Now that you have completed your SWOT Analysis, select and analyze the areas in need of improvement, and narrow down the list of places to do your Gemba walk.
Use your SWOT analysis to focus your Gemba walk. Identify and analyze weaknesses and threats to review during your walk.
While completing your walk, look for ways to eliminate inefficiencies, reduce waste, improve a product, or streamline a process.
Write an Opportunities for Improvement Recommendation report for management on your observations and recommendations from your Gemba walk, based on your SWOT analysis from Week 3. Complete the following in your report:
Include a summary of the organization (e.g., products or services, mission, and vision).
Provide context (where did you focus your Gemba, and why?).
Explain how you utilized your SWOT analysis to focus your Gemba walk.
List your Gemba observations:
What was the goal of your Gemba?
Where did you go?
What did you observe?
Who did you observe?
Prepare an analysis of your observations.
List key takeaways, providing evidence for each.
Choose 1 long-term and 3 short-term opportunities to eliminate inefficiencies, reduce waste, improve a product, or streamline a process within the organization. Clearly delineate these in your report.
It is recognized that some of you are working from home/working remotely, not currently employed or cannot walk around your organization. You will need to make your best attempt at visualizing the concepts for this paper. If you are not employed you might need to use a previous place of employment. It is also recognized that you might not be working in health care. Your current employment is fine for this assignment.
Another approach that can be taken if you cannot perform a Gemba Walk or have not been previously employed you can do research into the concepts of Studer rounding, Management by Walking Around (MBWA) or concepts in Quality Circles and prepare this for your report.
In many ways there are drawbacks to the Gemba Walk. The concept is superficial and cannot be used for complex problems requiring re-engineering work to be performed. It tends to be a top down approach to management. You might include include in your report the deficiencies that you see in the Gemba Walk.
Recent Comments