Screen Printing - August/September 2019 - 12

THE MARSHALL PLAN

5 KEY STEPS FOR
IMPROVING ANYTHING

Marshall Atkinson is the owner of
Atkinson Consulting, LLC, based
in Mesa, Arizona. He coaches apparel decoration companies on
operational efficiency, continuous
improvement, workflow strategy,
business planning, employee
motivation, management, and
sustainability. He is a frequent
tradeshow speaker, author, and
host of two podcasts, as well as cofounder of the Shirt Lab educational
company. He can be reached at
marshall@marshallatkinson.com.

Change in your shop comes with planning,
clarity, and tenacity.
MARSHALL ATKINSON

don't care how well your shop runs, there's always room
for improvement. You know this is true.
Some shops... well, they have more opportunity for
improvement than others. The challenge is to constantly be
doing something about it.
Let me break down the five crucial steps to make any
improvement process successful - with the added bonus of
being easy to implement.

#1: VISION
Let's start with the most important step: Vision.
Vision is the direction for improvement. Can you describe what success looks like?
For example, let's say you want to improve your set-up
times between jobs. Eliminating downtime is a great thing to
do, so this activity can really make an incredible difference.
But are you mapping out your target? You can't just yell
at your staff with a "You guys need to do better!" rant. That's
just going to upset people. Think about this from multiple
perspectives and have a discussion with your team.
n Company Will you invest in the right tools and training
needed to accomplish the improvement? Is the vision
of this improvement locked in from the ownership and
leadership of the company?
n Team From your crew's perspective, do they know what
they need to do and are they willing to do the work necessary to obtain the results and hit the goal?
n Person For each person on the team, do they share the
same vision and can they map out what they need to do
as a teammate to accomplish the goal?
When you take the time to illustrate what success is going
to look like, it's easier to draw a roadmap to get there. The
vision you create allows everyone to be on the same page.
This is a conversation, not someone barking orders from a
megaphone. Your shared vision brings everyone together and
unifies the effort.
Start with why something needs to change. If you picked
downtime reduction as the process improvement goal, what
does that mean? Why does it matter to the average worker in
your shop? What is the importance of the goal?
Articulate that with your vision so everyone can comprehend why something matters.
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SCREENPRINTING

#2: VALUES
Yes, our process improvement effort revolves around our
company's values. What do I mean by that? For starters, have
you mapped these out initially for your business? Hopefully,
you have, but if not, don't fret.
To accomplish our vision, we want to center our efforts
around a set of core values that will allow the company to
accelerate performance. These are concepts like honesty,
integrity, humor, teamwork, unselfishness, self-discipline,
self-respect, and accountability.
Why is this important to process improvement? Mainly
because this is the fuel that will power the engine of the
work. If you don't have teamwork, how are you going to work
together to solve any problem? Without accountability, will
someone on the crew drop the ball next Thursday?
Think about these from different perspectives:
n Company Our company values matter. In fact, we
reward or discipline our employees based on our stated
values.
n Team Working as a team, the values our company
celebrates are brought into the sunlight; it's how we get
things accomplished.
n Person I can be counted on to work by the standards of the
company's core values, and I expect the same from others.
At the end of the day, professionals want to work with
other professionals.
What will the outcome be if the staff works with an
overabundance of honesty, integrity, humor, teamwork,
unselfishness, self-discipline, self-respect, and accountability?
What results might we have if they don't?

#3: METHODS
What are we going to do to make the improvement happen?
Be specific.
n Company This might mean buying some new equipment
or consumables, or bringing in an expert to help.
n Team What work will the team be doing differently?
Want better results? Sometimes that requires doing
the same work in a fashion that hasn't been attempted

Screen Printing - August/September 2019

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