exam is harder. Yeah, saying.

Yeah. So the PMP exam and I passed and then the very next week my position opened up at make a wish. I had already been a volunteer with make a wish. So I knew who to talk to, who to send my resume to. I got this position and I think the project management part of it was so helpful for this role. Because we do systematically identify and address the problems, but then we also need that implementation side of things. That’s where the project management skills have come out. That’s kind of a long way to say how I got to here. Is that helpful?

Brion: That’s fascinating. That’s really cool. OK, I got a shout out to my brother. My niece has been in theater in high school, and somehow he decided to volunteer to do set designs. Every time I talk to him or visit him, he’s working on the next set of something. We’re like a sports family. Our background. This. Very different volunteer experience for him. He’s been doing this for many years now and seems to enjoy it and really like it. We’ll have to talk about that on our. Next call well so.

Kristle: The point then, is that she could inevitably become a Six Sigma black belt. The possibilities are there.

Brion: Leading up to that, what were you doing as a volunteer?

Kristle: The volunteer role I had was wish Granter. I don’t know if most people know this but wish granters have the most fun job. Like they get to do all the best and fun stuff because they get to meet with the family and the kiddo face to face and really discover with the child’s wishes. So that’s super fun. So you start connecting with the family, having those meetings with them, trying to find out if the child already knows what they want or has an idea of what they want. And then once they do figure that out, starting to think, how are you going to make that come? To fruition and children. We’re so creative. I remember hearing about a wish where the kids was like, I wish to be a mermaid. Like, how did you do that? People get creative. They figure it out. One kid wished to meet a Unicorn, and they made it work. It’s so fun. The wishes I worked on. The first one was that the kid wished to be a racer. A car, I should say driving.

Brion: Race car driver.

Kristle: Race car driver? Yes, that’s it. He was really young. We ended up renting out a privately owned go Kart track and bought him one of those little Moto. Guys, Lamborghini and his whole family came. Was a big party and he got to drive his little Lamborghini around the race track. It was so much fun. We had put his name in a sticker on the car, got him a little outfit and it was just such a great day. Another kiddo wished to go to Disney World. Another one went to Hawaii. You’re walking with the family throughout the process of getting a wish granted, and it can take some time. A couple months to over a year, depending on what the wish is. You’re just walking along with them, encouraging them, keeping in touch. It’s very warm and friendly. We want to make sure that they have a great experience. They do have to fill out. Forms but. They’re getting this completely with no strings attached, and it’s so wonderful not only for the kid, but for the parents to see them get so much joy out of it. They finally get to relax and see their child have a good time instead of going to the doctors and getting poked and prodded all the time. It’s really not only a joy for the child, but you can see that the whole family. Benefits from this we’re with the family from start to finish. Throughout that whole process until the wish is granted and that’s the volunteer journey in a nutshell.

Brion: Would you say it’s a project manager role or is someone else also managing this at make a wish?

Kristle: I wouldn’t say the volunteers have a project management role when it comes to booking things or paying for things. That’s typically the chapter staff that are doing that, but the volunteers are that frontline gathering. The information you could call it requirements gathering. The volunteers interact with the family and then bring that information back to their point. First of the chapter and then the chapter will do more of the logistical. Things I meant to mention this in the very beginning. One of the biggest misconceptions that Make-A-Wish has is that the child has to be dying to get a wish, and that is absolutely not true. They have a critical illness, but we have plenty of kids that pull through and come back and tell us what their wish meant to some of them go on to become doctors and nurses. Do they know what that experience is like? The biggest misconception we fight is we’re trying to let people know this is really just meant to be for hope, for joy, for just a moment of happiness while you guys are going through something so. Just wanted to put that out there.

Brion: Yeah, I thought. That was the criteria too. Thanks for clarifying.

Kristle: Sorry to tell you a year later.

Brion: I’m sure you did tell me and I Forgot.

Brion: Can you tell me a little bit about the work you’re doing now as process manager go a little bit deeper from what you talked about earlier?

Kristle: Yeah, absolutely. Like I said, we have different projects and different departments. A few that I’ve worked on have been with our wish assist process, so A wish assist is where perhaps a kiddo lives in Florida. Once a wish to go to Los Angeles and so wishes. This means that chapter in Los Angeles receives the kiddo and. Helps make that wish happen because it’s in their territory. Celebrity wishes this is if that kiddo in Florida wants to go to LA to meet a celebrity of some kind and not too long ago, we were needing to build an application in Salesforce that would allow the chapters to talk to each other more efficiently. For these wish assists. And so before it was actually built in Salesforce, the different departments that. Are a part. Of our Mission Department it that we’re going to build this application and the entertainment and sports relations team, we all got together. And did process improvements on both of those, which assists and celebrity, which assist processes we wanted to make sure that we were eliminating as much waste and inefficiency as possible before it was actually built in the system, which was really smart. I’m really glad we did this. We spent a few months process. Mapping and figuring out what steps didn’t need to be there. Why were we doing this? Why were we doing it this way and then coming up with the solutions, the new steps, things like that. That and then it was actually built into wish, assist and celebrity wishes into Salesforce. So now they’re applications that the chapters can use to fulfill those types of wishes. And when the rollout happened, I was so excited because I could see our hard work come to life. I can’t quantify it, but I can. Imagine the amount of rework we would. Done. Had we not done that ahead of time and really like combed through those processes, figured out what the issues were and eliminated that waste, I’m glad we did that because we’re offering a better experience to the chapter staff, so they’re not going like, why are we doing it this way? Why do we have to do this twice? We had people from the chapters. On the core team to give us that voice, San Diego and Hawaii were on our core team because they get tons of wish assist all the time. Like Hawaii. That’s probably most of their wishes granted. So we really wanted those important voices like at the table helping us improve those processes. That was exciting.

Brion
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It’s hard to quantify the impact of doing something proactively or getting ahead of it. We avoided who knows how much waste and rework and inefficiency. But it makes intuitive sense. Unfortunately, a lot of times they have to wait until it start. Having all those problems before we go back and fix it. But, you never know how big of an improvement it was because those things never happened and you had a good process to roll out or manage. That’s the difficult part of being proactive is you just can’t really show the savings. It’s the stuff that’s trusted a little bit, which is hard to sell to people on sometimes.

Kristle: I know and one of the biggest things is that they wanted to make sure that. The chapter staff would have a good experience and I don’t know if the chapter staff even know this that much. But like this, national staff are always thinking like how can we make sure that this isn’t going to be an issue for them? How can we make it as easy as possible for them to have a good experience? I’m sure it was a great amount of savings. I can’t quantify it, but I know it was great that we did that.

Brion: And I think that’s a great thing with nonprofits as part of the requirements for processes, they’re really concerned about their staff and the experience they have, because sometimes those volunteers are part of those processes, too. And if I don’t give them a good experience, they’re not going to come back. They’re critical to our processes and for us to do our mission so. I think if more, more profit companies. Approached it in the same way that nonprofits do, focusing on staff needs and meeting their needs. That would be amazing progress for them as well.

Kristle: I agree with that 100% the internal culture and make a wish is very much similar to our outward facing care for our kids and our families. You can tell that when we’re working on projects, we’re very collaborative. People are like, hey, what do you need? How can we help? Because they know that they’re cared about. That helps provide us to sing culture in which. We are working together on these things. Yeah, I agree. OK.

Brion: And how long have you been with make a wish.

Kristle: Three years in July. Yeah, I’ve really appreciated having you on my projects. I got Black Belt certified last summer, but I was like, this is great. I can do my projects at a higher level now, but having your expertise when we meet, I so appreciate getting your take, getting your perspective. Just giving ideas on how to approach certain things. Asking questions I didn’t think to ask the team that’s been super helpful, so I. Very much appreciative of your involvement in my projects. Very thankful.

Brion: Yeah, and that’s mutual learn a lot too, and helps me understand different challenges that. Different organizations go through and then you like to share some of the successes and some of the mission work that’s happening that makes it really rewarding too. It’s been great. It’s almost been a year. I think that we’ve been meeting and talking. I really enjoy our time when we meet and I’m glad that it’s been helpful for you, but definitely been helpful to me, too.

Kristle: Yeah. And helpful for the organization, like my projects are a better quality because of being able to run things past you too.

Brion: Well, thanks. Any other examples of things you wanted to share or tell us about?

Kristle: Belt trainings are three days. Two hours. I’m going to say roughly 2 1/2 because we have we’ve added office hours, but we go through Lean 6 Sigma concepts of creating problem goal statements process. Mapping. We go through high level intro to data statistics like how to collect data, voice to the customer. Things like that we go into, analyze tools, cause and effect diagrams. 5 wise we talk about generating solutions, implementation, planning, things like that. We’ve gotten so much good feedback from our yellow belt courses and we refine them each time we get feedback even more. And each time we’re steam rolling through trainings. We used to have between 5:00 and 10:00 people because we have people do a mini presentation or a part of a project and present it. Then we move to a more scalable way of doing activities in real time. Now our classes are anywhere from 20 to 40 people. We have them do the class as well as the activities. We have an activity guide that we give them time to do in real time. We’re starting to play with breakout rooms, so they have more time to talk with each other and think about their real life problems. It’s been really good and we keep getting great feedback of how people really enjoyed the training, but also are applying it to their. Daily job so. That’s super rewarding for me as someone who’s training others. Greenbelt is still in development, but we have people messaging our team all the time, going like when is this coming out? We’re trying to figure out a new more in depth approach where we’re actually going to have them walk through a full on project and then present. That might be a bit smaller, but we’ll get there. Our yellow belt trainings have gotten so much good feedback and we’re excited that the more people at make a wish national or chapters that are exposed to these concepts and are liking them, the more they’ll use them and the more that we can move the organization towards that continuous improvement mindset.

Brion: Did you say you have a white belt? Not yet, no?

Kristle: Yeah, it’s, it’s. A brief recorded training and my colleague did as new employees are being onboarded, it is mandatory for them to watch the videos that they know. Some of these basic high level concepts.

Brion: Do you know how your team got set up? I think we talked about that a while back, but I don’t recall before you joined. How did the three positions get set up? Because I think that’s something I’m really. Trying to figure out how do we help other nonprofits get started and somewhere these positions created. I was just curious if you had any background on how that piece started that led to this kind of movement you’re part of.

Kristle: Yeah. I’ll find out for you. I think it has been a progression and it started with someone who knew and valued lean 6 Sigma and wanted it to be a part of the organization. Then.

Brion: I’ve heard other organizations did a little training where a board member that might have recommended it, or it was someone like executive director or someone on staff that had some experience from another company or organization that says, you know, this work here or I saw it work, we should adopt it. But.

Kristle: I think that makes sense, especially at a director level 2. If you have the. That kind of ability or resources to hire someone in who is lean 6 Sigma certified. I think that already starts it right because you’re already placing people in an organization.

Brion: We talked about earlier that the nonprofits incorporating employee input into the processes, anything else that you would see, that a nonprofit? Has difference from maybe another organization or company? I don’t know if you have any thoughts on that yet? If someone was listening to this, who doesn’t work at a nonprofit? Maybe. Who has experience in lean or Six Sigma? What would they need to keep in mind? Besides more thought around the people and the workers and the volunteers? Any other suggestions about working in a nonprofit that could help prepare them for this type of work?

Kristle: With my experience in nonprofits is because money is typically strapped. You wear many hats. I’ve heard that from my colleagues who come from for profits. Usually they’re pretty niche. They have their job. Everybody knows that’s what they do. That’s what they specialize in. But when they came to nonprofit, they’re like. They’re asking us to do this too, and this and that. We’re process managers, but they’re asking us to do documentation too. I think that would be a good thing to know going in. You may be asked to do multiple things that you don’t normally. Too, it’s all part of that collaborative mindset. We’re all in this together. So how can we help each other out with mission driven organizations? You know that everybody’s there for a similar reason we’re there because we love the work, we love the mission, we love what the work does, even if we’re pretty far removed. Like, even if it’s just like pretty indirectly. Everyone’s there because they just really support the work that the organization does, so that is very rewarding, very fulfilling too. Using Lean 6 Sigma to improve. That work that makes me happy that I get to use my skills and support the mission in my own way, and you’ll hear this from other people and make a wish to like, finance, HR. They all feel connected to it in their own way. It’s a very rewarding part of it.

Brion: And you said you still volunteer?

Kristle: Yeah, I’m still a wish granter and I don’t have any plans on changing that anytime. Soon I started as a volunteer. I’ll probably continue volunteering because it connects me to the actual work and it gives me that perspective when people are asking for process improvement project. If it touches the chapters, I’ll already know some of that stuff. Having been a volunteer, that insight is so helpful. Just knowing what happens. Knowing what volunteers go through, knowing how wishes are granted, it’s super helpful in any part of make a wish. I think it’s just good to know. How it all works?

Brion:: Yeah, that’s great. I think that’s key. Like any kind of improvement is trying to understand how the processes work as much as possible. So you can understand and tie some of these concepts back to that. But as someone who’s already familiar with organization and has been through those processes, perhaps can speak first hand of. Some of the struggles or challenges you ran into.

Kristle: Concert going to the Gamba volunteers are definitely there. We’re at the forefront of everything that’s happening to grant A wish. The biggest lesson learned was actually when we met, we were talking about it’s the differences in roles like me as a lean 6 Sigma practitioner and the role of the champion, the role of the sponsor, and perhaps going back to my earlier comment about how we wear many hats, some of our projects have been very intertwined in the way that the roles were blurred, who does what. That kind of thing. But ever since a conversation with you, my team has really taken on like how can we empower our champions more to take more on, to lead the core team more so than us hand holding and doing everything quite honestly actually empowering our champions has been wonderful. I’ve seen this in. My colleagues talking about their projects and even in my own. And I have a project right now and the champion like setting those expectations up from the beginning saying, hey, this is your role, this is my role. This is what I’m going to do. This is what I need you to do. And I’m willing to help you and coach you through that. I’m in communication with the Champions, giving them more power to say this is your project. And I’m here for you. It’s your job to talk with the sponsors, to communicate our updates and things like that. That has actually worked wonderfully like this project that I’m working on right now. We just presented some solutions to the sponsor and she did such an amazing job of explaining through PowerPoint deck just this is what we did. This is what we talked through. This is how we got to these solutions and this is what we would like to do. Are you cool with that and. I was like. I didn’t have to say much at all on that whole call. I was like, OK, wow, great. So this was a good learning experience for me, like going from doing everything with the project to giving more enablement to the champion. That was pretty powerful. And my whole team has seen the benefits of that. And they’re also doing their projects that way as well.

Brion: Yeah. And I think that’s part of our nature. We want to be helpful and I find myself in the same situation as well that I’m probably getting too deep into it and not backing out and wanting to help and be useful. But taking away maybe the role that the champion should fulfill. And so from experience.

Brion: I probably suggested that because I’ve done the same thing, yeah.

Kristle: And the other part of that too is that because we’re a service organization, we’re not so data heavy in like a champion is looking for the specification limits and stuff like that to the control charts and stuff. That separation from the responsibility of the outcomes of the project. It’s more loosey Goosey. Yeah, this is what we’d like to do. And this is when we’d like to do it by and. Let’s hope it works versus more for profit organizations where it’s like we need this amount of widgets by with this amount of resources. With this budget, this scope, I think it’s a different beast. It’s helpful to have as much data as possible because we’re probably not running on much of it. I’m making the connection between the data gathering and the champion because the champion. It’s gonna take more responsibility themselves if they’re responsible for those outcomes. Like we had talked about before.

Brion: So if someone wanted to reach out, talk to you, maybe they’re working at an organization, a nonprofit, and trying to do something similar or want to connect with you. You’re in San Diego. How can they best reach out to you or? Next.

Kristle: Yeah, they can e-mail me at kbulleman@wish.org. That’s KBULLEMAN at wish.org.

Brion: OK, I’ll put that in the notes as well. And I think you’re on LinkedIn. I can put a link there if someone wants to connect there.

Kristle: Totally. With me on LinkedIn.

Brion: Thanks Kristle. It was great talking to you and having you share your experiences and all the great stuff happening. Make a wish and continued success. I hope it inspires other organizations to take on a journey of their own on continuous improvement and. Maybe do something similar or maybe we’ll hear from some of those that heard this podcast and said yeah, I heard Kristle’s podcast and we decided to go down this path as well.

Kristle: Cool. That’d be cool. Thanks for having me, Brian.

Brion: Yeah. All right. Thanks.

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