Health Services System (HSS) established a daily huddle to continuously improve their processes and support each other's improvement work Huddles are a form of a daily management system to help empower teams think about strategic improvements on a regular basis. At a 10-minute daily stand-up meeting guided by a visual management board (a "huddle board"), the team discusses, prioritizes, and plans to execute improvement ideas to move the needle on department or division-wide strategic goals. It's a great space to hold your team accountable for developing and executing ideas, and to be able to see at a glance the progress made on improvement goals! We’ve recently added a Huddle Resource Guide to our Lean Toolbox for anyone who would like to develop a huddle in your office. The San Francisco Health Service System (HSS) serves over 126,000 individuals, including active and retired employees and their covered dependents from the City, the School and Community College Districts, and the Superior Court. Member Services is the nerve center of the HSS operation, providing benefits information and issue resolution to all members. In 2018, Member Services staff answered over 63,000 calls and assisted over 14,000 members in person. Over the past five months, Member Services has implemented a problem-solving daily management system to discuss how to better resolve member issues through rapid “Just Do It” (JDI) improvement ideas. We asked HSS Operations Supervisor Siobhan O'Connor to share how she and her team welcomed the Lean methodology and have begun to build a culture of continuous improvement among benefits analysts: Any JDI highlights you would like to share? Communicating information to our members clearly and effectively is always an obstacle. Two of our analysts came up with ideas to better help HSS members understand our processes, the first being a newly improved retiree checklist that is relatively simple in design but presents visual information that is easy to digest and will help members better navigate the retirement process. The second improvement was updating language to forms with more clear instructions, so members won’t send the wrong forms or get redirected. What advice do you have for others who are considering implementing a daily management system? If you decide to start a daily management system, realize that you must be really committed to it. You will likely encounter frustration by your team and be frustrated when starting but understand that’s part of the process. Make sure to make it real for your staff – if you’re not bought into it, they won’t be either. Lastly, remembering why we are here – to serve our members – helps keep it all in perspective. How did you envision your team adapting the huddle as a daily management system? Implementing a daily management system was a major transition, so I knew I would have to reinforce the huddle by rounding up the team each morning. Providing encouragement to the team to create this habit of meeting daily was important for [huddles] to become a practice, which we’re continuously working on. What kinds of obstacles did you overcome when implementing huddles? There are always going to be those who are attached to how things are currently done. Processes [at HSS] are complex and can go across multiple systems and cross-departmental where ideas need multiple levels of approval. Coming up with ideas is one thing, but thinking about it from end to end is another, as you must anticipate whether the idea is fixing one thing but breaking another. By creating a space where you’re encouraging a methodological approach to problem solving and emphasizing the yield of process improvement, it helps those who are resistant and apathetic to change. Can you describe the strategies you use with your teams to encourage enthusiasm for participating in huddles? The shift in enthusiasm really happened two months after starting daily huddles. We’re not fully there, but the team is more eager to implement change through the Lean method. We anticipate that the supervisors will lead the huddles for the first six months to establish “huddle etiquette.” The plan is then for all staff to facilitate huddles, both as a way of reinforcing the huddle and to develop their presentation skills.
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