Process Improvement

Process Improvement Archives

Sometimes We Should Not Even Try to be Smarter Than Two Year Olds

Friday, February 22nd, 2013 at 08:46

Every project has its problems and we must deal with the so we do. However, the approach we take matters a lot. Sometimes we should not try to be smarter than a two year old.

Two year old children counter everything with one word: “why?” It’s why, why, why, why all day and sometimes all night. These young children are walking sponges soaking up new information and learning at an incredible rate.

How do they do that? By actively challenging every statement, assumption or directive.

If we take this idea to the work place, we have a working model: Ask a lot of why’s before attempting to formulate a how. This is not exactly a new thought. It was institutionalized in the Toyota Production System (TPS) under the label 5H=H.

The Cost and Production View Conflict

Monday, February 11th, 2013 at 09:23

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Every organization looks at itself in (at least) two basic, conflicted ways: the cost view and the production view.

These are fundamentally different ways to measure and evaluate performance that drive very different behaviors.

These behaviors are not immediately consistent, which means conflict and tension.

This is not necessary, but requires a mental shift.

In both cases we start with a process that we want to understand, measure and evaluate on performance.

Structures are Everywhere and Everything is in a Structure

Wednesday, February 6th, 2013 at 08:03

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Some people object to methods because they feel methods impose too much structure. But when you get right down to it everything has a structure.Some people object to methods because they feel methods impose too much structure. But when you get right down to it everything has a structure.

Even if we think about how we are impulsive and creative and just like to do what we feel like in the moment, that in itself is a process and a structure. The point isn’t that we have structures, the point is whether the structures are helpful or not.

We can’t escape structures, nor should we; instead we should make structure our friend.

dot Structures are Everywhere and Everything is in a Structure

What Bees Have Figured Out and We Have Not

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2013 at 09:50

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3D Women Pulling 02 125 What Bees Have Figured Out and We Have Not What bees have figured out and we have not is this: How to do great things without supervision. Such small beings, but such great cooperation and such great outcomes.

So how come we who are such big beings can’t do the same thing? We can of course, but it does not come natural. And it’s not like we don’t value this ability. In fat, most of our organizations seem pretty fanatical about supervision because we think this is nt eway to get things done.

Without supervision chaos will ensue. Or so we think. IN reality we don’t really know if this is true because we never really give the alternatives a try.

I understand that a business is reluctant to turn itself into a laboratory, but after all these years, you’d think someone somewhere would have produced a credible case for an alternatives.

The stakes are high enough, aren’t they?

Just think about the vast masses of middle management we find in most organizations of any consequence. This group of people is really all about supervision.

I’ve heard the role expressed as something like “middle management functions as relays, as human boosters for the faint, unfocused signals that pass for information in the traditional organization.”

When the recent advances in communication and collaboration technologies eventually seep into the mainstream, I believe that we will see a great change in the structure of our organizations.

Whole layers will disappear as the need for ‘relays and boosters’ disappear because more direct communication paths emerge up and down the organizations.

What will emerge is a structure consistent with a networked economy. This will be a fun transition to watch and be part of. I’m not so sure that we will necessarily be able to create completely self-organizing systems for ourselves just yet. The bees may still have the edge for awhile yet. Imagine that.

dot What Bees Have Figured Out and We Have Not

Experimental definition of a perfect process

Thursday, December 20th, 2012 at 15:42

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man with check sign 03 1251 Experimental definition of a perfect process I have used the concept of a perfect process in a couple of projects and find it a useful way to set improvement targets. However, I have usually defined the perfect process within the specific operating context of my clients.

I got on the subject in a more open context today and thought I’d collect my thoughts on how to define in general a universal perfect process.

This is raw, but here goes.

A perfect process is a process where:

All transactions initiate as and when intended
All transactions complete instantaneously
All transactions perform to the full satisfaction of all parties to the transactions
Nothing ever goes wrong.

Unfinished thoughts: Transactions are common to many processes, but will seem like a forced term for others. Alternative nouns could be ‘events’ or ‘activities.’

dot Experimental definition of a perfect process

The Sale Ruins the Brand

Wednesday, December 5th, 2012 at 09:30

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The title may be startling – the sale ruins the brand – but I realized this morning that it is a true statement more often than we want to acknowledge.

The brand – or more correctly, THE BRAND - is a a promise. Usually this promise is talked up quite a bit and appears somewhat (or even grossly) overstated.

We have all learned to discount the advertising hype, but the purchase and post purchase experience should and must be reasonably close in order for the customer to be satisfied or even just acceptably content.

The truth is that actual delivery on the brand promise has multiple points of possible failure. Since hardly anyone is very excited about zero defects anymore, we can easily demonstrate that something fails somewhere in the chain for almost every purchase.

The reason we the consumers don’t protest louder is our tolerance limits are set lower than they really should be. We expect mediocrity. Our frame o reference is other promise breakers.

This means that the winner is often just the one with the least broken promises.

That’s not such a great story to tell on Investor Day is it?

On the other hand, it represents a formidable opportunity, because, as Daniel Kahnemann has described repeatedly - lastly in his recent book Thinking Fast and Slow – people value losses 3-8 times more than gains.

And people are much more likely to coive their feelings when something goes wrong than when something goes well.

You see, consumers expect the promise to be honored. That is not remarkable. Not honoring – breaking – the promise is not expected and it is remarkable.

In this day and age of consumer reviews everywhere of everything, you can no longer hide from broken promises.

You can build up your brand, your story all you want but if the sale does not honor the promise, it will contribute to eroding or even ruining that brand.

Now it is easy to see where the social media strategy comes into play and why it should be given a hugely larger attention on the executive floor than it has today.

Defining work is the most difficult thing that we do

Wednesday, October 10th, 2012 at 07:05

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According to the late Peter Drucker, refining work is the most difficult thing that we do. Why would this be so? Well, I think the answer is that work today is not the same as it used to be.

On a farm or in a factory, the choices are usually fairly cut and dried. There is always a process and the next step is where the last worker left off. There is a visual sense of continuity to the initiated, even though I agree that to an outsider, the choices may be puzzling and decidedly unclear.

Today’s work place is more and more defined by ambiguous processes and myriad exceptions nobody has thought about. We have to invent the next actions based on whatever clues the environment gives us.

In addition to the clues in front of us, we also have to be mindful of the overall purpose or reason we’re there in the first place. An action should be valuable or to be defensive about it, the least wasteful it can be.

sorting all this out is what is meant by defining work. Defining work, then, is about clarity and understanding what is the next most useful action.

dot Defining work is the most difficult thing that we do

The simple secret of backlog reduction

Tuesday, October 9th, 2012 at 06:39

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man with bars 1251 The simple secret of backlog reduction Many processes, our own personal ones included, have a backlog of some sort; stuff we are waiting to get around to dealing with. In this sense, backlog is noting more than inventory.

But we often forget that to reduce backlog takes additional effort over and above the effort of daily activities. You cannot just go on as normal, because then you are in maintenance mode and just maintaining some sort of balance between what comes in and what goes out. If incoming exceeds outgoing, the backlog increases and if outgoing exceeds incoming, the backlog decreases.

So to decrease backlog, additional effort is required to work off more than the incoming at a significantly higher rate than normal so that backlog is brought to zero in a meaningfully short period of time.

A stable system simply means that outgoing is balanced with incoming. Such a state of affairs simply turns over the backlog at a predictable rate and never gets it to zero.

This is a surprisingly difficult idea to grasp despite its inherent simplicity. However, it is supremely powerful and drove vast improvements in manufacturing processes the world over starting first in the US during World War II and then reaching its zenith in Japan after being introduced by Deming, Juran, Feigenbaum and others as part of the rebuilding programs introduced by the US occupational forces.

So here’s the thing. If it is true that the outcome of a process is 95% or so dependent upon the structure of that process, it is easy to see that the first step on the way to improvements must be to stabilize the process. You must quickly find out the relation of incoming to outgoing to know whether the system is increasing, decreasing or maintaining a backlog (or inventory).

Only when you have reached stabilization will you know what the inventories are throughout the various sub-stations in the process; the piles and stacks of backlogged stuff that people are working on.

Every backlog, queue or inventory slows down throughput by the time it takes an item to work its way from being added to the pile to exiting that pile. The only way to change that is through ‘expediting’ it. Expediting is nothing more than jumping the queue. It is a bad (though admittedly sometimes necessary) practice that messes up the system or process and creates oscillations.

dot The simple secret of backlog reduction

Personal productivity still matters

Monday, September 10th, 2012 at 10:30

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3D Women Jump 03 125 Personal productivity still matters Even though systems and structures matter a lot, personal productivity does make a difference in the end. Why? Because after a smart system, process or structure routes something to you, it’s now up to you to deal with it as efficiently as possible.

Even at the personal level, we can take guidance from how to make systems or processes efficient:

People
Process
Technology

I want to expand on this by adding something that often gets buried inside the three: environment. Environment is just another way of saying space. Think of it as your work space and the immediate surroundings of it.

Our list now looks like this:

People
Process
Technology
Environment

Here’s how I interpret this for an individual, like, you know, for myself (imagine that).

People

People means your own competency (knowledge, skill and experience) as well as your state of mind and emotions; your psychological and physical well being. Athletes usually attribute their success or lack thereof on their state of mind, their attitudes– how you feel about what you’re doing matters as much as how you are doing it.

Process

Process means your personal ways of doing things, how you’ve organised activities you do often. Think of it as your personal work flow. You may have more than one, each fitted to a particular category of tasks or activities (e.g., dealing with email, writing and publishing blog posts, etc.)

Technology

Technology means tools and materials you use to assist with your work. Smart choices make for more efficient processes and better results, but only if you know how to make good use of them. So, just buying a tool is not enough, you have to learn how to use it. This brings you back to competency again – you have to keep building knowledge, skill and experience.

Environment

Environment means your place of work and it’s immediate surroundings. By this I mean, the phone in the other room, insulation from outside disturbances (or lack thereof). It is useful to think of this as a combination of an internal and an external environment.

The internal environment is what you have direct control over –it’s pretty much what’s within physical reach. The external environment is everything over which you have little or no control. It’s the outside world and it’s uncanny ability to create interruptions and disruptions at the most inconvenient times.

While you can never completely control your external environment, you can shield yourself from a lot of it. I call this building a Murphy fence and part of this exercise is to deal with one aspect of this you can control.

Maybe you can’t control what happens, but you can to a large extent decide how you want to feel about it. See how this brought us back to your psychological well being? Attitudes matter. It’s all interconnected.

Where to start

When setting out on a quest to improve personal effectiveness or productivity, it is often most useful to start with the environment. I say this for two reasons:

It has a much larger influence on your productivity than you think. (Studies show that we may waste as much as 1 to 2 hours per day just looking for stuff.)

It is very easy to see tangible and immediate results from your actions. (Absence of clutter is very visible although visible clutter is only a small part of what may be wrong with your environment).

The best way to figure out where to start is simply to decide for yourself what bugs you the most about your performance. What’s working (leave it alone) and what’s not (do something about it).

What’s not working will probably not just be in the environment category, but when in doubt, start there.

I am starting my own mini-campaign to work on things I am dissatisfied with regarding my own personal productivity. I’ll share how this unfolds as I progress. For the record, I am starting with the environment.

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