I’ve noticed the topic of “sustainability” is piquing the interest of an awful lot of businesspeople of late. I believe it’s an issue worthy of serious consideration but I have a few questions before I proceed:

• How are we defining the term? Do we agree on what it means?
• Is there anyone on the inside (developing sustainability policies, setting sustainability objectives, implementing sustainability practices and procedures, etc.)?
• Are most of us aligned with the status quo (i.e., standing on the shore, waiting for some other fool or brave soul to test the water)?

There are plenty of references to sustainability floating around the web. In Quality, we continually refer to a practice known as the “5S’s”, the key “S” being “sustainability”. Sustainability is often linked with the construction business, LEED certification being the hottest topic in the industry. Our friends at ISO – the International Organization for Standardization – have issued a number of standards that directly or indirectly address the issue, such as:

• ISO 15932, “Sustainability in Building Construction – General Principles“;
• The ISO 15686 series on “Building and Construction Assets – Service Life Planning“; and
• ISO 14001, “Environmental Management Systems“.

I’m curious to know what all of you think, so I’ve started a poll on LinkedIn — look for “What’s the status of your organization’s ‘sustainability program’?”. For those of you who have a LinkedIn account, I hope to hear from you soon. (For those who don’t, it costs nothing to sign up.) I’ll post the results for you in the near future.

Thank you for your time, as always.

Steve

What’s the value of process improvement? One way to look at it is by examining the reason for having a quality system in the first place. Let’s start by understanding the basics of six sigma, which define the maturity level of an organization’s management system. By that, we don’t just mean just a quality management system, but your entire system of management.

Sigma Levels

• 1 sigma = 67% error rate (or “2 out of 3 transactions are in error”)
• 2 sigma = 33% error rate (1 out of 3 transactions in error)
• 3 sigma = 6.7% error rate (1 out of 15 transactions in error)
• 4 sigma = 0.63% error rate (1 out of 160 transactions in error)
• 5 sigma = 0.02% error rate (1 out of 4,300 transactions in error)
• 6 sigma = 0.00034% error rate (1 out of roughly 290,000 transactions in error)

We define a system as “in control” when an organization’s processes exhibit a “3 sigma” (6.7%) or lower error rate.  If your organization has not defined its processes, effectiveness criteria, and competencies, it’s more likely that you’re at a 1 or 2 sigma level.  In order to achieve the “3 sigma” level, your company must consistently make no more than 6.7 errors per hundred — that’s a 93.3% success rate.

“Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service,
to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs.”
From W. Edwards Deming’s “Fourteen Points”

Are You Operating at a 93.3% Success Rate?

Let’s say you see 60-70% as normal, which is about 2 sigma (66% success). The “delta”, or difference, between 2 and 3 sigma is about 27%. We believe that by adopting a quality process improvement program, you should see your success rate rise from 66% to 93%.  That’s a 41% improvement over your current rate! What organization wouldn’t be interested in that?

Once you hit 3 sigma, your next goal is to improve to a 4 sigma level, then 5 sigma, and finally 6 sigma (which is as close as you can realistically get to “zero defects” in most operations).

Now quantify the benefit.  What is 27 percentage points of success worth to your customers? The cost of implementing a six sigma process improvement program is small compared to the benefits to your customer (and, of course, to your bottom line). Process improvement practically guarantees customer retention, and can lead to customers advocating for you.

But if that’s not for you, don’t implement a quality program. Learn to live with a 2 sigma error rate — and hope your customers can live with it, too.

Are you a “good” boss?  Google’s “Project Oxygen” has taken a lot of time — a couple of years, actually — to study what makes a good boss. Their “people analytics” staff has come up with eight key attributes of good managers within their organization.¹ Among those eight attributes are:

• Technical expertise (as you might expect of a tech firm like Google);
• Having a clear vision and strategy for “the team”;
• Helping your employees with career development;
• Be productive and results-oriented; and
• Be an effective and empathetic leader.

What shouldn’t surprise us is that of the eight attributes of a good manager, the “ability to work well with one’s employees” was ranked first in Google’s study. “Technical expertise”, which Google had considered an absolute necessity to being a team leader, was ranked at the bottom.

You may recall that in the Bizmanualz blog, we’ve talked about the qualities of great leaders and what makes true leaders different from others.   Mostly, what separates leaders from mere managers are those intangible qualities, those “quirks” of personality that stump psychologists and sociologists to this day.

What makes for a good manager and exactly how do we quantify it? Well, it’s been tried — a number of times — but Google is putting their own spin on the concept. Despite past failings elsewhere, the people at Google think it’s possible to make the process of grooming leaders a reliable, repeatable process. Their goal is to make the process of hiring and training leaders like any other human resources procedure.

This should be welcome news to every other HR department if Google’s HR can do it right. Managing people, with all their complexities and variations, is (at best) extremely difficult and statistical analysis is helpful only to a point. The chief problem with “data driven management” is that people can’t easily be reduced to a set of predictable behaviors and outcomes — we are only human. Every statistic has to be taken with a grain of salt² but even more so when human behavior is the focus.

I’m going to follow Google’s Project Oxygen to see if there’s any merit to it. I sincerely hope so but I don’t harbor lofty expectations, either. Google may have a world of resources behind them but — people being people – it’s not a sure bet that Project Oxygen will deliver the goods.

So, what do you think? Can Google be successful — at something not so technical — when many other companies before them haven’t been?

NOTES

¹Bryant, Adam, “Google’s Quest to Build a Better Boss”, New York Times, 12 March 2011 — http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/business/13hire.html.

²Seife, Charles, Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception, Viking Press (23 Sept 2010). ISBN-13 #978-0670022-16-8.

Anyone will tell you it’s impossible to know how well your business is doing if you aren’t taking measurements. Those same people will tell you you have to measure the “right” things.

Yes, it’s just that simple…or so they’d have you believe. How do you know you’re measuring the right things, though?

W. Edwards Deming

W. Edwards Deming was one of the pioneers of management by measurement. Dr. Deming recognized that all processes are flawed — some more than others — and that variation can and does occur at every step in a process. The causes of that variation need to be identified and reduced if product quality is to be improved.

Deming believed that organizations must continually monitor and measure their processes. He taught that process data should be examined by managers to determine the causes of variation, eliminate them, and improve the process. This idea became known as the “Plan-Do-Check-Act” (PDCA) cycle.

The “plan” phase of the cycle is where, among many things, you state the goals you have in mind for the process. What are the expected results? In other words, how do you know the process works if you’re not tracking (measuring) its progress?

Your objectives have to be SMART – specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. If your objectives aren’t all of the above, your best-designed process plan is still doomed to failure.

Specific – Define your objectives in concrete terms (i.e. increase by 50%); fuzzy won’t do.

Measurable – Objectivity is the key here. Weight, time, growth, revenue — these are things we can measure with ease. We can’t measure “goodness”, “attractive”, or “quality” with certainty; they’re all relative (and subjective) terms.

Attainable – Your objectives must be realistic. Perfection is impossible, especially the first time around. No process is 100% efficient — variation will occur. One of your implied objectives is to reduce the variation in your process.

Relevant – While increased efficiency and decreased variation do result in cost savings, not every process can be directly measured in terms of euros, yen, or dollars saved. Make sure the people directly involved with the process can understand the process objectives.

Time-bound – Efficiency is determined by comparing output with various costs, like time and money (e.g., dollars per hour, units produced per minute). Even with pure research and development projects, you don’t have an infinite budget; you have to say, “We need tangible results by ‘x’ date.”

Does any of this ensure you’ll be measuring the right stuff from the outset? Well, no. You’ll actually have to rely on experience and research to help you set objectives the first time through. But, once you have the process in place — you’ve been through the “plan” phase and now you’re “doing” it — you’ll be gathering enough data from your process that you can “check” it and determine if you’re headed in the right direction.

You then “act” on that information and make corrections, if necessary. That’s the surest way to know — keep measuring and comparing as you reiterate the process.

Any questions? Comments?

What are procedures? Procedures are documents that describe business processes. Procedures are one tool we can use to train new and current employees how our processes work, and sometimes we show them how processes interact. Procedures can also help ensure a high degree of consistency in how processes operate and in the results they yield.

From "We Want Our Mummy", Columbia Pictures (1938)

Procedures are also a pain for many companies to write and maintain. Many organizations write procedures with one goal in mind — compliance. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Either there’s a compelling business reason for you to comply, like a larger organization that says they won’t do business with you unless you comply with a certain standard, such as ISO 9001. Or, there are laws with which you have to comply simply to stay in business (for instance, worker safety and food safety regulations).

Strangely, when compliance is the most important — or the only — goal, companies often forget about their procedures once they’ve implement them. Instead of monitoring and measuring, reviewing, and adjusting their performance — gradually and continually improving the process — they put the Almighty Book of Policies and Procedures in a hallowed place on the shelf and ignore it.

From "vodex.co.uk" site

Why is that? Well, here’s what some companies say about procedures:

• “Writing procedures isn’t our business”
• “It’s a cost center, not a moneymaker”
• “It takes time and money to maintain procedures”

Writing Procedures Isn’t Our Business

It’s true — your customers aren’t buying your internal procedures. What ARE they buying? Yes, they’re purchasing a product…but is it just the product or service they’re buying? Of course not.

Besides paying for goods or services, your customers are paying for the quality of your product, your ability to produce a consistently good product, and/or your ability to act on problems quickly and efficiently. They like the fact that you don’t make excuses — you just fix problems. And how do you do that without implementing effective policies and procedures, like “how to conduct an internal audit” or “how to take corrective action“? You might, if you’re lucky, but luck doesn’t guarantee your customers consistently high-quality results.

Procedure Writing Is a Cost Center

True, it costs you time and money to develop, implement, and maintain procedures. The fact that you have to research, write, review, and approve procedures can appear expensive and time consuming.

But what does it cost you NOT to have procedures? Like we said earlier, effective internal procedures are what help you gain and keep customers. Without the high quality and consistency that procedures help ensure, you risk losing your hard-earned reputation — and your hard-won customers. It’s much easier to keep a satisfied customer than it is to obtain a new one and it’s infinitely easier to keep them than it is to win them back once you’ve disappointed them.

It Takes Time and Money to Maintain Procedures

“Besides”, many companies insist, “our people know what they have to do. They don’t need procedures once they have the proper experience ‘under their belts’.” But how did your employees get that knowledge in the first place? Were they given in-depth training? Was the training consistent? Are they able to build on that knowledge?

Besides, business circumstances change (look at the recession we still seem to be going through). Customers’ needs change over time. Regulations are added all the time — some don’t affect you but others have a great impact on your business. Are you accounting for these types of change in your procedures?

In short, maintaining your procedures will cost you something but not maintaining them will cost your company a great deal more. You run the risk of falling behind your competition, falling to the back end of the technology curve, or falling out of compliance if you’re not looking at your procedures as “living documents”. If you’re not continually looking to improve the way you do things, you run the risk of stunting your company’s growth.

To sum up, you really should develop, implement, and maintain business procedures because it’s just plain good business and not just because somebody’s making you.

What do you think? Can an organization’s growth be held back because of poor or nonexistent procedures?

* * * * * * *

If you find your company is having trouble developing effective, meaningful procedures, check out our full line of business policies and procedures. They’ll make your policies-and-procedures journey easier to start and make it easier for you to stay on the right path.

For many companies, it’s that time of year — time for year-end performance reviews. Time to see if we can find our performance reviews from last year, or head over to Human Resources to get a copy. For managers, time to dust off the performance reviews from last year and see if anything’s changed.

If you’re like most of us, you haven’t kept a daily diary of your accomplishments, so you have to construct an account of the last 12 months from long-buried memories in just a few days. You don’t bother listing your close calls, almosts, and never-weres — you need to put a positive spin on your year.

You might go into the review feeling you did a “more-than-adequate” job, even if you can’t quantify it exactly. Then again, you might approach the review with a sense of foreboding. You’re not well prepared. Maybe you feel like you’re going to get slammed. Maybe you wish the shoe were on the other foot. Maybe you wish everybody would just forget about it.

The performance review, as most of us know it, is a broken process. Lately, there appears to be a groundswell of support for the idea of doing away with performance reviews. According to an article in a recent Wall Street Journal, many HR professionals are “frustrated that managers don’t have the courage” to give constructive feedback.

In an interview from July, 2010, UCLA business professor Samuel Culbert said that performance reviews should be dispensed with altogether because annual reviews don’t promote candid discussions about problems in the workplace or their potential solutions.

Going back to 2006, the Harvard Business School’s “Working Knowledge” page ran an article by James Heskett, one of the HBS faculty, in which he called into question the main objective of performance reviews. Professor Heskett asked, “Is (the objective) to weed out poor performers? To recognize the so-called A players? To provide the basis for compensation decisions?” He concluded that we don’t do a good job of establishing or communicating objectives.

W. Edwards Deming, one of the gods of quality, called the performance review one of the “deadly diseases of management“. You’re not going to find a much stronger indictment than that.

It’s been a few years since I’ve had a formalized performance review. The manager in question got much more out of the typical performance review because he always had the performance of the group in mind. He linked my performance to that of my teammates, which helped create and maintain a team ethos.

Unfortunately, his type of performance review wasn’t the norm. Too often, the performance review is an exercise with no apparent purpose, except to satisfy a regulatory requirement or follow a decades-old policy. We go through the motions but don’t accomplish anything. By conducting performance reviews the way we do, we miss so many opportunities for improvement.

We all deserve better from this “process”.

* * * * * * *

I’m currently conducting a performance review poll on LinkedIn. Please drop in (it’ll only take 10 seconds, if that) and register your opinion. Or, post a comment below.

What do you think? Do performance reviews work for your company or your group? Or, do you think the performance review should’ve been retired with the mechanical adding machine and green eyeshades?

* * * * * * *

REFERENCES

• Light, Joe, “Human Resource Executives Say Reviews Are Off the Mark”, Wall Street Journal (Nov 7 2010) – http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704405704575596723632340284.html
• NPR Staff, “Annual Job Review Is ‘Total Baloney,’ Expert Says”, NPR-dot-org (Jul 8 2010) – http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128362511
• Heskett, Jim, “What’s to Be Done About Performance Reviews?”, HBS Working Knowledge (Nov 27 2006) – http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5563.html
• “Management’s Five Deadly Diseases – a Conversation with Dr. W. Edwards Deming”, Encyclopedia Brittanica Educational Corporation , 1984 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehMAwIHGN0Y. (Video is approx. 15 minutes long.)

FURTHER READING

• Peralta, Eyder, “Top 10 Performance Review Euphemisms”, NPR-dot-org (Nov 9 2010) – http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2010/11/09/131189907/top-ten-performance-review-euphemisms

What message are you trying to get across in your procedures? To whom? Is your message getting through? How do you know?

“What message am I supposed to get across, besides ‘This is how you’re supposed to do it’?”, you may ask. To that I reply (in the form of a question), “Are we talking ‘procedures‘? Or ‘work instructions‘?”

If the activity is fairly simple:

• There might be more than one way to do it, but none of them is longer than 6-7 steps;
• It doesn’t require a lot of parts, tools, or prep time; and/or
• It’s not being done by a broad, diverse group of people;

we’re talking about work instructions. An example is “loading a smartphone app”:

• Use a search engine to find an app that does what you want;
• Go to a web site that has the app; and
• Download the app and install it on your smartphone.

Many tasks are simple and straightforward so that an employee can be trained in minutes just by showing them how it’s done and letting them do the task repeatedly until they have it right. You don’t need to write a work instruction (or a procedure) when:

• It would take less time to show someone than to write and test a work instruction; and/or
• The risk of failure is minimal (i.e., the probability of failure is small-to-nonexistent, as is its impact).

If you can’t afford the risk, either don’t do it or reduce your risk by documenting the process.

Which brings us to procedures. Procedures are documented processes. The processes may be so complex that they can’t be reduced to a set of work instructions. A process may also consist of a number of processes. The process may cross departmental and/or hierarchical boundaries.

In all cases, it’s important to communicate certain concepts clearly and effectively in your procedures, such as:

• Purpose;
• Roles and responsibilities;
• Scope; and
• The company’s policy on that subject.

If you’re not communicating these points to your intended audience — if your message is being lost in translation — here are some things you can do to help:

1. Add graphical content. If I tell you, “Enter your user name and password and hit [Login]“, you probably know what that means, regardless of what application I’m talking about. But, what if you don’t?

Procedures are primarily designed to train (and retrain) people to perform complex processes and/or processes they don’t perform often. If you’re unfamiliar with logging in, it’d be helpful to you if I showed you what that looks like, wouldn’t it?

(Don’t you love the warmth of that light bulb that goes “on” in your head as you say, “A-ha!”?)

2. Use active voice. It’s more direct. It leaves less room for interpretation. For example, which of the following makes more sense:

• “An internal audit program shall be prepared annually by the lead Quality Auditor before the end of the current calendar year”?, or
• “The lead Quality Auditor shall prepare next year’s interal audit program before the end of the current calendar year”?

3. Write as if you’re talking to one person. Picture yourself trying to teach a procedure to someone who’s not at all familiar with it or the company, like a new hire.

That’s the procedure’s audience and that’s how you should write all procedures — as if it’s just you and the trainee at the computer, machine, etc.

4. Tell your audience “why”. The new hire in #3, above, should have been through a general company orientation — the company’s lines of business, how long it’s been in business, the vision and mission statements, company objectives, etc. — by now. They need all that background to understand how this procedure fits into the grand scheme (that is, how the process helps the company achieve its objectives, or “why they’re learning the procedure”).

If you don’t tell them why, they’re liable to ask themselves at some point, “Why am I doing this?” You may not agree with — or like — the answers they come up with on their own. This may be counterproductive.

5. Simplify, simplify, and simplify. My favorite example is the Swiss Army knife¹. The more expensive variations have nearly every tool you might possibly need. Capable of doing a hundred things, it does none of them well. I’ll take a tool box with me on a camping trip; you bring your Swiss Army knife.

Champ 28 Swiss army knife, by Wenger

Is my kit heavier? Yes! Is it stowable in the glove box?² No! But will your saw cut anything larger or heavier than string cheese? Will your knife cut nylon rope? Will your hammer…wait…you don’t have one. (I will credit you the beer and wine bottle openers, however.)

My point is you should keep your procedures like your tools — simple, functional, and easy to use.

Remember these five techniques for improving your procedures:

1. Add graphical content;
2. Use active voice;
3. Write like you’re talking to an audience of one;
4. Tell the reader “why”; and
5. Keep it simple

…and your procedures will be simple and easy to use, which will improve your workforce’s productivity and morale. So, who’s with me?

* * * * * * *

Notes:

¹I’m expressing a personal preference; that’s all. (I can’t see “Dexter” using a Swiss army knife, can you?) However, if Wenger wants to give me a Swiss army knife and show me how to use it, I’m open to that.

²I’m curious: How long have you been driving? Have you ever, in that time, put a pair of gloves in the “glove box” of any auto?

I wonder how many of our clients, on receiving our policy-and-procedure manuals, have asked themselves what in heck they got themselves into. (“There’s a lot of stuff here…where do I begin?”) Well, like a lot of things, it’s probably not as difficult as it looks initially. First, you took a step in the right direction by using our templates to develop your company policies and procedures. It’s always easier to start with some of the work already done for you, rather than you having to start from scratch.

Now, how do you proceed?

Understand Why You Need Policies and Procedures

You don’t need policies and procedures merely to comply with regulations or industry standards (like ISO 9001). Sure, there’s nothing quite like the threat of fines, legal action, and the scorn of the business community to motivate you, but that’s far from the best reason. Much better reasons for developing policies and procedures include:

• Communicating your business goals and priorities;
• Standardizing processes, behavior, and results;
• Training your employees consistently; and
• Identifying acceptable and unacceptable behaviors (and encouraging or discouraging them).

Prioritize Your Needs and Set Goals and Timelines

Now that you understand “why”, you need to decide “what”.  Of the policies and procedures you could work on, you have to determine which one(s) are going to provide:

• The biggest bang for the buck;
• A quick return on your investment; and/or
• The greatest good for the greatest number.

Only you know what you need.  I can offer you suggestions (like “start with a fairly simple process”) but only you have the intimate, day-to-day knowledge of your organization. It’s your company: you decide.

So, decide which process you’re going to document first.  If you have absolutely no idea (you have no metrics and no historical basis for evaluation), try any Bizmanualz policy or procedure.  Document your initial design and development process and use it as a baseline for further development.

Give the first procedure a fair evaluation.  Don’t look at your first policy-and-procedure development, point out all the flaws you can find, declare the project an abject failure, and pull the plug.

Introduce discipline into the development process by setting clear and meaningful (aka, “SMART“) goals and timelines.

Analyze Your Existing Procedure

If you already have a de facto¹ procedure in place, don’t throw it out in favor of so-called best practices that may or may not work for your firm.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” (Anon.)

Now is as good a time as any to document your process.  Diagram it quickly in any manner and medium with which you’re comfortable. Simple is best (“Don’t make a big production out of it!”, Mom used to say).  Next…

Compare Your Process with Bizmanualz Best Practices

Bizmanualz has already looked at many companies’ procedures, blended them together to describe “best practices”, and reasonably modeled these procedures on the Deming, or “Plan-Do-Check-Act”, cycle. You may find that your procedure already looks very much like the PDCA model:

• You develop a set of objectives and a plan (process) for realizing those objectives;
• You implement the plan and immediately start collecting process data (in-process, end-of-process, etc.);
• You routinely analyze the data, to see if the process is performing in line with expectations; and
• You make changes to the process (procedure) in order to improve it and improve your results.

If that’s the case, you don’t have far to go at all. Next…

Make Our Procedure Your Procedure

Make the obvious and necessary changes to the Bizmanualz policy and/or procedure.  We wrote them generally, like ISO standards, so they’d have the widest possible application.  Any resemblance between our procedure and your process is coincidental; that is, you’ll have to customize our procedures – make them your procedures.  For example:

• Change every instance of “Bizmanualz” or “the company” to your company;
• Where you have an existing form (e.g., purchase order, customer order, invoice), use it – and make sure field names, etc., on the form and in the procedure agree;
• Change job titles in the “Responsibilities” section and in the procedure itself to reflect your circumstances;
• Change diagrams² as needed;
• Add visual aids – they add impact and meaning and they complement verbal descriptions very well (especially when they come from your office, your shop floor, your staff, etc.); and
• Leave out what you don’t need.  An entire procedure or just part of one — if it doesn’t apply to your situation, delete it.  Make your policies and procedures simple and direct.

Verify and Validate the Procedure

The people responsible for implementing the procedure have to put it to the test.  Oh, you could write a procedure and thrust it on an unsuspecting workforce but until it’s subjected to “real world” conditions, the results you see may not be the ones you want or expect.

And there’s more to it than procedure verification and validation. Some people call it “getting buy-in”. Whatever you call it, recognize that your employees are stakeholders in the company. They have a vested interest in the company, too – if it does well, they do well. So, keep them in the loop on matters that directly affect them, to ensure their understanding and cooperation.

Even if they’re not directly impacted by the procedure in question, keep all employees informed of this — and most — company matters.

Implement the Procedure

Now, publish the tested-and-verified procedure.  Distribute the procedure to those responsible for executing it, analyzing it, and training employees.  NOTE: A document management system, or DMS, will help you address publication and distribution, as well as improve document control.

Hold a training session on the procedure – make sure trainees are not only capable of doing the work, but that they understand the process and the objectives, as well.  Finally, execute the process.  Collect the data from measuring devices and routinely analyze it.  Look for anomalies and trends in the data, evaluate the process, and aim for continual improvement.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s just that simple! Any questions?

NOTES

¹Just because you haven’t documented it doesn’t mean you don’t have an effective process in place.  Example: my wife and I came to a quick understanding some time ago that I would clean tubs, showers, and toilets and balance the checkbook. It’s very effective, plus there’s no point in documenting such processes because (a) they’re easy and (b) she won’t ever do them.

²We’ve been using Microsoft Visio to build diagrams. Unfortunately, Visio is not automatically included with any version of MS-Office, so far as we know. There are many alternatives to Visio, though – any search engine will help you find them – so your organization need not be constrained by a lack of Visio³.

³No, that’s not a typo.

Lean is defined by at least one manufacturer as a philosophical approach to business, based on “satisfying customers by making exactly what they need, with the level of quality they need, when they need it, in the amount they need, while using a minimal amount of material, equipment, space, labor, and time.”

Sounds like the way every company ought to be managed, doesn’t it? Some companies have used lean with great success, yet many companies still don’t use lean principles, aren’t aware of what lean is, and don’t want to get involved with it.

Why is that? Well, what do we know about lean?

Lean Is All About Manufacturing

True, lean is rooted in manufacturing. The best known example of lean is the Toyota Production System, or TPS. Toyota has not limited its lean system to manufacturing, either. They’ve applied it to other functions, which has largely led to its success in lean. They recognize that siloing, or segregating, business functions is a major driver of waste. Yet somehow, siloing persists in business.

Siloing breeds inefficient or no communication. Therefore, siloing is responsible for at least three types of muda (waste) — delay, duplication, and unnecessary motion. Manufacturing has to be coordinated with sales, marketing, accounting, HR, and every other functional area, and vice versa. It wouldn’t do much good to have lean operations in one area and not in the others.

By all means, start small to increase your chances of success. Once you’ve had that first success, it’s easier to farm the concept of lean out to other areas of your business.

Lean Is Hot Now, But It’ll Cool Off

Lean is not a new practice or tool.  Lean has been practiced at least since the early part of the 20th century. Frederick W. Taylor, often called the Father of Scientific Management, wrote “Principles of Scientific Management” in 1911, which became a sort of bible for manufacturers. Japanese manufacturing used, and refined, many of the principles of lean to reestablish itself after World War II.

Based on the success of lean in Japan, it took root around the world, though with limited success. Companies that didn’t have the level of success with lean that Toyota and others experienced didn’t apply its principles holistically, or felt they couldn’t wait for a long-term payoff.

Lean has proved itself around the world for decades, and interest in lean seems to be increasing. For instance, Google Trends shows interest in “lean production” spiking last quarter and a growing interest in “lean management” over the last couple of years.

The Company Will Expect Me To Do More With Less

Lean has nothing to do with increasing the pace of work. Rather, it has everything to do with increasing productivity, coordinating processes, and eliminating waste. The objective in lean is not to speed up work but to even out the flow of work — remove delays and other kinds of waste that we’ve always thought were inherent but aren’t. The company may be looking for increased productivity, but speed does not equate to productivity, or quality.

Lean Advocates Don’t Use The Same Language We Do

Lean comes down to two objectives — increase value and eliminate waste. Every tool and technique, every theory and principle boils down to value and waste. What activities — in the customer’s view — contribute value to your products? What activities, or steps in the process, add nothing of value but raise your costs? Value stream mapping, kaizen, kanban, muda, and all the other terminology isn’t nearly as strange as not improving processes.

Lean Is Time Consuming And Costly To Implement And Maintain

Any time you begin a new (to you) way of doing things, you have to expect that not everything will go according to plan from the outset. However, once you’re past the “break-in period” with lean, you begin to realize its benefits. Lean is identifying and eliminating waste — improving the flow of processes.

Lean is a philosophy that ties together ideas and practices. Lean isn’t expensive tools and equipment. Eliminating waste frees capacity. This, in turn, obviates the need for more office space, more equipment, and more facilities. When done correctly, lean saves much more over a lifetime than it costs to implement. Lean continues to pay for itself.

To summarize, lean is not…

• Just for manufacturing;
• A fad that management will easily pick up and discard;
• Going to force you to do more with less;
• Some obtuse concept practiced by wizards in pointy hats; nor is it
• Costly and time consuming.

Do you have experiences with lean that you’d like to share? Did you have any misconceptions that were erased once you started using lean?

In the last two weeks we discussed an Olympic skater’s disqualification and came up with a possible root cause; in this case, human error. Specifically, everyone assumed everyone else was keeping track of the number of laps and, as it turned out, no one was.

Finding a root cause was the easy part. How does the skating team eliminate the root cause? How do they eliminate carelessness and inattention? How do they eliminate the possibility of even a momentary lapse in concentration? What’s the best corrective action they can take?

Carelessness and inattention being uniquely human qualities, the best corrective action, or countermeasure, is to do what you can under the rules to eliminate them. The first thing that comes to mind is an automated signal — for instance, a voice — triggered as a skater goes through an electronic gate.

They already have start and finish gates for all racing events. It wouldn’t be difficult to include a lap counter that would also prompt a skater, aurally or visually. Tell or show them what lap they’re on and when to change lanes. Wireless in-helmet communicators have been in use in the National Football League (NFL) for several years. The NFL ensures that no team has an unfair advantage. Everyone’s quarterback gets an in-helmet communicator.

While some, I expect, will say that communicators remove the “human factor” from the sport. What about body suits? Or the changes made to skates? Everyone has the same opportunity, so that it comes down to who is the better skater.

Better training under race conditions is another possibility. For instance, work on exercises that sharpen one’s mental acuity – concentration – during an event.

What does this have to do with your organization? Plenty. Take a look at your best and worst processes in terms of performance and consistency. Look at the numbers generated and determine where your weak points are. Why are those your weak points? What’s causing them?

Where is waste occurring, and how much? What kinds of waste are there?

Now, how do you reduce or eliminate waste? How do you prevent root causes of error and waste from recurring? Once you determine what corrective and/or preventive actions to take — and you take them — you’re on your way to making the process in question as foolproof as it can be.

Remember — inflated expectations are the worst form of sabotage. No process can ever be made completely foolproof. Nevertheless, you owe it to your customers — and your company — to try.