Now that you have completed your SWOT Analysis, select and analyze the areas in

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 a 750-word 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.
Cite any references that support your work (e.g., trade or industry publications, government or agency websites, scholarly works, or other sources of similar quality).
Video 1 Gemba Walk Explanation
– You might be wondering what walking, a Gemba walk really
is, What does that really mean?
Gemba is a Japanese word
that roughly translate to “the real place.”
What its function is
there to help you with is to help you get connected with the real functional processes
that your staff or your
colleague are doing in your workplace.
Lots of times, I think people
have assumptions within project management
that we assume employees follow
the policies and procedures
and what we find out is there are 2 sets of rules that
The explicit rules in an organization
of what we’re supposed to do,
and the implicit rules of what we do
to still accomplish the mission
despite the policies and
procedures of the organization So, a Gemba is about an opportunity
for an evaluator to walk through
to look at what the behaviors are in real time
You’re hopefully tying
in those observation that are creating an a-ha moment for staff.
So you’re taking those
moments in observation to really coach a staff
member or leader to say we can look at these
things a little differntly and in looking at them differently,
we can perform our job function,
we can change it just a little bit,
and the small incremental changes
actually make a big difference
over the course of a period of time
One of the elements that
youre going to want to look at is who did you speak to?
An important part of the Gemba
is that you really start to look at
the specific staff behaviors.
We talked about phrasing
question in a certain credit method so that they’re not as
threatening for the staff So this is about preaching and
practicing a humble approach to asking somebody if there is something
that they could improve.
Indirectly, a Socratic method is about
phrasing the question of
“what did we observe?” So it could be something of
“hey our budgets didnt come in on budget, we’ve over budget in overtime,
“so let’s understand why we’re
overbudgeting on overtime Asking narrative questions without rushing to a judgement
allows you to build the case
for the idea for your
proposal or your plan or to really understand what your observing
Lastly, was there an opportunity to teach
during the Gemba walk?
So when you see somebody
doing something wrong it could be a customer interaction,
it could be wasting supplies,
where they’re taking materials home
for their own personal use,
and you have an opportunity
to hold them accountable in an instructional way
so that they can understand
what they are doing and how
it harms the organisation When you notice that there’s a problem,
how do you validate that problem exists?
And you can use an ishikawa diagram,
which another name for
a fishbone diagram It’ll allow you to create categories
of where the principal problem could be.
Another thing that you could that i like to apply
it’s much easier to do
is called a 5 whys And that’s asking a team
or your group of people why do we have this problem?
And then building on that why to say,
when people give you a reason is
“Why is that reason a problem?
“And what is the next level why?”
And by the time you get to the fifth why,
you have a pretty good idea
of whats causing this So culture is defined by Dr. Schein as
the underlying assumptions
the espoused values, and
the artifact and symbol And I’ll give you a quick
example of artifact and symbols that will bring it home for you.
If I give you flowers, it’s an artifact.
If I give you a red rose, it’s a symbol.
So in your organization,
we have our flowers and we have our roses.
So, as a leader, it’s really understanding
how those symbols and artifacts
incorporate within the cultural dynamic.
So the underlying assumptions
in Dr Scheins triangle are that people that want
to work in healthcare care about healthcare.
People that care deeply about patient care
are in the field of healthcare.
And that’s a nice underlying
assumptions that you could have used to build value in your
Gemba Walk to get by in So it’s a wonderful thing to say
“Hey, we noticed client outcomes
are not where we want to be “and most people are in healthcare
to make people healthy And that becomes the social narrative
of that conscious capitalistic social value,
of them wanting to work in
an organisation like that And it allows you to build and get buy-in
for the improvements
that your trying to do The espoused values are
truly the leadership thoughts of what’s in an organization.
So, if your CEO
doesn’t really value money,
you’ll get the idea that
the entire organisationwould feel that money’s really not an issue
If the leader doesn’t
find it to be important then it must not be important
for the organisation So the espoused values
are really understanding how the whys of your leader are
really leading to those whys So if your leader has four or five whys
that they focus on as a leadership style,
and that could be fiduciary management
of the financial assets of the company,
it could be maximizing productivity
and the value of your
employees time during work it could be cultural values like telling the truth and honestly owning negative problems
that happen in an organization.
These could be the whys of your leader.