Aligning for Excellence: A Collaborative Lean Transformation in Facilities Management

Finding Flow

The first stage of our engagement, ‘Finding Flow’, focused on understanding the current state and identifying the core challenges hindering the partnership’s full potential. We conducted a two-day immersive workshop with the combined leadership teams from both organisations. This process involved a detailed review of past performance and facilitating deep-dive sessions to map out a future-state vision.

Through these diagnostic activities, it became clear that while both teams were performing their individual roles, a lack of a unified strategy was creating friction and inefficiency. This manifested as several key challenges:

• Misaligned Priorities: Different teams within the partnership were working towards separate, sometimes conflicting, objectives, which led to high waiting times for decisions and duplicated effort.
• Flow Fog: There was a lack of clarity on how work flowed between the two organisations and how day-to-day activities contributed to strategic goals. This resulted in an inability to accurately track progress and focus on the most impactful work.
• Assured Accountabilities: Roles, responsibilities, and decision-making authority within the combined governance structure were not always clear, leading to confusion and a lack of ownership over cross-functional issues.

A critical part of this stage was posing Joel Barker's "paradigm-busting question": "What is impossible to do today that, if it could be done, would fundamentally change your business?" This exercise broke down conventional thinking and empowered the teams to articulate a truly ambitious shared vision.

Taming Turbulence

Having identified the key challenges, the ‘Taming Turbulence’ stage focused on creating the initial structures and systems to bring order and clarity to the partnership. The workshop outputs were designed to serve as the primary interventions to stabilise the environment and set a clear direction.

The first step was to formalise the ambitious ideas from the Finding Flow sessions into a powerful joint vision statement: "A collaborative partnership to deliver world-class facilities and services to support our client’s drive for a high-performance culture on their journey to becoming a top-performing enterprise making the world’s best aircraft."

From this vision, we helped the teams define three core strategic objectives to guide their efforts. To ensure these objectives were more than just words, we facilitated the creation of a detailed, shared KPI Tree. This visual tool mapped specific performance indicators for both the FM provider and the aerospace client, creating a single source of truth for measuring success in areas like Safety, Quality, Cost, and People. This directly addressed the challenge of Misaligned Priorities by creating a shared framework for performance. Finally, we introduced the six essential Lean Leadership Habits, such as ‘Go Look See’ and ‘Act on Data’, providing leaders with a unified behavioural toolkit to guide the transformation.

Accelerating Flow

With a clear vision and structured objectives in place, the ‘Accelerating Flow’ phase focused on translating strategy into action. This stage involved transferring ownership of the improvement process to the client teams and empowering them to execute targeted initiatives.

The workshop generated a comprehensive portfolio of tactical improvement projects designed to close the gaps identified in the KPI Tree. These initiatives were organised across key business functions, including:

• Safety: A "zero tolerance for non-conformance" approach and improved tracking of near misses and hazards.
• Quality & Customer Satisfaction: The launch of a Net Promoter Score (NPS) programme and robust process confirmations for services like cleaning.
• Cost & Efficiency: The development of a comprehensive waste management strategy and improved resource planning.
• Delivery & Operations: A commitment to zonal working, digitalisation of performance dashboards using tools like i-Auditor, and deeper asset performance analysis.
• People & Culture: The rollout of a dedicated people development programme to foster cultural change and improve employee engagement.

These tactical initiatives were consolidated into a Master Schedule, creating a clear and visible roadmap for the coming year. This plan provided the mechanism to accelerate the flow of improvements, ensuring that all teams were working on coordinated, high-impact projects that directly contributed to the shared strategic objectives.

Keeping Pace

The final stage, ‘Keeping Pace’, is about embedding a culture of continuous improvement to ensure the gains are sustained long after the initial workshop. The Hoshin Kanri system itself is designed for this, with its inherent cycle of ‘Plan-Do-Check-Act’.

The framework established in the workshop provided the tools for this ongoing process. The Master Schedule of initiatives and the KPI Tree became the focal points for regular, structured reviews. This created a governance rhythm where the leadership team could monitor progress, identify barriers, and provide feedback, ensuring the programme remained on track.

The Lean Leadership Habits introduced earlier became the behavioural engine for Keeping Pace. By practicing habits like ‘Challenge the Status Quo’ and ‘Lead By Coaching’, the leadership team could continuously foster an environment where every employee was engaged in identifying and eliminating waste. This transformed the workshop from a one-off event into the starting point of a sustained, long-term journey of lean transformation and collaborative excellence.