GA 627 | Value Stream Mapping on University Campuses with Kristin Kielich

An effective leader will know which one is best to use strategically to help you with going back to your Northern Star. I'm going to really think through where can we have the most impact, and then which of the Lean tools will be the most important helping you solve your problem. And usually when we start from there, it opens doors.

Today I am very excited to welcome Kristin Killick to the show. Now, Kristin, as you'll hear, works with the University of California California, specifically the Office of the President. And so, boy oh boy, does Kristin have a lot of energy and passion for continuous improvement. I was just— it's one of these episodes where I was just listening like, man, I love her energy. I even told her so at the very end. So just lots of good things packed into this episode. So we really just kind of just dive into what they got going on over there at the University of California as it relates to the continuous improvement program in the Office of the President. And we get into all kinds of things like, you know, The first one was just like, hey, you're not in manufacturing, so how do you overcome that? Hey, we're not manufacturing, lean doesn't work here. Like, what do you do? And she does a lovely job sort of responding to that. Then we get into some of the actual tools and techniques that they're using. They're doing a lot of value stream mapping, and she kind of walks through like what they're doing to sort of remove waste and what kind of a waste they are removing and some of the benefits that they're realizing and just all kinds of good stuff. And again, if nothing else, you're going to leave this episode kind of, if your flame for continuous improvement is ever wavering, just listen to this episode because Kristin's going to blow on your flame and get it going again because she's full of energy and passion. So, this episode is 627. So, for the show notes, go to gembapodcast.com. Again, episode 627. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. Kristin, welcome to the show. How are you?

I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me. What an honor to be here after years of Oh, well, my pleasure.

Thanks for coming on. So where are you calling in from?

Calling in from San Diego, California. Not a bad place.

Yeah, as we were just talking before we hit record, so it's a real rough life you have to live out there in San Diego. What is it, like 78 degrees year-round or whatever?

Yeah, we're in the 60s, so people are wearing full snowsuits basically.

Yeah, okay, okay. I grew up in Ohio, so, you know, trust me, you don't know snowsuits. I was up there recently and I was like, Boy, forgot, you know, the real cold.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, it gets cold in Texas as well, but not like, uh, not like the Midwest. So yeah, good stuff. Well, Kristen, I know you've listened to the show and you know how we like to get things started. It's with our, our guest sharing a quote. So what do you got?

I love Peter Drucker. There's nothing as inefficient as doing it as doing efficiently that which should not be done in the first place.

Awesome.

Awesome.

Say it one more time.

There's nothing as inefficient as doing efficiently that which should not be done in the first place.

Oh my gosh. Yeah, that's so good. Yeah.

Yeah.

That guy had so much wisdom, didn't he?

It's so good. I don't think I've heard anyone share that quote before.

No, as a matter of fact, I mean, I've heard that before, but I don't know if it's ever been on the show before. So yeah, good one. Yeah.

It's a foundational component of a lot of my lean thinking. So I used to share it on almost every project because even if you have a great idea to lean something, the first question really is, do we need to have that process in the first place? So it's helpful.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. How many times have we, you know, optimized a non-value-add or something that didn't even happen, you know?

Exactly.

Yeah, no, that's a, that's a beautiful, uh, beautiful statement. All right, well, good stuff. Well, tell us a little bit about yourself, Kristen. Tell us about your, your background and how you first got involved in all this continuous improvement stuff and what you're up to these days.

Absolutely. So my name is Kristin Killick. I am the Director of Operational Excellence Center of Expertise at UC Office of the President. That is technically like the headquarters for the 10 campuses of the University of California. So we have 10 campuses, 6 health centers, and 3 national laboratories. If I can geek out just for a moment, because I take a lot of pride in the University of California, we have 300,000 students. There's 2.5 million alumni, and that turns out to be $21 million economic output, or $21 of economic output per $1 of state investment. And our academic health centers conduct about 4,900 clinical trials a year. And we have 74 Nobel Prizes, an average of 4 inventions a day, and about $55.8 billion to state gross domestic product. So as you can imagine, there's a lot of operations supporting that happening in the background.

How many students did you say there is?

300,000 students across the 10 campuses. So everything from UC San Francisco, UC San Diego, UCLA, Cal Berkeley, our first campus. Yeah, we have 300,000 students.

Now, is Berkeley the biggest one?

No, it's not. Oh my gosh, you're gonna— let's see, I should know by size. Um, I'm gonna have to fact-check myself because I don't want to say it wrong, but Berkeley is not our largest, and It's actually one of the smaller footprints. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Well, very interesting, but it is the oldest, so that is the original University of California.

Yeah. And a football team, right? Is there anything else?

Yes. And we have a football— Go Bears! Yeah. So the president's headquarters are located in Oakland near the original, um, Cal campus. Yeah.

Got it. Got it. All right. Well, good stuff. Well, hey, tell us a little bit about yourself, Kristen. Tell us about your background and, and really how you got involved in, in, in everything. Absolutely.

So I was thinking about today and how— what I really want to give back to this community, because I've listened to episodes, and when I think of my journey, I've always had a natural passion for Lean, as I imagine most listeners have. I started actually in sustainability in higher education. I've worked in higher ed for 19 years, the past 17 years at UC San Diego, and then recently at the headquarters for the UC system. And naturally just have been passionate about learning how can we reduce waste, how can we add value. I love thinking strategically. And from that, you know, working in sustainability, we had a new chancellor at UC San Diego who had an engineering background and two visionary leaders who said, you know, we want to bring lean. Bob Newhart, Ashley Gambier, give them full credit. I'm grateful. They were really forward-thinking in 2013 to say, universities can be applying this. And higher ed didn't have a lot of significant movement in Lean at that time. So, I was fortunate that they had the vision, and we started seeing it build momentum. And it was really exciting because I was part of a group called Operational Strategic Initiatives. So, we did everything from internal consulting, building strategic plans, to the Lean side and continuous improvement, operational excellence. And it really went back to what's your Northern Star? And the UC system is a premier, one of the best public universities in the entire world for our education and research. And how do we get our operations to also match that level of outstanding services being provided, best in the world, best in class? So, the chancellor thankfully had this Northern Star established around being service-oriented and was supportive of bringing Lean. And as you know, with change management, there was a lot of resistance. We would try to— I would joke that I was a translator because I wasn't using words like Ishikawa. I wasn't going to go in and try to tell these amazing leaders how to change. I was there to really facilitate and recognize their expertise, go to Gemba. And through that, we started seeing Lean take off. And then we had this common language start to develop where on projects, people could speak up and say, is this really value-add? And not feel uncomfortable by questioning something. So, after 17 or 16 years at UC San Diego, close to 17, I was working on some projects with the Office of the President. And their headquarters said, we were working on some, some other external consultants on optimizing processes. And the opportunity came up of what if we had this in-house? And instead of having external consultants fly in, you know, it can be quite expensive. What if we had this in-house and we actually empower our staff to have these tools and skill sets? We remove the jargon and make it easily accessible to people. So through that, I am now at the Office of the President starting this all over again. And our campuses are spreading. UCLA, I was doing a train-the-trainer for them on a Yellow Belt simulation that all of our UCs can tap into. And it's as simple as we show the 8 wastes and we do downtime for our acronym. And we like to follow it with what does that actually mean for anyone at the UC that whether you are in UC legal, we've had projects ranging from investigative drug services, our patient in the clinical side, every single person can identify waste. Remove it, eliminate it, reduce it, or control for it. That way, at the end of the day, our students can spend more time learning, our faculty are not having to go through the red tape and the bureaucracy, and our researchers are trying to save lives, get more of those Nobel Prizes, changing the world through the research of the UC. So that's how we've been doing it. We've been translating, you know, as soon as we talk about defect, they're like, okay, I can understand that a little bit, overproduction. But then when I say, raise your hand, how many of you have too many emails in your inbox? How many, how often are you copied on something that you don't need to be? And so then we get into value add. And if just that, those two things alone, I think are really powerful. If everyone looked at everything we did with a lens of consideration for service of the people, our stakeholders, Is this going to be value-add? Is there any inherent waste that I can remove or reduce or control for? So that was how I got here. Across the UCs, we've saved tens of millions of dollars, Ron. It's really exciting. Some of those projects, like, alone are getting millions of dollars. It's just a really exciting time. The health side has a lot of exciting things happening. A shout out to my previous— current mentor and my original boss, Ashley Gambier, UC San Diego Health. For all the listeners, follow what UC San Diego Health is doing, transformational healthcare, truly incredible on how do you bring lean to non-manufacturing industries and translate it in a way that we get higher quality, still efficient, but also avoiding risks because we have to be very careful. Yeah.

So, how did you, how did you first learn, like, and what got you interested in it? Like, just like day zero of your personal journey, like, what was it? Like, who taught you? How did you learn?

You know, yeah, I think it was that natural interest in— I love higher education and I wanted to be— have an impact. I've always been very driven around that. So when I started in sustainability, it was around how can I clean our air, clean our water, and save the university money while we're doing so? That was one of my first jobs out of college, and I started realizing I wanted to get my MBA so I could translate instead of speaking the language of environmental conservation, how do I speak to business leaders in a language that they'll understand for a power purchase agreement of solar panels? And it was through that work that I was working with other business leaders, and Ashley Gambier and Bob Newhart said, we're starting this internal consulting group at UC San Diego, Operational Strategic Initiatives. And I was one of the first staff to join.

Oh, nice.

And when they talked about lean, I actually hadn't heard about it. But it was such a natural fit of what I love to do, which is how do I empower people to get access to the tools and demystify? So much of Lean is really basic. I love— shout out to the Master Black Belt program, which I just completed. Reading the Toyota Way, you know, the 14 management principles are really something that every single person can apply. And just by— you don't have to go in and sell some new thing to people on a campus. So, when I was there, and I'd see people fly in with all the different jargon that we hear, and I had to convince them, this is not a flavor of the month. Lean is based on the scientific methodology, and we'll have a hypothesis. And then I started seeing small wins, and people started spreading it naturally on their own, and the excitement for it really took off. And we were seeing our IT department really lean into it, our academic affairs, have hiring staff to just focus on making sure we were serving our students in a way that is as efficient as possible and avoiding risk.

So I don't know. I mean, most people that, that I've worked with over the years and when they're not in your sort of traditional manufacturing environment, which obviously you're not sometimes, and I don't know if it happened with you, but sometimes, you know, you'll hear we're not manufacturing, you know, we're different. Like, I don't know. I'm sure everybody has been very easy to work with and you've never had any resistance or anything like that. But, but have you ever come across that? And then like, what advice do you have for maybe someone listening? They're like, yes, yes, I'm hearing it right now. What do you do in those situations?

It's a great question. I welcome all challenges. So I first think it's important to listen to concerns and the skepticism is legitimate because so often people hear something and they say, "I knew someone who did that and it didn't work." And I like to share that there's Lean and Six Sigma is a whole host of tools. And an effective leader will know which one is best to use strategically to help you with going back to your Northern Star, going back to my quote of, we don't want to do everything efficiently. I'm not going to ask you, I'm going to really think through where can we have the most impact and then how, which of the Lean tools will be the most important in helping you solve your problem. And usually, when we start from there, it opens doors that we're going to focus on what's the problem. And yeah, one tool is not going to be the perfect tool for every single thing. Even when we teach value stream mapping, people go, "But, you know, it doesn't do this or that." And I say, "Absolutely, that's why lean is not one tool, and it's not one framework even. It's really the combination of all these together that you get process improvement, and you start to see that momentum. So, I think for change management, just listening to people and knowing the importance of getting your senior leaders on board. So, I say people aren't afraid of change. If I were to offer you right now, Ron, do you want any brand new car? We're going to change your car. You can pick whichever one you want. Almost every 99% of people are going to say yes, absolutely. What we found though is people are afraid of the risk associated with it. So, when I come in and people hear, what is this new thing we're talking about? What is this agenda item or this new workshop? And they're afraid of the risks involved with that change. So, if we can go to Gemba and let them see that they are the experts, we are here to facilitate the problem-solving portion, we are the experts in the different lean tools, and we propose and recommend, here are the different ways You can now apply that. I think to our retirement services center, their leadership was wonderful. They said, you know, Ming said, "I want to use Lean A3 and start with that. You know, can you demystify it?" And their team, it clicked with them. And they said, "All right, we really want to lean into this root cause analysis with our leadership team for retirement services." And so, we met with them and we shared, there's so many tools when it comes to root cause analysis. But we want specifically for their situation, to walk through real examples using two of them, the cause-effect analysis. And then we use that to then segue into 5 Whys, where their leaders actually used a real example from UC. And then we did a train-the-trainer, did breakouts, and now that's something they can keep using, but also knowing, hey, this actually worked. But if it wasn't the perfect fit for the next problem they have, there's all these other root cause analysis tools we can tap into as well.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was, I was thinking when you were talking about just sort of like early in my journey, even just there's been times where, you know, people would ask you about how does this stuff work or this and that. And in my environment, I'm like, you know what, I don't know, but let's try. Would you be willing to try? And let's see what we learn, you know? And a lot of times just that, like, just, you know, because in the end we don't know, right? Like, we've got to, we got to let it play out and run the experiment, right? And see what we learn. But if you just have that courage to just try and let it know it's safe, you know, and if it doesn't work, we'll learn. So it still did work because we learned, right?

Yes, that's part of the scientific method. And I think it's really helpful in higher education specifically to connect it to the terms that they do know. There's a lot of Japanese terminology that once people like at UC San Diego while I was there and we started getting this this movement really created. I could use some of that language, but right, going back, I'm starting to build this program out for UC Office of the President. And so trying to speak in a way that considers my stakeholders, wearing a very lean hat of, if I'm going to meet the needs of the people I serve, I need to speak first and foremost in a way that communicates best to them.

Yeah, yeah, I love it, I love it. You mentioned value stream mapping just a bit ago. I'm wondering if, uh, I don't know if you have I mean, don't share any trade secrets or anything like that, but I'm curious to hear like some examples of maybe some of the maps that you guys have drawn up and what you've, what you've learned from them.

Yeah, I, we've done several that I started with, um, actually when I was consulting at UC Office of the President that ended up leading into the role that I'm in now where they said we want this and we actually want our team to keep doing this themselves. So, um, it was great. We led one for two different examples within Office of the President. We have a system-wide program at the University of California Agricultural and Natural Resources. So, we have staff members in all 58 counties across California. And system-wide programs are managed through our headquarters. And we were working with them specifically on HR. And what I love about the value stream map is I've seen some very complicated value stream maps that are very intimidating. But at the end of the day, if we just capture, capture the key components of, you know, what is happening, where is the time, what's our process time, where's the wait time, and then walking through with the team, I'd say one of the biggest takeaways consistently is that people have never done that before. And the aha moments, the low-hanging fruit of, I didn't realize they were also checking this. We almost every single time I've done one, people are going to have the aha, we get some quick wins. But then there's the bigger strategic projects that we identify at the end of it. So I like to do some multi-token voting, let them say after we walk through, we flag a waste walk. And I'm thinking with our UCANR team, they're just really committed with pursuing excellence and improvements. They said we're going to hire someone full-time. So I have, I've hired a team member to focus and support to support UCANR full-time. So, it's from that that we have enabled them to identify those opportunities, the big, the low-hanging fruit, let's knock those out, you know, just in time as much as we can, put those on a Kanban board. And then for the larger strategic projects planned for the next year, what can we do realistically 30, 60, 90 days in support of our strategic vision?

So I'm wondering if we talk a little bit about like maybe how you guys are structured. Like, do you have a team of folks that you work with, or is it—

yeah, you by yourself? I hired, uh, 2 team members that are organizational consultants. Uh, they're senior consultants, and they both have backgrounds in— they have their black belts. And actually, Tiffany Widmeyer, my— one of my teams, just got her master black belt. So we are just the three of us trying to drive change at the UC Office of the President. And when I started, it's only been one year that we've had us, but we've already focused on a strategic plan that I developed to support Rachel Nava, the COO for the entire system. And I have a wonderful leader, Tara Calmain, who is the executive director of UC Office of the President Operations. So I'm trying to create, you know, a northern star And going back to my original quote from Drucker, what are the things that we can really focus on as we start this effort? So I— it's small. We're small and mighty. And one of our team members is focusing on rolling up her sleeves and really making a change at the system-wide program for her first, um, really big project on transforming their procurement, procure-to-pay process. So, uh, we have to think very strategically and what we can take on. And it was through that, and a shout-out to my coach, John Knotts, from the Master Black Belt program for Gemba Academy, where I was excited to use some strategic planning tools that people don't really realize is associated with Lean. But if I'm going to do this right, I really need to ensure Rachel Nava, the COO, what her vision is cascades down, and that Tiara Calmagne, what she's envisioning. I'm supporting that, and everything we're doing is focusing on the highest impact with the appropriate amount of effort so that we can say yes to as many quick wins, but then pick a few strategic projects that will drive. And so through that, I was excited to do my first Ocean Connery X matrix. And, you know, that doesn't translate to everyone in higher education, to be honest with you. There's a lot of confusion on reading and So I have a couple versions of our strategic plan, one that models the UC office operation or UC operations strategic plan so that you can see the same structure and framework. And through that, we had 5 things we would focus on as the 3 of us. We were going to first empower people to— we can't do it all, so I need them to have the tools. So we have our Yellow Belt certifications. We now have 200 staff across OP certified and they're yellow belts. Yeah, it's exciting. And you really see a difference in the conversations that we're having, the questioning. I shared with you before the call, I was talking with IT trying to sort out some tech issues on my laptop, and they were proud. They're like, oh, let's get to the root cause, Kristen. They're joking, you know, it's nice to have that levity. And people are seeing how this applies not just in the office but outside as well. So that's the first thing we're doing is we're trying to create a movement. We are trying to give away as much as we can to allow people to make their jobs and their processes better because in the end, that's ultimately going to pay off for the student and the researchers and our patients. The second thing we're doing is we're picking a few of those big projects where we can be the consultants on them and we're driving them. So very sensitive projects, we will come in. And provide that institutional knowledge and expertise on operational excellence, whether it's wearing our change hat, our lean Six Sigma expertise. And that alone, just, I don't need to tell someone what a value stream map is. I can map out what they're doing using swim lanes and saying, flagging the key opportunities after speaking with stakeholders. So, we're driving some major projects. As part of our time as well. And then we're trying to connect people as our third goal. We want to bring them together and leverage the collective impact of the University of California. So we have a community of practice where people come together. We had a showcase of our local procurement last month, and they were talking about changes they made to some forms and how they used automation, and it was a Greenbelt project. So, we love bringing people together. We started an online channel so people can quickly say, hey, I'm working on this. Does anyone have experience? We have our office hours. We have a whole host of things for that third one. But it's really about we have to use our time really wisely and spend it on the right projects. And then fourth, we're focusing on AI and technology as a final component. And that's really important right now. You can't be operational excellence and not be thinking of technology. But we also can't just say, why don't we automate everything? I had a friend at UC Office of the President when I started say, in full honesty, Kristen, let's just automate it. You know, do we need to spend this time? And to that, I would say, I think that fourth goal is really important because lean and AI or automation, all those solutions operations, technological innovations, have to partner together to get good results, or else we'll just automate defects faster. And we don't want to make defects and more rework. So, first, leaning out the process, partnering with our tech teams and our division of innovation technology. So, those are what we're focusing on as a team, and it's been how we decide what to focus on. That's our northern one star. How do we help us truly elevate every operation so that it's world-class, just like our education and our research?

So something that we talked about a little bit before we hit record was one of your goals is to, um, correct me from— I think I'll say this right, but you want your whole sort of environment, the, the whole operational excellence environment, to be like a second nature, um, at the school. So that's, that's pretty ambitious. So like How's it going? And, like, and really, how are you measuring that, right? Like, if you think about, like, a practitioner, like, how do we gauge that? How do we measure that?

Yes, that's a really good question. So, we are focused on empowering our diverse workforce across all divisions to really create a movement and have that positive impact of demonstrated results from the transformative power of continuous improvement. We're early on. It's been one year. We're looking at key metrics like we have, we've had two cohorts of Greenbelt certified projects that target $40,000 in savings per project, and they have to be a UC Office of the President project. So now that we've graduated two cohorts, it's starting to see in certain areas where I'm working with leaders, especially on that transformational component, Shout out to Amy Brizuela, who heads up our Business Resource Center. UC Office of the President Local Procurement has trained almost all of their staff in Yellow Belts, and both of our cohorts had best-in-class presentations on their improvements through local procurement processes. And so I can see, you know, the savings. Both of those projects, two of them that were best-in-class, saved over $70,000 just by improving. But what I love is the, the litmus test. You know, we were at a celebration with our COO at the end of the year celebrating some of the different achievements, and when we were talking about improvements, someone from, uh, a friend leaned over and said, oh my gosh, the travel portal is so much better. The, that whole process, Kristen, is so much easier. So that to me is what gets me excited, is when we see the metrics but people feel the difference. So we're investing in empowering the teams. Now that same leader, part of what our team does is we have a tool at many of the campuses that does process documentation. And so we have a single source of truth. And now if I document onboarding for local procurement, I can now compare with Berkeley, who also has this process manager. I can also compare our maps with UC San Diego, and we can see best practices, we can see where who's done improvements to their processes. So that group, our local procurement, last year was really committed to continuous improvement. And so they did the training, they followed our approach of— they, thanks to Amy and her leadership and Tierra and her leadership, that not only are they getting trained, they're applying it on real projects, and we're seeing the savings, but also the lagging indicator of customer satisfaction. So we're going to have a customer satisfaction satisfaction survey this year. We're hoping to continue to see people feel improved processes.

Nice. Oh, this is so exciting. I just love hearing the energy and the excitement in your voice. It's, uh, it's lovely and refreshing. So great, great work so far. I can't wait to stay— I'm going to definitely have you back on down the road, and we'll, we'll keep tabs on how things are going. And, uh, um, obviously, you know, reach out to us here at Gemba Academy, anything we can do to support you. I know John he's just a phone call away. So, so reach out to him and, and, uh, well done. Um, any final words of wisdom or anything that you want to, uh, leave with the folks?

Yes. Okay, so I hold myself accountable to what I preach, and so this is to be really value-add. I do not want to waste anyone's time. I hope that everyone who listens to this will actually have a takeaway. If you don't have a takeaway, please reach out to me and let's connect. So I would love to support other people on their journeys because I really appreciate the mentorship. I tried to give a lot of shoutouts and I didn't even get to everyone, but thank you to you, Ron, as well, and Gemba Academy.

Yeah. And what's the best way for folks to connect with you?

LinkedIn. I need to be better at using it, but I will make that commitment now that I will look at it. Yeah.

And we'll, we'll link everything up in the show notes for everybody to go connect with, with Kristin. So, hey, thanks for coming on. And it's exciting to see all the good things you guys are working on. I can't wait to hear what's next.

Yes, looking forward to it. Take care, Ron.

Take care. Thanks for joining us today. We know the path to continuous improvement can be challenging to walk alone. That's why Gemba Academy exists, not just to provide training, but to be your partner in problem solving. Whether you're just taking your first step steps or leading a global transformation, our goal is to help you bridge the gap between knowing and doing. Beyond our library of Lean and Six Sigma resources, we're here to coach and guide you through your journey, whether that's through personalized support or joining us for a live training to get that immersive, hands-on experience. To learn more, go to gembaacademy.com.