GA 445 | Ventura County’s Lean Journey with Paul Stamper

You can very easily talk to someone else at a conference or from another life organization that's already done an improvement in a product or service area that you work in, and they've got some good ideas or solutions that you could just take and run with as they just do it. And that can be kind of your way to get your foot in the door to get the organization to start looking that way.

Today I'm excited to welcome Paul Stamper to the show. Now, Paul works with the the county of Ventura in California as part of their Lean Six Sigma continuous improvement organization. And so Paul and the county of Ventura doing some fantastic work as it relates to applying the principles of Lean and Six Sigma to really just across their entire county. And so today we talk about some of the things that they're doing, how they got started, sort of where they're at today, and just lots of really good examples of how, you know, these, these, these, this concept, this, this, this thinking system called continuous improvement. It really knows no boundary. So I, I really enjoyed and appreciated talking to Paul. Show notes, which will include links to everything we talk about, can be found over@gemba podcast.com. just look for episode four, 45. Again, gemba podcast.com and look for episode four, 45. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. Paul, welcome to the show. How are you?

Good morning, Ron. I'm doing great, thanks. Me, I just can't help but add that I know your Gimba Academy started in 2009 and our county of Ventura Lean Six Sigma journey started in 2008. So we feel like you've been there as a partner with us all the way through. We have, oh, fantastic 10,000 employees, and I can't tell you how many of them have taken advantage of watching the videos you guys put out so well.

Thank you. Well, we appreciate that. And yeah, boy, it's when I think About March of 2009 is when we turned this whole thing on. You know, we had 12 videos. That's how we started the company. And, man, it's been a wild ride, I tell you. And the ride continues. So. Yeah. Well, thank you for, for all your support and for trusting Gemba Academy. I appreciate that. So.

Absolutely. All right. Yeah.

Well, Paul, I know you've listened to the show, and as you know, we like to get started right away with our guests sharing a quote. So what do you got?

All right, well, I'm going to go with a quote by Charles Darwin. It's not the strongest of the species that survived or nor their most Intelligent, but the most adaptable to change.

Yeah.

And I know that other people have used that before. Right. Has a special meaning to me, I think, because life and circumstances are changing constantly. And so this is, of course, one reason why you and I and other folks will never be out of a job. Right. Because we're constantly readapting our work and our processes to what's changing around us. And then particularly, of course, with the recent pandemic, and I know you myself, other people have been through some difficult times, and so I really do appreciate your recent words on that topic and having faith and trusting the process. And I find myself repeating that mantra as well. So, yeah, it's important.

Thank you. That's awesome. That's awesome. All right, Paul, tell us about yourself. Tell us about your. Your background, how you got involved in all this continuous improvement stuff since 2008, and. And then what you're up to these days.

Okay, Absolutely. Well, I was raised in California and went to college for my undergrad at UC Santa Barbara. And I love sports. I did well in school, had no idea what I wanted to do for a career. And so I did something rather novel in college, which is I just took the classes that were most interesting to me. By the time I finished, I came out as a philosophy major.

Nice.

Now, Ron, I don't know if you ever want to try this, but this is a fun little experiment. Graduate from college, then go open the jobs page and look for the number of jobs for philosophers and compare that to engineers.

Right.

I did that recently on Indeed, just to see what it was like. I saw 14 Philosopher Jobs and a quarter million engineering jobs. So I found myself in an interesting place at that point. So I ended up starting off in the healthcare industry just by happenstance. And, you know, I enjoyed my work. Got a chance to move up a little bit into a supervisor role. Wasn't particularly my calling, I wouldn't say, but I was gaining some good experience. I remember, Ron, one day my manager early on brought me in and said, I need you to talk to one of your employees. I said, what about? Well, you need to talk to him because he has bad body odor. And I thought, oh, boy, this is going to be a fun conversation. And I just realized that it really struck me how being a manager, supervisor, leader, it really is about people, and how can you have some difficult conversations and also maintain positive relationships, keep things moving forward. So I, as I was in my healthcare career, I started looking around and I found that my next career that appealed to me was information technology. And What I liked about that was because it wasn't. Your advancement wasn't solely based on years of experience in the industry. It was really what you learned and what you knew. And some people collected baseball cards. You'd think with a name like mine, I might collect stamps, but I collected library cards. I would go around whenever I was visiting a different city or county, and lo and behold, you don't often have to have a local address. And I could get access to online audiobooks and ebooks and started down in an IT career path. And then in 1999 was when I started working for the county of Ventura. Started at entry level as a desktop support technician. And the first half of my career at the county was kind of moving through the ranks of the IT department there. So I found myself as a manager of our service support team. But I was also becoming more interested in business at that point. Went back and got an MBA, and then that was right around the time in 2008 when our service excellence program first began here at the county.

Okay.

And so I guess I found myself lucky timing. Right place at the right time, and I found an opening where I could get in kind of at the ground floor. My mentor, Elaine Crandall, who talked me out of the IT world and brought me into this new Lean Six Sigma world, which I didn't know much about at all, but I knew that it represented great opportunity. The county of Ventura, for those of you who don't know who is in California, there's a population of about 850,000 people, and there's 10,000 employees.

And.

And there is a very wide range of businesses that we're in, everything from hospitals to sheriff to libraries to, you know, some of the things you might more commonly think of permitting and code compliance and the regulatory aspects. But there was a ton of different value stream types, business product, service types, and it was just a great place, kind of like the Galapagos Islands of where to start learning how to apply some of these Lean concepts.

Who's your favorite philosopher?

Well, I have to go with Socrates. I think that's a common one. But I think the reason it sticks out to me is because of the Socratic method. And it's so in line with Lean and the idea of just continually asking questions and trying to get deeper and deeper at the truth. And starting from that point of curiosity, rather than, you know, I already know where I want to go, and I'm going to defend my position.

Right, right. 100%. 100%. Very good, very good. All right. Well, I'm curious to hear the county Ventura's, you know, obviously you mentioned kind of timing as far as when you guys got started, but I'm just curious to hear, like, how the journey has gone. Like, how did you start? You know, what issues did you have along the way? Because nothing's ever easy, right, as it relates to continuous improvement. And then maybe sort of a present day, like, where are you now?

Okay, absolutely, yeah. You know, the, the postcard summary is, you know, you can always point to a scorecard or, you know, $40 million in savings. We've trained over 5,000 employees. But the stories and kind of the origin is very interesting to me. So 2008, as you recall, the mortgage crisis had hit recession, and frankly, we didn't want to be the county that said, well, we're going to do less with less. We wanted to figure out a way to do more with less, because as it happens, most local jurisdictions are heavily reliant on property taxes to fund local services. And in the middle of that crisis, we knew that that funding was going to go down. And simultaneously in government, the needs as we serve as a safety net for the community are going to go up. So you're going to get stretched. And so we wanted to find how can we do more with less? And so that was kind of the genesis. And then, as luck would have it, we have a Naval warfare center here in the county of Ventura. And one of our agency heads, Paul Grossgold, a former pilot and former commander of that Navy base, still had some connections there. And we sent a few people over there where they were already doing some lean Six Sigma training. And so they got exposed to it, came back. The first thing they did was a project on procurement. And so they applied the concepts and they were able to move their process from 30 steps down to 11 and improve the speed by six times what it was before. And that caught everyone's attention. And so that early success, kind of dipping our toe in the water. And then so a few other agencies and folks tried some things. And so, you know, we started getting a little momentum and then it was, okay, let's have some serious talks about this. And we got to our CEO and our board of Supervisors and said, we want to make an investment in this and we want this to be a long term way for the county to go about being more efficient with the resources that we do have, because we don't want to cut services. Right. We want to find a better way to provide them and keep them when people most need them. And so that was kind of how it started. And then, of course, it took our Board of Supervisors to make that investment up front to spend some money on some initial training and consulting to start. And then, you know, building out the structure of what that would look like in our organization, which I can describe in a little more detail.

Yeah, I was going to sort of. My next question was going to be just around, you know, how is it structured today? Like, do you have dedicated employees to continuous improvement? Is it embedded just in everybody, how everybody does their work, or perhaps a combination of those two?

Yeah, I think it's an important question for every organization. What do you want out of this? And the county's mindset going in was this is, we want this to be long term. This is not just going to be. Get us through whatever tough period might be ahead because of this recession. And with that in mind, one of the early choices was this needs to be embedded in all 27 of our different county agencies, as you might imagine. You know, we talk about organizational culture, but when you have 27 different agencies that range from sheriff to hospital to library, there are different cultures embedded within each of those agencies as well. And our best chance of success was to make sure that the people actually engaged in doing the work were in those agencies. And we didn't want to have a centralized, separate group that was kind of running the show. And so in order to accomplish that, we did have create in our CEO's office our service excellence organization, which is very small, which I'm a deputy executive officer over that area as well as a few others. But my role is really to be an internal consultant to the department directors and to all of the green belts and yellow belts and staff that we train to go out and do the work within their agencies. And we have something pretty unique at the county, which I traveled and talked to quite a few other counties and private businesses with this type of work. And something that's really unique is when we train green belts, which we've trained, we're coming in on around 500 now over the years that we've trained. And they are not restricted to only doing improvements within their agency. And in fact, they're often encouraged to pair up with another green belt and work on a Kaizen event and another agency entirely. And it really allows them to come in with an outside perspective. Yeah, ask. Ask good questions. Not. They don't have any skin in the game. You know, they. They don't have an agenda of what they're. They want out of this other than, you know, the, the definition of success as the champions defined it. So, so we have this cadre of belts that are out there and then we have an ongoing, what we call our service Excellence Council, which is made up of all of our county leadership CEO across to every agency. And we're regular talking about what's working, what's not, what are some of the projects we might look at taking on and how can we look at our strategic plan and can that give us some input ideas for possible improvement events as we move forward? So it's really been, the only reason we've been able to sustain for so long is because that level of engagement at the very top.

Yeah. Hey, how many towns and cities and whatnot are in your county approximately? Is there like.

Yeah, yeah. So there's about nine, depending on how you count those between seven and nine. Our largest is Oxnard, which is somewhere near 200,000. But we have, there's a lot of green space in open areas and we're on the coast. And so there's, there's, there's a very nice different feel and culture associated with kind of the different cities within the county.

Yeah. So I'm curious then. So obviously you're, you're, you're within the county. So almost like an umbrella right over the whole thing. So has, has Lean and Six Sigma, has it infiltrated at the city level as well? At the town level? You. How does that work?

Yeah, excellent question. So a couple things. One is, yes, we've had more than one call about different cities that wanted to either, hey, I heard you guys worked on your permitting process. Do you have any tips or suggestions for us or are you available? So come in and give us some a little hands on guidance. Now I would say we've seen more of that at the county level than at the city level. As it happens. I'm also a trainer for an organization called csac, which is the California State association of Counties, and they do ongoing education for counties all across the state. And so one of the recurring courses is on Lean Six Sigma, which we come up and teach and then, and we find that a lot of them are interested. And similar to your question earlier, Ron, you know, how do you get it sounds great. How do you get started? Right. And it's usually my advice is, you know, find one champion who's willing to dip their toe in the water and do a pilot. Find something that you can work on and then build on that before you're asking for a big investment.

Yep.

Yeah, so, so yeah, so we've Been to multiple other counties, Los Angeles County, Kern county, you know, several of our neighbors, we've been up to Shasta and several other counties. So in some cases we've just, we've done some leadership training as they were kicking off their program and others, we, we did more hands on greenbelt training to help them get ready to go out and do improvements. So it's been really valuable to get those different perspectives as well as we go along and to see them facing the same choices that we had to face because you can structure these programs in multiple ways.

What about outside of the state of California? Do you network and collaborate with other states or other counties across the country?

Well, most of that right now is happening one off through LinkedIn and connections I've made in that regard. And certainly we've been to some of the conferences and ASQ events and you meet people like that. But frankly, you know, with the way that we've structured our resources at the county, we don't have enough resources to really focus externally. The one place where we really did double down and do that locally was we had a real great partnership, still do, with our Cal State University of Channel Islands. And they really wanted to embrace this lean approach. And so we worked with them. And this was on the staff side, not the student side. And so they became partners with us where they would attend our training events and we would collaborate as they were building out their program. And so for many years we would cross pollinate our classes with attendees from both organizations, which also brought some very good perspectives.

Nice, nice. So, you know, applying lean in different industries is always different, right? Or different, you know, things like government versus a manufacturing organization, you know, making a widget or whatnot. I'm curious to get your thoughts on, is there any difference and if so, what is it?

Yeah, absolutely. Very good question. You know, I think I noticed, Ron, from when I first went through black belt and master black belt training, that I was one of very few from kind of the service or transaction side. The majority were from manufacturing. And so often even from that very beginning, there was a bit of a challenge to translate the concepts into the service side. And government has some particular aspects that are even different than service. And so at the very core, you start with just value. And the definition of value, right? And our traditional definition is the customer wants it, they're willing to pay for it. Well, right there we have lots of customers that don't want to be on probation. They don't want to have to come in and get a permit, you know, they're not willing customers in many cases, and they don't want to have to pay for it. And so the very core of that value exchange that everything's based on in government has to take on a little bit of a different meaning. Where we really looked at our customers and said, who are our customers? And found that our customers are really often not just the person or persons receiving the actual service or item from the county, whether it's a permit or something else, but it's also the public that we're serving and that we're often balancing between competing values of those customers. So I'll just give you an example. If you're a restaurant owner, right, and you need a permit from an environmental health agency so that you can open your restaurant and do business, well, you want that process to be, you know, fast, quick and easy. And yes, you want to follow the rules, but your goal is to get that license as quickly as possible. On the other hand, if you're a patron, right. If you're the one eating there, then you want a sense of security, that this place is actually following the guidelines, the food's going to be safe and so forth. And so the county, you know, kind of plays that middle referee role of balancing the needs of the two customers while we're. The value that we're adding or creating is creating an atmosphere where both of those parties involved in that can trust each other and have a good experience at the end. Right. So value was certainly one of those that stood out. And even those folks that don't want our services but are, you know, feel forced to have them, you know, maybe you need a building permit, for example. We can still focus on, okay, it is a requirement, but how can we make this as easy as possible?

Yeah.

And, you know, not just focus on our production value stream, you know, how we're creating that product or service, but also on the consumption side of that, how are we making it as easy as possible for those folks that do need to come in and get that?

Well, and I think what happens is, you know, assuming, you know, you have a great permitting process, so I'm going to add a building on my property, so I need to get a permit for it. Right. And so I go in and I'm talking to your team and it's a pleasure. Yeah, I didn't. I'm not thrilled about having to go there, but I get in there and boom, it's done. Guess what? Next time I need one, it's probably not going to be that bad of a, you Know, I'm not going to dread it. Like, I would have. I had a terrible experience the last time I was in trying to get a permit. I mean, I can tell you from personal experience that there's been times in my life where we've tried to get permits. And it's not an easy process. Right. It's a painful process. It's frustrating. And so, you know, if that organization would apply these same concepts like you are, I feel like, you know, all these things wouldn't get such a bad name. The dmv. Everybody picks on the dmv, Right. Because it's. It's sometimes, depending on where you live, not a pleasant experience. Right. And. But there are companies or there. There are cities and states, whatnot. We were in the state of Connecticut many, many years ago, and talking to their DMV about how they're going about improving their process. It's like, wow, that's fantastic. You know, like genuinely trying to, you know, reduce waste and improve the value that, you know, they're delivering. So there's lots of. Lots of folks out there trying, and I think that's brilliant. And if the, you know, maybe we get the federal government, you know, thinking that way, and, you know, then we're going to be in great shape.

Yeah. And it's a perfect example of one of those areas we're never gonna be done. Right. There's always room for improvement. And as soon as you improve one area, then, you know, we have this water constraint. So we need to add some. You know, there's some new legislation around water, so that's gonna impact the permitting process because there's some new requirements. And so there's a constant evolution of needing to change those things. And talk about, you know, a building permit is a. Is a perfect example of what I would call, you know, a process that involves a lot of complexity. Because some of the reasons that it's complex is because the people who are doing this don't do this every day. Right. Maybe they hire someone who does it every day, but the owners certainly don't do this on a regular basis. There are specialty areas throughout the different departments within government that have to have specialized knowledge and be involved in the process. So there's a lot of coordination across all of those. There's ongoing rule changes that are constantly getting updated, whether it's from federal, state, or even local. And so it's a continuously moving target. And so one of the things that we did in acknowledgement of that in the last couple years is we added a new role at the county, permit navigator role, which is really, you know, as much as we're trying to get people through quickly and make it as easy as possible, where there's a disagreement or where someone gets stuck, there's an easy outlet to appeal or escalate and try and get it resolved more quickly.

Nice. I like that. Well, and it's all about communication as well, right? You just say, hey, we're having a problem with XYZ and here's what we're doing about it, right? If, if there's just open and communication back and forth, then it's going to be a better experience for it for everyone. Right? So the county in the, in the, in the, in the citizen. So, hey, I'm curious to hear how just your, your infrastructure, your continuous improvement, Lean Six Sigma, just the environment that you've had in place over the. For the last many years, how did that play a role during your. The pandemic response over the last few years?

Oh, absolutely, yes. You know, I feel we were incredibly lucky to have had, you know, more than a decade of experience of some of these best practices of how to evaluate a process and improve it, because there were so many instances. And, you know, this, Ron, this is across every county and across the world, not just Ventura county, where we were standing up brand new products and services and creating new processes that had either never existed or had just never existed on the scale that they needed to exist for. And so our process of going through that DMAIC and PDCA and in some cases DMAdvi, if it's brand new, was really ingrained. And there was, there was a, a comfort level with knowing that we're going to be moving fast. We're not going to get everything right the first time, but we're going to be watching and making adjustments as we go quickly. And that was, that was critical to our success. We, you know, like every place, we did a million vaccines, we did 5 million units of PPE that was distributed. We ended up serving over 5 million meals. I mean, it was just a scale that was unheard of. And then taking that opportunity and being creative as we designed it, the meal program in particular, I was proud of. One of my other hats that I wear is supporting economic vitality at the county of Ventura. And so, as you know, businesses were severely impacted through this pandemic. And we found a way where local businesses could sign up to be food providers for those folks that were at home that couldn't get out or wasn't safe to go shopping and to provide those meals for them. And so businesses were able to capture some revenue that helped them stay in business, keep the doors open, and people got some pretty great meals out of the process. And you know, what we found interestingly, as you often do, is you design a service or a program and you realize that one of the things people appreciated most was not just the food, but the chance to interact with the person who was dropping it off, to have a short conversation, even if you're standing at a distance, how are you doing? You know, are you able to talk to your neighbors? Are you guys able to get the things that you need? And so you just never know what value is going to come out of there. One of the areas for my work in particular, because of economic vitality, was we ran five different business assistance grant programs, and we're able to distribute $70 million to local businesses. I've got some letters that I keep in my drawer that I like to read every once in a while. That's, you know, just letters of appreciation saying thank you. You know, we were a small business. I have one where the owner said she employed four other single mothers and that that money helped them survive through that period that they needed to until they could start to reopen again.

Great. Fantastic. So, Paul, someone's listening right now. Perhaps they. They work in a county or the city or just some government agency, and perhaps they're. They're entertaining the idea of getting into this whole Lean Six Sigma world, continuous improvement world. What advice do you have for that, that individual?

Excellent. Well, you know, first and foremost, I would say there is. There's just a ton of information out there. You can start by educating yourself by just looking around, you know, whether it's Gemba Academy or other. Look up Lean Six Sigma online and just. You can watch some videos, you can read some materials and see which part of it the. What my initial advice would be is to ask yourself, are you looking for, hey, do I want to work on myself right now or do I have a level of authority where I want to do something maybe for my whole department, and can I gather some information that would help me do that? Or if you're at a leadership level and you're looking more broadly across an organization, you know, that's where I would say, well, you know, spend a little money, get some consulting support and get some advice and look at the different possible ways that you could deploy that across your organization. And it's not a one size fits all. And there's not one way, one right way to do it and in fact, I would argue quite the contrary, depending on your business and workforce in different situation that I would optimize the organizational structure differently depending on what I found. And so, you know, talking to people and advisors who have been through this with other organizations I think would be key if you're looking at that level.

Yeah, fantastic. Well, and you mentioned conferences and whatnot as well earlier. You know, AME is coming up in October and you know, just conferences like that are asq. There's, there's a bunch of them. Just getting out and networking with people I think is also just a fantastic way of, of just hearing other people's stories, like, hey, Paul County Ventura, what do you guys got going on? You know, and there you go. You know, you've got this fantastic conversation and encouragement, inspiration, everything else. So.

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, there's, there's the aspect, Ron, that I've seen where, you know, you can think about it on the program level, which I think is kind of a long term view and I think in the end pays the most on your investment. But it's also, there's some value in some short term wins as well. And you can very easily talk to someone else, like you said at a conference or from another like organization that's already done an improvement in a product or service area that you work in and they've got some good ideas or solutions that you could just take and run with as the, just do it. And that can be kind of your way to get your foot in the door to get the organization to start looking that way.

Right. And circling back to some advice you gave earlier in the podcast, just get, get some quick wins. Right. Get some, some success under your belt, get a little momentum going. And once the momentum gets going and you get enough of it, you really can't stop it. Right. Unless you just completely quit.

Right, Absolutely. And then the longer you do this, you know, the more you start in the beginning, I would say, you know, you might hear a lot of there's so many different tools. Right. There's so much to know. The longer I've done this, the more I've started to see recurring patterns where it doesn't matter which department I'm in or what product or service area, although they're different, there are some things that are the same and you can more easily draw on those. I think one of my kind of favorite experiences at the county was early on in my career I had the opportunity to be a green belt for the sheriff evidence disposal process.

Oh, wow.

Yeah. So, Ron, picture that ending scene at the end of the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, right? You're walking down these big, long, tall aisles just filled with boxes and crates, right? And this is all stuff that has been collected over the years and thousands of cases that have gone through the court system. And you know, you don't want to hang on to that stuff forever. You want to have a system in place for when is it time, you know, to dispose of the things that we can get rid of, manage that inventory. And so one of my first experiences was just gemba, just how do you guys do it now? And I found that I walked in, they would grab a batch of years old files, open one up, and then just start looking up in that file, okay? They had a whole laundry list of requirements that had to be met before you could dispose of something and depended on factors like was there a gun involved in the crime, was there a youth, were there multiple defendants, whether, you know, the list goes on and on. And it was when I watched this person working on the computer screen going to all the different web pages of the database to find all, gather all this information just for each one. It reminded me of that commercial with dominoes where you see the person folding all the boxes and doing it so fast you can't help but be impressed. But at the same time, because of Lean, I'm just thinking, my gosh, how many different screens did they just have to jump to, right? And just the notion of, you know, using a tool like 5S or the 8020 principle, where you take, can we get the stuff that we have to look at every time on one screen, we just start there, you know, and then maybe later on, maybe we're doing a query and we're actually not just pulling random files, but we're pre selecting those that might meet the criteria, you know, And I saw a recent podcast of yours where someone was applying, it's the exact same concept, but this was in a warehouse and they were picking supplies, right. And talking about how, you know, 80% of the products going out were the same. And if they could locate those in the most convenience places to make it easier and faster to grab those, then you're going to improve your throughput. And so you can see how, whether you're, you're picking something off the shelf in a warehouse or looking for a piece of information in a computer, the concepts, the principles behind a lot of these Lean tools can still be applied in very different settings.

Yeah, fantastic. Well, Paul, this has been a fun conversation. Thank you for all the work that you're doing for your county and which, you know, really just impacts citizens of this country. So thanks for that and keep up the great work. If folks wanted to connect with you, Paul, what would be the best way?

Yeah, Ron, I encourage people to connect with me through LinkedIn. You can look up Paul Stamper. As luck would have it, I think there's about 20 of us out there. I haven't met my other counterparts, but if you add something along the lines of black belt master, black belt, my name come to the top of the list.

Yeah.

And I think that's probably the easiest way.

I love it. There's another Ron Pereira out there. If you Google it and it's some bodybuilder guy or whatever, I'm like, yeah, well that's not me. I try to exercise. I'm not a bodybuilder. Everybody's gonna go Google around for air to see the bodybuilder. Good stuff. All right, well, and we'll link to, to all of your, your, your, your links to maybe to your county and to your LinkedIn and everything in, in the show notes. Folks can find that over@gemba podcast.com this is episode 445. So. Well, yeah, Paul, thanks again for, for coming on to the show and yeah, keep up the great work.

My pleasure, Ron. Thanks so much for having me. And like, like we discussed before, have faith and trust the process.

That's it. I love it. Take care.

All right, you too.

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