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DAN ESTY So LEAN is a process for driving transformation, really in any organization, but with great applicability in state government. It's a
mechanism for taking apart a system, really looking at the individual pieces and pulling out the ones that are not adding value or slowing down the
flow. So in doing a LEAN process, you are able to eliminate waste, improve efficiency and deliver better results for the customer at the end of the
process in our case, the public and the citizens of Connecticut.
KAREN CALIENDO I saw an announcement for a training through Leanovations and asked that I go to the training, and it turns out that many of us in
the department wanted to go to the training also, and that's how we got started. We called ourselves the LEAN Implementation Team. We had top
management's support.
NICOLE LUGLI We pioneered LEAN in this agency with three teams. Now five years later, over 50 teams have gone through Kaizen events. These teams
have been across our environmental programs and with our recent merger with Energy, we now have begun to introduce that branch of our agency to LEAN
as well. We have also begun partnering with other state agencies to do more statewide inter-agency LEANs.
FRED SHAMBERG Kaizen is a Japanese word that means continuous improvement. Kaizen teams mean you bring a group of people together, cross functional
people who will work on a specific opportunity to improve, and the goal here is as a team, they are going to come up with improvement plans to help
DEP be more efficient. So when you see all these stickies up on the wall they all represent something. Value stream map purpose is to allow people to
see the opportunities, green meaning value, yellow meaning not value but necessary, red or pink meaning no value added. By doing that, visually it
engages everybody in the process.
KAREN CALIENDO I've seen an improvement in morale and excitement. I think that folks are starting to feel like they can make a difference. People
on the outside are starting to notice what DEP is doing and we also hopefully can help other agencies in the state of Connecticut see what we've
done, and perhaps they can make improvements in their agencies too.
SUSAN BAILEY We permit any work waterward of the high tide line in the tidal, coastal, or navigable waters. We look at things from small
residential docks to large marinas. We knew that things could be changed but we really weren't sure how until we started to go through the Kaizen
event and laid out the process and it covered two walls of a big room. We said, "Wait a minute...are all of these processes really necessary?"
PETER FRANCIS One part of the LEAN process that I think worked really well was bringing in stakeholders during the Kaizen week. We brought in
representatives from the Department of Transportation, and consultants that we work with regularly to get their buy in on the process.
JEFF WESTERMEYER In the beginning of the week it was so heavily involved that it actually seemed like there was no end to this week. It just seemed
like it was going to keep going on. At the end we were actually able to redevelop our entire process in four days.
PETER FRANCIS We had tremendous results. We went from five hundred days review period, to under one hundred twenty day review period. Our back log
has been cut from two hundred and fifty applications to under one hundred seventy five applications, and it wouldn't have been possible without the
LEAN process.
DONNA SERESIN We had a serious problem with our enforcement back log and how long it was taking for our enforcement actions to get issued, and to
follow up on inspection results. I did not have any idea what LEAN was, but by the end of the week I was excited for making changes. As the team
leader I was expected to direct and facilitate coming up with ideas to improve our enforcement process. There were a lot of steps along the way that
made me encouraged when I started seeing successes and that gave me the energy to get the staff motivated. The people that weren't on the LEAN team
but were going to be affected by the outcome of our LEAN process were skeptical at first, but we met with them on a periodic basis to tell them how
the changes were going and how they were going to affect their job, so they were encouraged after seeing our results. It takes a lot less time for us
to get enforcement action out the door. We've cut down on paper. We've cut down on review time, and I can get a lot more work done in a shorter
period of time. And with the limited amount of staff resources that we have, it really has helped my job be a lot more successful.
FRED HURLEY It's probably a good thing that the responses from DEP back to us will be quicker and in a more timely way because it will take an
issue that should be looked at by us, and it means that it won't fall through the cracks and be forgotten which could create problems not just for us
but for everybody.
DONNA SERESIN By LEANing out enforcement process we get the regulated community to correct their violations and both the public and environment
benefit by having cleaner water.
GEORGE PURPLE One day in the field would make you three to four days in the office, and we knew that just wasn't efficient. If you have ever been
part of a LEAN team it gets pretty hectic and you just can't believe what you are seeing up there as for the steps that are involved. And then
there's been a lot of discussion because people have been doing it their way for so many years. For the skeptics out there who don't believe it can
work in an office environment, or this, this is strictly for manufacturing, don't believe it. This can be used on any kind of process.
OMAR TYSON We were able to identify many steps. I think it was about sixty percent of the steps were removed. Now we're able to do inspections on
the site. We're able to print a report onsite. And I do enjoy my job more because I'm able to be more visible to be able to take that time to talk to
the members of the regulated community and understand some of their feelings or some of their concerns.
SAM SAMPIERI The LEAN project was a great idea for newer power plants to be approved to render the older dirtier power plants obsolete and to shut
them down.
JUDE CATALANO We run air dispersion models to predict how much pollution that a source of pollution will have in a neighborhood, and make sure that
we protect public health.
SAM SAMPIERI As a former consultant I used to submit the modeling projects to the Department of Environmental Protection and it would take two,
three, maybe even four months before we would even receive approval. I came in on two of the five meetings. They had asked me for my perspective from
being an ex-consultant, and it just seemed like there were all these stickies in all these different colors. Some of these colors meant that some of
these procedures needed to stay in place, but there were others that we didn't need to do.
JUDE CATALANO And when we came out the other end of it we realized that, yeah, there really is a lot of room for improvement. So we were able to
eliminate some supervisory oversight. We eliminated FOIA requests that we had. We put this guidance together which really clarified our program for
the regulated community. We have databases out there now on the Internet that the regulated community can just grab themselves. It's freed me up to
be able to concentrate on other things.
TIM BARRY Over on this side of the state we have Burlington Hatchery which is a very old, almost a hundred year old hatchery. Conversely on the
eastern side of the state we have a state of the art hatchery. The process of distributing fish statewide is something that we've been doing since
the early 1900's. In some ways it was long overdue for us to really sit down and assess how we were doing things and how we were getting the job
done. Previous LEAN teams had been done on the other side of DEP and this was the first one from the natural resources side.
JAMES HAYS It's good to sit down and look at things in a grand perspective to really see what you're doing. Like having the two different
hatcheries on either side of the state, we never really sat down as one big group and looked at how it worked.
TIM BARRY We had a wide range of outlooks on the whole process from some people feeling that it really wasn't going to be worthwhile at all. Some
of us with maybe more of a open mind, but I think in the end we all felt it was worthwhile.
JAMES HAYS I asked a lot of questions because I didn't know how the process went, so I posed a lot of questions and I asked a lot about how things
worked and was able to give suggestions on ways I thought we could stream line the process.
TIM BARRY It certainly was somewhat trying. There was long days trying to pull in information quickly from a lot of different areas.
RICK VAN NOSTRAND So what come out of this I think is that we drew the group together and we became a little more consistent and comprehensive on
how we addressed statewide distribution of trout.
JAMES HAYS So one of the things we did was we started doing mixed ponds over here, so we put multiple species of fish into the same pond, so when
we went to load our trucks we didn't have to go to multiple ponds to get the mix that we wanted. We were able to go to one pond and get all the fish,
and that actually helped us move faster in the morning to get our trucks out faster. The faster we get our trucks out, the better the fish are going
to do. So that was a big benefit and we saved a fair amount of time doing that and fuel costs.
RICK VAN NOSTRAND I would recommend it to other factions of the agency and whether they become more efficient from the LEAN process itself, or
whether they become more LEAN thinking after the process is over, I think both of those are two big benefits.
JEFF WESTERMEYER LEAN means becoming more responsive to our stakeholders and becoming more efficient as an agency.
KAREN CALIENDO Everybody's wondering, hey, I want to be on a LEAN team because, you know, they see the kind of results that the teams are getting.
DONNA SERESIN LEAN is success!