This is a guest post by Marcus Hammarberg, author of Salvation: The Bungsu Story, How Lean and Kanban saved a small hospital in Indonesia. Twice. And can help you reshape work in your company. (available on Amazon)
This is the third post on a series by Marcus Hammarberg about how metrics can help engage, motivate and ultimately push a team towards success! (See other blog posts in this series here)
When we first started to work with the Bungsu hospital they were in a devasting situation.
Fast forward 1,5 years and you would see a hospital that was making money every day.
In the end, we turned the hospital from a situation where only the director and her closest staff cared, to a situation where 100 people in the hospital were actively engaged in everyday improvements.
How is this possible? What kind of magic was applied?
How focusing on a single metric improved team performance
Now that we had a metric that mattered to everyone and this truly was the “talk of the hospital”, we experienced a wave of change.
Not surprisingly the first groups to engage was the people in charge of bringing more people to the hospital; the marketing team.
It turned out that making the “number of patients served”-metric visible throughout the hospital, was what was needed to get them activated. But when we did, the lid of their passion and creativity jar was blown off! We started to see real ownership in their behavior. As if The Bungsu was their very own hospital.
Before I knew it, I found myself in a workshop where the two ladies of the marketing department blurted out 25 ideas on how to get more patients. And 3 or 4 of them were really low hanging fruit that we could do the very next day. For example:
- Go to the nearby clinics and advertise our availability for surgery and treatments that the clinics could not handle
- Offer free transport from the big hospitals to our hospital for treatments that the big hospitals had a waiting list for
- Suggest that our freelancing doctors would do all their surgery in our hospital
These were very simple changes that had been dragging on in decision-making boards. Now the decisions were quick to make – because the need and impact were clear to see.
Just a few days after we started to track “number of patients served per day” these actions brought the metric up to a whopping 133 patients served per day! Twice the normal number of patients and a level that has not been seen in a long time.
This taught me, in a very impactful way, how a single metric can transform the performance of a team. In this case, the marketing team.
Do you need the one metric that matters to engage your team? This booklet is for you!
In the Bungsu’s Pirate Code for Visualization downloadable booklet I will go into details on how we made this “one metric that matters” engaging, kept it relevant and ultimately saved the hospital by keeping our focus there – using what we referred to as the Bungsu Pirate Code. Click here to download your guide to using the “one metric that matters” in your own team.
This is a very actionable tool that you can you use today in your organisation to make your visualizations matter to everyone all the time.
The Bungsu Story is a fascinating account of a real-life crisis, and how Agile, Lean and Kanban saved the Hospital from bankruptcy! Twice! Get ready for the journey, it’s going to be a bumpy ride!
About Marcus Hammarberg
Marcus is the author of Salvation: The Bungsu Story (available on Amazon), an inspiring and actionable story about how simple tools can help transform the productivity and impact of an organization. The real-life stories in The Bungsu can help you transform the productivity of your team. Marcus is also an renowned author and consultant in the Kanban community, he authored the book Kanban in Action with Joakim Sundén.
You can link with Marcus Hammarberg on LinkedIn, and connect with Marcus Hammarberg on twitter.
Jeremy Jarrell is an agile coach and author who helps teams get better at doing what they love. He is heavily involved in the technology community, both as a highly rated speaker as well as a syndicated author whose articles and videos have appeared on numerous popular websites.