After a unanimous vote at Wednesday’s Finance, Efficiency, Economy and Sustainability subcommittee meeting, a first step was made in the creation of a team designed to make city government more efficient.
“Although we aren’t talking about personal fitness programs, we are going to be looking at the fitness of the organization of the city of Phoenix as a whole,” said Mario Paniagua, deputy city manager.
The idea behind forming a “Lean Team” comes from a waste-elimination methodology known as Lean Six Sigma. The Lean Team’s main goal would be to make government processes more productive and useful with the resources we have been given, Paniagua said.
“Lean Six Sigma is actually a combination of processes,” he said. “It’s about process improvement and making the city better for our citizens.”
Creating a Lean Team could cost the City of Phoenix $50,000-$60,000, according to Paniagua’s “guesstimate.”
Paniagua said the goal for Phoenix would be to train a team of 20 to 25 city workers in the Lean Six Sigma strategy. The city would then send those members of the team out to different departments of our government to see how they could streamline processes.
Lean Six Sigma is actually a combination of two processes. The methodology of Lean started with Toyota in 1970s, while Six Sigma started with Motorola in 1980s. These methods were not related to government; rather, they aimed to streamline production and eliminate waste.
Melissa Sweinhagen, deputy public transit director, discussed some of the successes of other cities and organizations that have implemented Lean Six Sigma. Some of these locations include Lane County, Oregon; Fort Wayne, Indiana; Hartford, Connecticut; and Washington Department of Licensing.
Marshall Pimentel, a city worker, raised his concerns in a statement to the committee that he used to be employed with Motorola and saw them input the Six Sigma process. He said he also saw his job disappear.
“Motorola is no longer the electronic powerhouse it used to be,” he said. “They are no longer in the [competitive] field, much less the race.”
District 3 Councilman and committee chair Bill Gates said there were probably other things involved in Motorola’s fall and said he saw the strategy as a successful one.
“It’s not about reducing positions at all,” Gates said. “It’s about making the processes better, and we have a lot of processes in this organization as the sixth largest city.”
Contact the reporter at melissa.szenda@asu.edu.
