GA 522 | Continuous Improvement at Jack Henry with April Bell

So my youngest son is autistic, and so he struggles with multiple directions now he's 14 now, so he does a lot better. But, you know, when he was five or six, asking him to clean his room was an instant meltdown. And using KATA really did like I tell people, like, I really do use it in my personal life.

Today I'm excited to welcome April Bell to the show. Now, I've known April for a long, long time. In fact, I was able to coach her through our black belt certification program several years ago. It's always great to reconnect with April, so she actually was able to come into studio. So we've actually had a few interviews now here in studio, which is pretty fun. And so April works at a company called Jack Henry. And so they are working more in an office financial services world. And so what we talked about was sort of their journey with continuous improvement. And April runs basically the whole continuous improvement program there. And talking a little bit about their experience with different approaches and what they've settled on that works best for them is more of a Toyota Kata scientific thinking framework. And so she walks through sort of how that's working and, and how they're going about it and the different types of, you know, initiatives that they got going on. She also shares quite a few of the challenges that they're facing and how they're trying to overcome those. So a lot of good stuff. I think you're going to enjoy this one. Show notes can be found over@gembellpodcast.com just look for episode 5, 22. Again, gembapodcast.com and look for episode 5, 22. Okay, enough for me. Let's get April. Welcome to the show. How are you?

I'm good, Ron. How are you? Thank you for having me.

Yeah, my pleasure. So earlier today, we. We interviewed someone here in the studio that. That episode came out last week. And. And so it's awesome to do two in one day. I don't think we've ever done two live interviews in one day at the studio. So this is pretty exciting.

Awesome. Awesome. Happy to be here.

Yeah. All right, well, I know you've listened to the show, April. We like to start with our guest sharing a quote. What do you got?

Yeah, so my favorite quot at Jack Henry we have in our profiles you actually get to put a quote on there if you want to. And so this has been my quote on my Jack Henry site for my entire career. Jack Henry. So it is. An artist is not paid for his labor, but his vision by James Whistler.

What'S that mean to you?

So really, I think a lot of times we put so much emphasis on doing something and just the act of doing something when there's so much to be gained and learned just from discussions and sharing knowledge with each other and collaborating, that we feel like we don't put enough emphasis on that as much as we do getting something done or just doing something for the sake of doing it.

Yeah, got it, got it. Okay, well, hey, tell us a little bit about your background, April. Tell us about how you got involved in all this continuous improvement stuff and then what you're up to at Jack Henry.

Sure. So I've been at Jack Henry for 13 years. Actually. Yesterday was my 13th anniversary. Yeah. Thank you. So when I started at Jack Henry, I had come over from a bank banking environment. So I'd been in retail banking for about eight and a half years, came over into Jack Henry and the department that I was working in at the time really wasn't doing continuous improvement. And about a year into my career at Jack Henry, we started doing just small improvements in the processes that we were doing. Really didn't have a word for it. We didn't know how to label it or anything like that. We had no formal continuous improvement program at Jack Henry at the time. And then fast forward a couple years from that, we actually started to develop one. And so here we are all these years later. We have, I lead our enterprise continuous improvement team. So my team supports the entire organization and looking at their processes and improving them and making sure they're in alignment with strategies and those types of things.

Yeah. Well, it's been awesome being able to work with many of you over the years as well. So it's been fun seeing the evolution of your program and how much you guys have, how far you've come, really. So it's been. It's been fun to watch.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was, you know, it was great having you be my, my coach through my black belt certification. And I know we've had several people, not even just people in my organization, my part of the organization, but, you know, people in other parts of the organization have now started reaching out, wanting to get their black belt certifications and things like that. So it's awesome to be able to help build that CI aptitude throughout the entire, you know, all of Jack Henry.

We had a lot of coaching calls, man, back in the day.

Yeah, we did.

Those are. I don't actually do a whole lot of coaching anymore, but I still a little bit here and There, but back then, man, it was guns blazing while I was doing tons of them.

We had some fun.

We sure did. We sure did. All right, well, hey, so I wanted to sort of, I thought today we could explore, you know, obviously you guys are a financial services organization, so not necessarily producing metal widgets or anything like that. Not that that's easy or anything like that. Metal widgets are very difficult as well. But it's different, right? It's different. And so I'm wondering if we could just start with what have been some of the challenges that you guys have experienced along the way with just kind of getting continuous improvement rolled out.

Yeah. So really when we first started doing continuous improvement at Jack Henry, like I said, we didn't have a formal program. We were trying to figure things out. We really started with using dmaic, very heavy early on. And we honestly struggled with that because it was hard for us to correlate between what we do at Jack Henry, the types of processes and tasks that we do. With most of the education around continuous improvement that is out there because most of it is very manufacturing or healthcare driven. And so it's really hard for people to correlate that to a phone call or an email or things like that. And especially starting out with dmaic, there's a lot of toll gates and milestones and documentation and thing that goes on with it. And most of what we saw early on were things like quick wins and, and people would look at what we were asking them to do in the dmaic, you know, framework and saying, I can go fix it faster than I can document all of these things. And so we didn't get many, you know, we didn't get a lot of buy in. We didn't have many activities going. And then we tried to switch to A three thinking, thinking it would be simplified. But what we did was we put it in a system thinking we were doing, you know, we were making it easier to use, but we overcomplicated it. And essentially what we found was our simple A3 page, when you printed it out was like 13 pages long. So again, we were overcomplicating and over documenting. And it wasn't really until we switched to KATA that we were able to start being able to show some of the correlations and really break things down. Some of the sidepoc conversations that we were having. When you talk about a supplier, like you said, you're looking at widgets and things like that, you're thinking of a supplier being a manufacturer. Manufacturer, that's Going to send you an actual input of a part or something like that. Being able to take that and correlate it to what we do in our organization and helping people see that the supplier could be the person that's sending you the email, or if your input is data from a report, who's putting that into the system. And so just getting people to understand the difference between what we do and when they're watching videos about a manufacturing environment. You know, for us, going to Gemba looks very different than going on a factory floor. So we've, we've had to do a lot of, especially with a virtual, you know, setting. Now being able to go to Gemba is almost impossible for us to do in an office because we're, you know, most people aren't in there.

So I just remember like, well, many of my conversations with various Jack Henry people. It was sometimes always a struggle early on project selection. So I'd be like, what problem are you trying to solve and how do we know it's a problem? Right. And we were almost, we were always able to sort of get there. But yeah, was not as straightforward as going out and measuring the number of defects off an assembly line or something like that. But we still got there. It was just, you know, because ultimately you have problems and you're trying to make it better and try value, trying to get value to flow, right?

Yeah.

And so, yeah, so a lot of fun. So obviously you guys are, are heavy into kata now, right? So talk about that. I mean, I remember some of my early conversations about kata and, and even the way that I was coaching you, we were trying to, you know, sort of flavors of the Cochin kata. So, like, talk a little bit about why you think that's been. Scientific thinking has been so helpful to Jack Henry.

I mean, I think ultimately, because scientific thinking is really like common sense, right? I mean, most people are doing it in some sense, but they just don't realize that they're doing it until you can help them call attention to it and really see how they're using that thought process and really applying it to, you know, what they're doing in their tasks. The other thing I think is that it doesn't require as much documentation and things like that. So we get buy in, but we also, by implementing those short, smaller target conditions, you get people actually able to see the benefits of what they're doing quicker. You know, maybe they're shaving 30 seconds off this week, but it's still better than nothing. And so they, they kind of get excited and get energized about what they're doing in that. And, you know, one of the other things that we decided to do several years ago was once we started getting more people buying into the use of kata was we wanted to get 100% saturation at Jack Henry of people at least being aware of what kata is, which is a pretty big feat. We're a pretty large company. So getting everybody in the organization aware of it and using it, we're still on that journey. We're not there yet, but we've really been implementing kata in the classroom very heavily. In fact, we actually made it part of our new employee onboarding process back in 2020. So, you know, that was really interesting. Cause that's when Covid hit and everybody shut down. Right. So we had this whole big plan to roll out caught in the classroom for the entire organization. I was basically gonna go on a roadshow. I had my whole travel schedule planned out for a couple. Yep, yep. All of it. And then, you know, Covid hit and had other plans. And so, you know, we really had to work to figure out how to make that a virtual option. We were also struggling with how to do that because we realized that our largest posture in our associates is remote. So, you know, even if we were able to go to all the offices, there were still going to be employees that we missed. So we really had to work to figure out how to give that in a virtual setting, which was a lot of fun. I got to work with Tilo Schwartz on that effort and Sylvain Landry, and we came up with some interesting ideas. We got to do a lot of kataing in that, you know, experimenting with things and how to make it work. And we've been really successful with being able to do that virtually. We actually teach a class class every single week for caught in the classroom. I think we're about 36% of. Of our organization has been through it now.

How many people in Jack Henry?

A little over 7200. Wow. Yeah.

That's a lot, man. You might. You get 100%. Well, you. It'll always be new employees. Right, Right. But you hit them out of the gate. So you could be at 100 one day. How amazing would that be?

That be awesome.

I don't know if there's a company out there that could say they have 7,200 people and they're all familiar with. With at least the basic concepts of prima kata. Coaching kata.

We've actually started allowing our customers to come into our sessions, too. So we're not only trying to get our employee base, we're trying to get our customer base. Nice to understanding kata too.

Very cool. Very cool. So talk a little bit more. I mean, and share as much or as little as you can for confidentiality reasons. But I'm curious on the framework of, of your use of improvement kata and coaching kata as far as like, are your leaders sort of setting challenges for. For. For learners and then you're going through the full process of storyboards and you know, like talk a little bit about. About that.

Yeah. So we have an entire process set up that my team does where we get activities from several different ways we have, you know, obviously there's always going to be the people that we've worked with before that come back for more and entire process lined out to where any associate in the organization can submit what we call an idea submission. It comes into us and we look at it and then we work with them to figure out who on our team is the best suited coach. So I've got people on my team that have various backgrounds. Some of them are in installation, some of them support, you know, just. They have different backgrounds because they all came from different parts of Jack Henry. And so we'll look at who's the best coach that's suited for them. And then we actually have a system that we use that we're capturing all of our storyboards and keeping all that stuff up to date. We have reporting that comes off of it. We do have people who come in and say they want to work on something as a part of, you know, a target that they have or something like that. So we get, we get people from a lot of different ways. But yeah, I mean, it's there, there are some targets that we set within our. I mean, my group uses them, I, you know, to even work through their personal development. I mean, we, we use kata storyboards for everything.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, talk a little bit about. So you're obviously mostly in an office environment or 100% in an office environment, even a home office environment, if they work virtually. But how do you quantify waste in that environment?

Yeah, it gets a little difficult. So one of the things that we've started doing this past year is getting people more aware of the waste of emails and meetings, which is a big one for us because those are pretty much the two main ways that we communicate with people. So we've started showing people how to use some of the simple tools that we have within. Well, the phone. But even something like one of the things that my team has worked on this past year is measuring the amount of emails that go back and forth around a particular process. How many people are on those emails, what the average time that is spent for a person to even just open an email and read it, and how much time does that take and does it really need be an email? Do we, you know, did you have 20 emails that go back and forth around something that really could have been, you know, a 10 minute phone call and you solve it? We've, we've been utilizing SharePoint lists to put attributes to emails and really be able to show data around it. We've been looking at meetings in the same way, how many people were on a meeting. And when you start to put data to meetings, it gets a little interesting for people because I mean, if you have a 30 minute meeting for two people, that's really an hour worth of productivity that's lost. You have four, you go to two hours and so on and so on. So when you start to look at these meetings that have 30, 40 people on them, you know, you really get down to how much time was actually spent from the organization standpoint on a single meeting and what was the ROI of that meeting and those types of things. So yeah, I mean, it gets a little interesting, but there's definitely ways that we are, we're working through that.

Yeah. And then that 40 people, six people talked.

Yes, you know, exactly. And yeah, I mean, and that's some of the stuff that we're talking through is who actually needed to be on the meeting to share information or get the information or make a decision and who else just needed to get the highlights from a note.

Yeah, yeah. Something that we've tried and we're obviously much smaller company, but even for us, sometimes in a smaller company it's even more dangerous because this is the whole company.

Right.

You know, and, and so yeah, we're almost going to the whole thing of let's do better at capturing meeting minutes. Right. And there's now there's all these AI tools that will do it for you and all the rest of it, which is kind of creepy. I don't need anybody listening to my meetings. But, but, but yeah, then to send the minutes out and say, hey John, I know you weren't in the call, but here's some things that you might be interested. John can skim through it and he's done. He didn't have 30 minutes in that, in that meeting. Right. You spent three minutes. So yeah, good. So like what are you see your, I Mean, I know you've got this vision to get a hundred percent saturation and that's all well and good, but what about like just sort of like the maturity of your organization as it relates to continuous improvement? What's your vision? What's your plan?

Yeah, so we actually are in the process of piloting a brand new CI coaches program that my team is standing up. And what we're looking at doing is actually building the coaching aptitude within the organization. So you don't necessarily have to report to my team to be a CI coach. And that's the vision. You know, part of that stemmed from I've gone to different conferences and things and talked to different organizations and, you know, really asked them what helped them to be successful. Because we were kind of looking at our size. We're a very small team. I have eight employees and large organization. So, you know, I was asking, you know, do you all have larger teams? And you know, what I got from so many people was no, we have teams that are that size, but we have 200 yellow belts within the organization. We have a hundred green belts in the organization that are in these little pockets that they help lead the coaching exercises in their own areas. And so we actually are working on standing up a CI coaches program within Jack Henry. We've got a couple people going through it right now. So that's one way. The other way is I mentioned we've started letting customers into our Caught in the Classroom sessions. We're actually rolling out. We've. We're working directly with some of our customers right now to roll out a CI external client program to where we're allowing. We're teaching Caught in the Classroom and we've got an additional class that we've put together that basically takes what Mike put together and kata in the classroom and it expands it to be able to show employees how to actually take the concept and apply it to our processes and then measure the benefits that you do and how to tie it back to the bottom line. So we've opened both of those up to our customers, but we' than helping them stand up CI programs within their fis.

Yeah, yeah. So where. So obviously, you know, you are very familiar with lots of various Lean and Six Sigma tools and different things like that. So where do you see the intersection of sort of scientific thinking with sometimes you just got to do a good old fashioned 5s somewhere or like, how do you see tools playing with scientific thinking?

Yeah, so we, like I said, we're really heavily caught up and we have a kata Storyboard. And again, we find those instances where it's just too much.

Right.

Like, I just need to go and 5s my email box. So we're actually rolling out a new template within our site that is a just do it 5s type of. You know, if a person comes to us with something like that, then they can use those tools that are just for. I just need to go do this thing. But I need some kind of guardrails around. What's, you know, what's the best way to do this? How do I. How do I 5s it? You know, how do I just, you know, do a five why? And get to the thing I need to do and then just go do it?

Right.

So we're working on it. I mean, we. I always tell people we kata our kata all the time. So, you know, we're constantly looking at how we do that work. What are the gaps and how do we need to fill that, and what can we just kind of play around with tweaking to make it work for the needs, the needs of the business, so.

Right, right, right. So what is. I mean, you've been at it for a little while now. Like, what. What are some of the current challenges that you're facing? You know, small team, a lot of people. Maybe that's one.

Yeah. No, I mean, that really is one. You know, it's a. It's a blessing and a curse when people start realizing what the benefit of your team can do. You know, I tell people, early on when we were doing this, we were knocking on people's doors. Can we please help you? Can we please look at your process?

Can we?

And now it's. There's. I mean, there's a lot. There's a lot that people want to do, which is fantastic, because again, we're teaching everyone, as soon as they come into the organization how to do kata, how to think differently, how to see that in their processes. But what that equates to is everybody sees it and they want to work on things. And, you know, we've got a ton of people that even come to us and say, I've got this personal goal that I want to accomplish. Can you help me figure out how to work through this? So maybe you've got an education goal. You want to figure out how to get to this next level. We've even got people who are doing that kind of thing and not necessarily just looking at their processes. So once they get bitten by the cottabug, they see it, you know, the use case for it everywhere. And so, yeah, I mean, that is a. That's definitely a struggle that we're having right now.

Have you met Mike Lombard?

Yes, I have once.

Yeah. So anyhow, I just had him on the podcast, so he was a few episodes ago, or maybe he was the last episode. I can't remember. I've done so many interviews recently. Anyhow, he and I were chatting about him and his wife have young kids, and they were. They're homeschooling some of their kids. And so he was talking about how they're using kata to basically experiment their way forward, you know, and in working in visual management and different things like that, you know, and so it was pretty. I mean, it's amazing. Like, just this way of thinking, this meta. It's a meta skill, really, that transcends work. Right. It's just life.

It really does. I mean. No, that's a great point. So when I teach kata in the classroom, I always like to use. It's a very similar analogy. So my youngest son is autistic, and so he struggles with multiple directions. Now he's 14 now, so he does a lot better. But, you know, when he was five or six, asking him to clean his room was an instant meltdown. And using kata, really, I really did, like I tell people, like, I really do use it in my personal life, you know, teaching him to use KATA to cleaning his room. And just. What's the. What's the next target condition? What's the thing we're focused on right now? Don't worry about everything else. Let's. Let's just get to this target condition.

Yeah.

And if it's, you know, dirty clothes are out of your room. Okay, let's get that done. Now. What's the next target condition?

Right.

And once he learned to do that, it was so much easier, and now he's just able to do it.

Well, if you just think about, like, you know, our journeys with continuous improvement. I mean, like, I've been doing a long time, and I remember when Mike wrote the book, I was like, oh, good for Mike. He'll, you know, do a lot of talks and, you know, you know, sell some books and all that. And so I sort of like. Like, was. I've told Mike this. So, like, I was dismissive initially, maybe intellectually jealous or whatever, you know, but eventually, like, I was like, wow, what is this all about? You know? And so I kind of got into it, and we start practicing it, and then I'm like. I'm like a believer, obviously. And. But the thing for Me that it did. And it's interesting. You talked about a story about your son is like, without this framework of breaking problems down into target conditions or just smaller milestones, if you will, it can feel so overwhelming. It's overwhelming to your son, right, to think about this huge, messy room and, like, there's no hope. Well, no, there is. Let's start with our socks. Can you do the socks? Yeah. Okay.

Yeah.

You know, breaking it down. But when we do that in continuous improvement, it's the same thing because it's very overwhelming when your boss says, we need to have revenue at this level or defects down to this level. And you're like, what are you crazy? You know, but you start breaking it down and it just takes the pressure off. I don't know. I think.

No. And that's one of the things that I love. So I. You know, we were just doing a session, actually, earlier this morning, and you get people to kind of talk through what. What is the challenge? What's the thing you're trying to get to? And you can see the look on their face when they just, there's no way I'm going to get there. And when you can talk them through getting to that first target condition and then coming up with, what's an experiment that you can do, what's something you can go back to your desk right now and try maybe move a little bit forward. And just the relief that you can physically see on people's faces when you help them get to that point, because it's like they're standing there in the middle of all of it, and they don't know how to even put their foot in front of the other to move forward. And finally you give them something that helps them to move forward. I tell people it's honestly the reason I do what I do. I love seeing that relief in people that you help. I mean, you're truly helping change people's lives by just having a conversation. That's why I say I go back to that quote, like, you have a conversation with somebody and you can make a huge impact on them and not physically do anything.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I remember, you know, like a kid stressed out about the act or SAT or whatever. It's like, well, okay, well, what are you struggling? I'm terrible about math. Okay, well, where are you now? I took the pre test, you know, and here's what I got. Okay, well, that's our current condition. You know, what we can do, what can we work towards? And, you know, then they start chipping away at it. And again, takes that pressure off that they're dumb. No, you're not. You're just currently struggling with math, and that's easy. A lot of people are good at math and can help you. So let's chip away at it.

Yeah, absolutely.

So, wow. Hey. So if someone's listening to this right now, perhaps they're in. Let's get really focused. Financial service, not manufacturing, maybe just office environment, more generally spoken like that. And they want to get going with, you know, some aspect of continuous improvement. They don't even know what KATA is at this point, but just. Just some aspects of continuous improvement. They just haven't done anything. Like, what's your advice for that person?

Oh, man, that's a good one. So, I mean, honestly, when I work with people who have never done anything with kata, continuous improvement anything, they don't. They don't know anything about any of it. The first thing that I always suggest that they do is really sit down and think about, where are you? I mean, because there's so many people who don't even realize where they are. I mean, honestly, like, when we start talking about what's your current condition? And people are like, what do you mean? And it. Like, I honestly had a gentleman in one of my sessions today, and we were trying to talk through. He was really struggling to articulate what it was that they wanted to accomplish. And I said, just, do you have any information right now? Like, do you have any data around your process? Do you. Are you measuring anything? And he was like, no, we don't have a system to measure it in. We don't have, you know, any structure to measure it. So could you go back to your desk and just start making tick notes, like on a piece of paper or on something? Could you just start making a note? So that's it. Just write something down. Start measuring. Start capturing your current condition. Because it's really hard to know how to move forward if you don't know where you are.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know what you think, April, but I'm a big believer that that 2C current condition, that is most often the most difficult part for anyone in the whole cycle.

Well, and I think a lot of people put pressure on themselves to have all this data, right? Which data's fantastic. It helps us make decisions. But I tell people there's so much more to current condition than just all the numbers. How you feel about your process or how your process makes you feel is equally important because at the end of the day, that's what you remember about your. The experience. So I tell people, you know, if you're struggling to capture your current condition, have a piece of paper sitting next to you and every time you're sitting at your desk and you want to slam your hand on the desk, write down the thing that was happening that made you feel that way, because that is part of your current condition.

Right. Fix what bugs you.

Right, Right. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Wonderful. Wonderful. All right, well, hey, April, people want to connect with you personally. What's the best way?

I would say link, I think. Do you guys have my LinkedIn?

Yeah.

Okay. Yeah.

April Bell also, I don't know how many April Bells are out there. Maybe there's a bunch, but I don't know. We'll link it up in the show notes.

Also, My email is AP bell@jack henry.com so if you want to email me.

Got it, Got it. All right, well, hey, thanks again for coming in. It was awesome to see you in studio.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

All right, take care.

All right, thanks.

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