Staff photo: Peter Bartz-Gallagher
Tom Baumann, retiring head of Minnesota’s Enterprise Lean Program, says he “found the challenge of changing the culture of state government very rewarding.” He adds, “I certainly hope I have made a difference, and I hear that from people, but at the same time I know how transient things can be.”

What’s the problem?

That’s what Tom Baumann was searching for on his visits to various agencies and units of government. But getting the kind of specific, helpful feedback necessary to answer that question usually required him to offer up situational prompts and examples. So he’d ask if there were any processes used by the office that constantly generated public complaints, resulted in high employee turnover, or simply drove everybody crazy.

Of course there were. Dozens and dozens of times during Baumann’s 5½-year tenure as the director of continuous improvement for the Minnesota Department of Administration, people could identify the dysfunctions in their workplace. In response, after they’d kicked it around for a while, Baumann would often recommend that a small group — say, between seven and nine of them — would meet for a few days to come up with ways to address the problem.

This ongoing effort at internal government reform is known in Minnesota as the Enterprise Lean Program, and was initiated at the end of 2007. Until he retired in June, after 38 years in state government, Baumann was the program’s only manager. Understand that in this case, the word “lean” does not mean to push — by nature and by training, that is not Baumann’s way. No, the lean Baumann and his cohorts at the Capitol were after is the one described in the dictionary as “thin, especially healthily so; having no superfluous fat.”

Among Lean’s real-world success stories, it is saving the state nearly a million dollars per year by reducing the amount of staff time necessary to hear and process appeals regarding personal care attendants (PCAs) at the Department of Human Services. It has cut the time it takes for the Department of Labor and Industry to grant or renew construction licenses by nearly two-thirds, from 29 days to 10 for new licenses and from 10 days to 4 days for renewals.

“Lean boils down to a couple of key principles,” Baumann says. “It doesn’t spend a lot of time on structure, it focuses on process. If somebody walks in to apply for something from the county or the state, what are the day-to-day individual tasks, in excruciating detail, of how that work gets done? Another key is that [Lean] isn’t big shots coming in telling people, ‘This is what we do.’ It engages the people who are actually doing the work.

“So those are the two underpinnings.” he says. “After that, it is, ‘How do we create value for the customer?’ Because a lot of the work we do doesn’t create that value; it is done for a hundred other reasons.”

As an example, Baumann cited what used to happen when people wanted to lodge complaints against a licensed psychiatrist at the state Board of Psychiatry. They would fill out a form and mail it into the board, where it would be entered four different ways in four different formats, including a spreadsheet, a database and a file folder.

“It can become a ‘cover your backside’ thing, where, you never know if the computer is going to crash so keep a hard copy, or maybe a manager remembers that this is the way it has been done for 30 years,” Baumann explains. “We need to understand what is the risk and what is the cost. We get a lot of talk in the media and from politicians saying nothing can go wrong. So we go to extraordinary lengths to try to reduce that risk, and wind up spending $20 to save a dollar.”

A DNR background

Baumann had an oddly appropriate college training for his eventual task of studying process and creating efficiency — forestry. After being born and raised in White Bear Lake and attending Hill High School (now Hill-Murray), he received his B.S. in forest management from the University of Minnesota and joined the Department of Natural Resources. But he also had a background in journalism and thus was soon moved into the DNR’s Bureau of Information Services for 13 years. During that time, he joined the nonprofit Minnesota Council for Quality, a clearinghouse for information and practices designed to improve performance for businesses.

“On the council, I quickly realized that the stuff they were talking about was applicable not only to the making of cars and toasters, but to government, because we have customers who need quality service too,” Baumann says.

As Baumann began keeping up with the literature on the subject, he encountered the writings of James Womack, who co-authored a series of books looking at efficient business management, based on the success of Toyota, and founded the Lean Enterprise Institute in 1997. While giving credit to Womack, Baumann stresses that the principles of Lean have been around for a century or more, although its application to the public sector has only occurred in earnest over the past decade or so.

The person who initiated the Lean program in Minnesota was Dana Badgerow, a former Honeywell executive appointed by then-Gov. Tim Pawlenty to be commissioner of the Department of Administration. Badgerow, who left the department in 2009 to become President and CEO of the Better Business Bureau of Minnesota and North Dakota, thought the Lean principles would be a good fit here, making Minnesota only the second state, after Iowa, to implement the program.

Baumann, who had left information services and spent the past six years as an associate director of the DNR division of forestry, was interested in a late-career change. His background in communications, time on the Council of Quality, and familiarity with the rudiments of Lean and other performance-enhancement philosophies made him a good candidate in a job where the manager would have to sell the program — not only to the 24 cabinet-level state agencies, but to counties that are frequently process-partners with the state in areas such as veterans benefits and human services. That said, he still underwent intensive training in the program after taking the job in December 2007.

It was predictably slow going at first. “A few agencies were willing to try the tools, but there was a lot of hesitancy. People were saying that they’d done this before and there was this attitude of ‘here we go again,’” Baumann says. He credits the open-minded agencies that helped him establish a positive track record, citing the state departments of Health and Human Services and Corrections, the Pollution Control Agency and the counties of Anoka, St. Louis and Olmsted.

As Lean salesman, Baumann adopts a distinctly Minnesotan mien of self-effacement when discussing his success. When pressed, he acknowledges that “we have done hundreds of improvements that have made a tangible increase in the value of service, either in the reduction of costs for the taxpayer or time for the customer. But I always tell people, don’t take my word for it; go do a couple of projects, and you will see a dramatic improvement in process if you do it right.”

Asked if there aren’t times when redundancy is a good thing — say, safety procedures at a nuclear facility — Baumann chuckles and replies, “Well, we don’t manage nuclear facilities, but we do manage a lot of taxpayer money, and there needs to a division of responsibility there to make sure it is managed properly. So in some cases there needs to be redundancy, but again, it is about balancing risk and cost.”

And because Lean is about process, Baumann believes the process is never perfect, and that vigilance in search of quality is warranted. “We should be constantly adapting to changes in technology and ways in which the process is able to deliver better value,” he says. “It is a journey without end.”

Calling it a day

But Baumann’s own journey is now taking him beyond Lean into retirement. He speaks of his recently-completed career and his coming free time with a mixture of satisfaction and peace of mind. He certainly won’t miss the 40-mile commute to St. Paul from his 80-acre tree farm in Isanti, right near where his wife, Kathy, was born, went to school and then taught for 38 years in the Cambridge-Isanti school district. She also retired this summer, enabling them to spend more time at their cabin near Bemidji, where Baumann vows to “drown a few leeches” fishing, and a trip to Alaska this August is also on the agenda.

Looking back, Baumann says he “found the challenge of changing the culture of state government very rewarding” but, being a process guy, understands that most everything is mutable.

“I certainly hope I have made a difference, and I hear that from people, but at the same time I know how transient things can be,” he says. “When politics are involved, things can disappear.”

Noting that the Lean program in Iowa was jeopardized by a change in party control of the governor’s office, he is thankful that Gov. Mark Dayton renewed his support for Lean after succeeding Pawlenty and that Lean enjoys bipartisan backing the Legislature.

“There is recognition that Lean is not a quick deal,” Baumann says. “Done right, you can avoid the finger-pointing and figure out how to work together. And there are so many little building blocks that go into making sure that happens.”

Tom Baumann was one of them.

The Baumann File

Name: Tom Baumann

Age: 60

Grew up in: White Bear Lake

Lives in: An 80-acre tree farm in Isanti, with a cabin in Bemidji

Education: B.S. in forest management from the University of Minnesota

Family: Wife, Kathy; two children: a son, 25; and a daughter, 23

Hobbies: Fishing, tree-farming, freelance journalism

Interesting factoid: “I like to pretend I know what I’m doing when I play the guitar.”