For more than six months I support an impressive transformation at Zilveren kruis. Impressive? Very impressive! Out of all the big challenges there are right now, and coming up in health care, some departments and their people try to make a shift in organizing themselves around the customer;  self organising teams; more agility; higher effectiveness, etc.

Off course, that goes right through traditional organisation-structures, so the obvious bottlenecks appear: Conflicting planning, issues on resources, different mindset, questions about leadership and responsibility and….changing method and mindset cost energy and where do we find the time?

I am therefor very impressed of the people who invest not only time but have the courage to try something new. Scrum? Kanban? Kaizen? Retro? Let’s try and see what value it brings us. Why? Because they believe in doing so, they can make a difference for the customers, now and in the future.  In short, the focus for the last months was on:

1. Value: What value do we bring? What quality do we deliver? Do we see impact on our time to market? Do we deliver what we promise and plan? Are we driven and proud on what we create?
2. Roles & expectations: In this labyrinth of a changing corporate, what do we expect from eachother? What do i need and what can I bring? How do we organise learnings?
3. Scaling: which organisational steps can we make to improve on program- and portfoliolevel?

Challenges? Don’t rush things into artificial ceremonies, but stay focussed with each other on (customer)value. If you make that clear, you can together decide what small steps to take forward. Involve more and more stakeholders to ensure a common goal is set and collaboration improves.

Last Friday I was very happy to visit the Reinier de Graaf hospital in Delft. Not as a patient, but fortunately as a guest. My former colleague Monique Elsing and Maaike van Meeuwen gave us a tour through some departments in the hospital on how they use Lean in practice. It was so heart-warming to see how patient-driven the staff is. By using kanban twice a day, they literally gather small improvements every day. Although the NPS is sky-high, still looking for improvements. Also, there was no manager to explain or organise. The teams themselves are in the lead.

Challenges? As an hospital is also very dependent on knowledge and specialists, it is a big challenge to use them as good as possible, as other departments often depend on their availability. Still, high agility in an hospital should be the norm. In that perspective it is interesting to deep-dive on (personal) leadership. Good luck Monique and Maaike!