Everyone knows the story; a few years back, after Eric Wolf, a Business Data Analyst with the Denver Department of Finance, took Denver Peak Academy’s Black Belt Training, he started innovating. And not just innovating, but changing the way the City and County of Denver, and its innovative employees, solve problems.
One of the first things he did was decided to collaborate with Denver’s Department of General Services, and Technology Services, to improve the Conference Room Scheduling Process in Denver’s Wellington Webb Building (Webb Building). And why not? Denver did it at Denver’s International Airport (DEN/DIA).
According to Eric Wolf and others, “rooms at the Webb Building were double booked due to lag in approval time or lack of cancelations. An actual person spent five to six hours per week getting requests, opening them, checking the schedule for that room, ensuring there were no conflicts, resolving conflicts, approving requests; manually processing cancelations, Etc. Employees could not see the availability of the room concerning other rooms, or concerning an invitees’ schedule.”
And that was just the beginning if you spoke to anyone back in 2014 and most of 2015, Denver employees agreed with Eric’s perspective, with a familiar anecdote alongside a funny expression. The Conference Room Scheduling System was not the most popular kid in school, but it was not the most disliked. Over a period of roughly eight months (not exclusively), Eric Wolf, alongside his change agents, planned, executed, checked, and acted on their analyses of the Conference Room System, thus delivering time savings to the employees and customers of Denver’s Webb Building.
Eric, his ability to collaborate, and be persistent in spite of the weight of improving the Webb Building’s Conference Room System, helped the Webb Building Improvement Team decrease actual human time lost, and countless soft dollars wasted. Moreover, Eric and his cohort helped improve meeting room requests in the Webb Building by more than 90%. Furthermore, these innovations saved about 20k per year of an actual Denver employee’s time, which also helped efficiently reprioritize that employees workload.
Eric and his cohort, through research, trust, and a few Denver Peak Academy tools, like Standard of Work (SOW/instruction guides) and Gemba Walks, turned the Webb Building’s Room Scheduling Process around wholly; time spent scheduling a conference room in the Webb Building decreased by roughly 95%.
In the end, Eric’s story teaches one that there is always room for improvement, and leveraging cohorts or evidence-based solutions can easily result in the elimination of “deadweight time loss.” But most importantly, true change comes from within and “being the change you want to see,” is the first step towards continuous improvement.
Innovate, elevate, and repeat.
JerraudPeakAcademy
Jerraud Coleman is a creative, positive and hardworking Performance Improvement Specialist for the City and County of Denver’s Peak Academy. Alongside a great team of professionals, he facilitates process improvement events, trains employees of governments, non-profits and other enterprises (nationally, abroad and at all levels) in the principles and methods of “Lean” and other change management tools like PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act/Adjust). Jerraud believes that “sharing and talking about these tools can help enterprises identify and sustain the elimination of any waste found within any process. Thus resulting in happier customers, a more effective and efficient process, as well as a better product or service overall.”
Jerraud holds a BFA (in Integrated Arts) from the University of Colorado, Boulder.
