Rolling-5 Action Plan Methodology
When you are working on lean, six-sigma and a variety of continuous improvement activities, the quantity of action items can get overwhelming. It’s not uncommon to have over 100 individual action items to complete. This is a good thing though. It means that you are well on your way to achieving record results in your plant.
How can you manage this level of activity though without losing your mind? It’s simple; use the rolling-5 methodology for you and your teams. The rolling-5 methodology means that while you may have over 100 action items to complete, you only need to prioritize five of those to the top of the list and actively work on only those five action items. This method of focus enables progress and prevents overwhelm.
You can work on those five actions directly or assign them to individuals of a team. Let’s say for example that you are leading three different continuous improvement teams. Each of these teams has a long list of great opportunities. However, using a rolling-5 method of project management, at any given point in time, each team is only working on five action items and those five items may be assigned to five different individuals.
Now to expand this example, lets say that you are leading three different teams, in which case you will be juggling the activity of 15 different action items. While fifteen action items may seem like a lot to manage, it is better than getting lost with trying to coordinate the efforts of over 300 action items. Because the actions are limited to only fifteen in this situation and the actions are assigned to different resources, they are not so overwhelming to manage.
HOW IT WORKS
At a high-level, managing rolling-5 action plans is not so different than managing any list of action items. You want to have clearly defined objectives for those items, specific resource assignments and target dates of completion for each action assigned. See below for an example of what they might look like for a specific manufacturing project:
Once the list is prioritized and assigned, then the team members can focus on completion. The cool thing about this process is that because only five actions are in-play at any given time, then the actions are not so overwhelming for you or the employees, but they still provide a sense of progress and accomplishment.
Project momentum is created and maintained because, with a rolling-5 action list, when one action item gets completed from the rolling-5 list, another action item gets added to replace it. This happens when the team meets. They discuss progress and the completed actions and then add other priority actions to replace the completed ones. So, there are always five active action items for the team to work on. Using the rolling-5 method means that no individual is overwhelmed with work and yet the project progresses forward at a good pace.
I highly recommend using the rolling-5 action list for all of your continuous improvement teams. Typically, these teams are formed after an initial kaizen event. Kaizen events will kick-start progress, but I find that a parking lot of improvement opportunities require longer-term focus and effort. So, after kaizen events, plan on creating continuous improvement teams and using the rolling-5 action plan methodology to manage the action items and maintain continuous improvement progress.
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