Dozens of local business executives will coordinate with eight Detroit city departments over the next eight weeks on an initiative that launched Tuesday to use lean process and management principles to bolster city services.
“Project Lean,” which got underway with a meeting at Detroit Public Safety Headquarters, will deploy 18 teams of city employees and volunteers from 23 businesses. Those teams will prepare reports for city officials on current operations and possible improvements by mid-July.
The event follows a request that Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan made at Crain’s Newsmaker of the Year luncheon in February for business executives at the event to offer leaders willing to come teach — and apply — lean principles to government agencies.
Duggan told an audience of about 65 executives, city department heads and some support staff taking part Tuesday that he also had attended about a dozen forums with city employees about ways to improve operations.
The employees have many valuable ideas, Duggan said, even if some have encountered resistance from bureaucratic management or political concerns.
“It’s been a while since anyone came to these groups of people and asked them what can be done to make your job better or make you more effective at it,” he said. “And that’s going to be a completely foreign experience to many in this work culture.”
Senior manager Michael Held at Deloitte Consulting LLP in Detroit is overseeing the project management office, which is setting the schedule and coordinating with the 18 project teams. Other local companies to send volunteers to Project Lean include PriceWaterhouse Coopers LLP and Plante Moran PLLC.
“Once those reports come in, those proposed changes that then get approved would have to go to implementation — whether that process in each case takes a few weeks or ten months,” Held said.
The teams will be assigned to four projects apiece within the city’s departments of Public Works; Public Lighting;and Buildings, Safety Engineering and Environment; as well as others in its finance and human resources departments, general services, Department of Transportation and IT services, led by Chief Information Officer Beth Niblock.
“Successful businesses, when you analyze them, are very good at taking care of the really boring stuff. And governments, that are used to getting management decisions from elected officials, sometimes are not,” Duggan said. “So we are trying to turn around the culture here, and I think you’re going to find that many of the employees are very willing to change it.”
