4. Which roles are required to successfully implement Lean?

Many respondents mention the importance of having top management driving, or at least sponsoring, the Lean effort. However, a vast majority (over 80%) thinks that dedicated Lean resources are critical in order to get started and to quickly build knowledge and understanding of Lean and to get success stories. There are different names for what these roles are called, but in general two types of roles are mentioned many times:

• A central team sponsored by the CEO / DG or someone else in the executive management team. This central team should be a center of excellence with responsibility for methodology and best practice, training and communication plans among other things.
• Local Lean resources / improvement managers / change agents (full or part time) with competence about Lean and continuous improvement work who support and coach the line managers during implementation.

Some argue that the implementation can be driven by line people from the start, but at the same time say that it is hard to get enough focus and traction without dedicated resources.

"In a way it would be best if you did not have to assign dedicated resources and that the new way of working and acting is the responsibility of managers in the line organisation. But often Lean coaches are required to get things done and to constantly get focus on Lean. The risk with dedicated resources though, is that too much responsibility for the implementation is handed over to these resources."

A second part of this question was how these roles change with time as the organisation matures and the culture of continuous improvement sticks in the organisation. Here the answers differ more. Many think that it depends on the size of the organisation. Small companies can integrate Lean completely in the line organisation while large organisations need more central coordination and methodology development in a central function.

"It depends on the organisation, the culture and way of working how to proceed. You need to analyse that first. Our experience is that in the beginning we had dedicated resources working with a Lean project. With time Lean becomes "the way of working" in the organisation and we now have dedicated Lean leaders supporting the way of working and an organisation called Operational Excellence with different competences in methodology development, processes, training etc."