For my employer, I was asked to design and implement Lean education for caregivers at one of the phlebotomy draw stations. This education needed to be brief, easy to understand, and aid in the overall goal which was to get caregiver feedback on the issues in their process. The primary information that needed to be synthesized was what is Lean waste and how do we spot it in daily work. By training caregivers to identify waste in their processes, we hoped to gain enduring benefits in the future with a workforce that could continuously improve their processes. That is when Shark Week was born.

I initially got the idea for Shark Week from a Lean presentation that I found where a presenter used sharks as symbols of waste. This led me to tie that with the pop culture phenomenon that is the Discovery Channel week of shark videos that occurs every year on cable television. Next, my partner and I developed posters with each of the 8 types of Lean waste with a definition and example of a situation where that waste type was identified. To complete the training, we attached a small bag to the bottom of each poster and filled it with slips of paper in the shape of a shark. Those slips of paper were to be used by caregivers to identify that type of waste in their own process and enter it into a drawing for a board game called “Get Bit!” (a shark is trying to eat little robot men).

The description above is how the project was developed and implemented. At the time I was not aware of the 5 steps for design, but when I was learning about the steps, I could remember doing four of the five steps as part of our process. The first step is empathy which involves seeking to understand the caregiver’s needs. Before we developed the training, we distributed a survey to all caregivers and asked questions about what caregivers knew about Lean and process waste. From this survey, we were able to gather that caregivers were worried that Lean meant reducing staff. With this information, we were able to tailor the training so that it included information about how caregivers were viewed with regards to Lean (they are the organization’s most valuable resource).

The next design step is called define, which is where one is meant to develop a deeper understanding of the user’s needs. Part of this step is development of an action statement. For this, we took the user survey responses and the goal of the project (to improve their workflow) and developed a training plan using the ADDIE model. This informed the steps we took to plan and implement the training. All of this was done prior to the third step of ideate. This was performed when we did the Lean informational search and tied sharks and shark week into the training design. I thought this part was the most fun!

The fourth step is prototype which involves building physical forms of the ideas that were developed during the ideate stage. We built the posters and pitched them to the phlebotomy team leaders for input. We did not dwell on this step for very long, much of what we planned was implemented as planned.

The final step is test, and this is the only step that we have not completed. It involves seeking feedback from users on the design. When shark week was implemented, we received 65 paper shark submissions, and due to the caregiver engagement, we decided to expand the training to include root cause analysis. We plan to gather feedback from caregivers after the training is completed.

Overall, I think that the five steps for design are a good general description of the steps to develop a project. The fact that my partner and I designed and implemented the training using many of the same steps (unknowingly) is further confirmation that we had a good system for development. It could be one of the reasons it was such a success.

Hohendorf_Hannah_IndividualAssignment9.pdf