Creating an Enterprise Excellence Control Room for Auckland Leisure

When our Continuous Improvement programme at Auckland Leisure was rolled out to 22 leisure facilities we felt that we needed something to help us to monitor our progress and the ROI on all these activities.

Our somewhat creative and slightly crazy solution was to commandeer an unused squash court at Alan Brewster Leisure Centre, and to bring a visual management approach to tracking our overall performance.

After all the purpose of visual management is to manage and improve our operations and ensure our resources are targeted and deployed.

On one wall we have our “Dashboards”, these track at a glance our key performance indicators and alignment to our overall strategies. By breaking in down into geographic areas we can see where we need to place our emphasis.

We have devised measures against CI – Our Basecamp for operational excellence, Winning Culture, Customer Satisfaction. Operational Excellence, Health and Safety and our strategic goal of Activating Aucklanders.

The other side of the squash court we are building up a project gallery of the Lean Practitioners and their teams, and the projects that they’re working on.

We will be using these facilities for ongoing training and planning, as Auckland Leisure continue to build their capabilities this year to cement the gains to date.

The impact of this visual content has been improved engagement and communication with our Lean Practitioners, Lean Coaches and Centre Managers, they responded to the Control Room with renewed energy. In particular, they told us that they valued:

• Seeing how the projects they worked on fitted with the overall strategy, known as the ‘Game Plan’.
• Helped them to easily identify where to target improvement activities and see where progress had stopped or stalled.
• See what has been achieved at other facilities and benchmark their own progress.

As a squash court a lot of sweat and effort went into their game, and with its new lease of life, we’re all pulling together to do the same with the “Game Plan”!