Lean Service Blog

Process Blindness

2008-11-06T10:17:00.002Z

I went to see a client a little while ago and followed some work while I was there. The work was basically to receive a paper form from a client and enter the data into a database that made it available on the web site. The wrinkle was that the main office received the forms and logged the receipt and then batched and packaged them to go off site for the the data capture.

I would just like to bring to your attention one little part of the process.

When they had accumulated a pile of like forms together, they would take that pile from a big table and bring them over to their desk where they would take twenty forms at a time and read the bar codes from the forms into a spreadsheet. They would press a button on the spreadsheet and it would print two top sheets. They would write a batch number on both the top sheets. One sheet would be put on top of the twenty forms, secured by an elastic band, ready to go into a crate and thence off site. The second sheet would be scanned and then filed. The scan of the second sheet was kept in their electronic file system and could be searched if they needed to find out which batch a particular form was in.

Phew. Was that paragraph as boring for you to read as it was for me to write? Imagine if that was your work every day? Now imagine if you were a customer who came to the office to watch how the data you neatly inscribed on the form got onto the web site and instead you saw that?

The value for the customer was to see the data on the form, up on the web site. If you can manage it, re-read that paragraph and see if you can find any step in there that contributes to that value.

No? That's because there is no value to find.

They didn't see the problem and the difficulty they had was not a lack of intelligence but process blindness. They had been doing it that way so long, they could no longer see another way to do it. This was where having defined value to the customer was so valuable. When customer value is your only criteria for judging a process then the scales fairly spring from your eyes and you see your process afresh.

They don't get it

2008-09-22T21:11:00.002+01:00

There is an article in the Guardian newspaper which discusses Lean and once again they don't get it. I quote:

Radnor recalls a housing director who was approached by two employees who claimed they needed another team member because they were unable to manage their current workload of dealing with complaints about unfinished repairs.
After examining their current processes, a barrier to flow was identified. It was found complaints couldn’t be logged properly because not all the required data was in place and that the team spent the majority of its time going back to retrieve missing information. It was suggested the form used to log complaints was redesigned.

Wrong. If they were unable to manage the workflow of dealing with complaints, then management need to change the system that produces the complaints to produce fewer complaints, with the goal (not the target, the goal) of producing none. That is Lean.

We must not be deluded and mistake making current processes more efficient with changing the system as a whole to more efficiently serve the customer. The difference in wording is slight, but the outlook is very different and the results wildly so.

It does say a little later in the article:

While the customer is very much the focus of Lean [...]

So maybe they do get it, I don't know, but they must have loads of examples to choose from and they picked one that shows that they probably don't.

It's the System, Stupid

2008-06-17T10:46:00.003+01:00

On the front of today's Guardian newspaper is an article about the Bank of England, inflation and interest rates. To partially quote it:

The government is on inflation alert amid fears that dearer petrol and food will herald the start of a year of bad news on the cost of living and limit the Bank of England's ability to cut interest rates.
...
An explanatory letter from the governor to the chancellor is required once a quarter for as long as inflation is more than a percentage point higher or lower than its target. Speculation has mounted in recent days that today's figure will edge up from 3%.

This to me is a classic example of not thinking about a system as a whole.

One of the first things that the new Labour government did after being elected in 1997 was to make the Bank of England independent and give it a target to keep inflation below 2 per cent. The mechanism to do that was to change the Bank of England base rate of interest.

This is not an article about economics, I am not an economist, but even then that struck me as simplistic. The Bank must keep inflation at 2 pc and the only lever they can pull is interest rates. What about balance of trade, house prices, world commodities, credit and financial markets. They can't change the tax system, print money or borrow.

The UK economy is buffeted externally by world events, international speculators, trade relations and a myriad other things. Domestically 60 million people make economic decisions every day. Not to mention government policy about tax and borrowing.

So does anyone really think that the Bank of England can control inflation by changing interest rates? I don't.

I think the government should take back the setting of interest rates. The argument that you bring back political influence is a slim one when they still have control of tax, money supply and how the budget is spent. They should look at the system as a whole and do their best with it. Actually, an almost impossible job, I think.

But thinking that the "interest rate" lever is directly connected to the "inflation" read-out is plain silly.

The lesson for other organisations (which have to deal with much simpler systems than the UK in a world economy) is not to make the same mistake of attaching one single input to a single output. Even simple systems do not usually work like that. You must conduct controlled experiments and measure the outputs and look out for unintended consequences. And remember always measure against the purpose of the system (to serve the customer, in the case of a company).

Also, what is this stupidity of sending of a letter to explain what has happened? That will fix it!

Good one

2008-06-03T12:17:00.002+01:00

I normally will be on here pontificating about how to do it better. But I must give praise to the DVLA (Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency in the UK).

I filled in the online form to change my address on my driving licence, sent the old one back on Thursday 29th May and received the replacement on Monday 2nd June.

I have to say I was very impressed. I had expected that it would be three weeks at least. And you know how they are... Well in fact they were not like that at all, they vastly exceeded my expectations.

Well done the DVLA!

I wonder how they did it...

Best Service Is No Service - book review

2008-05-19T10:00:00.001+01:00

I have recently finished a very interesting book called "The Best Service Is No Service: How to Liberate Your Customers from Customer Service, Keep Them Happy, and Control Costs" by Bill Price and David Jaffe.

The premise is in the title. Basically they are saying that the way to please customers is to give them what they want right first time so they never have to call the call centre and access the Service Department. They are also very keen on Self-Service. They want companies to provide as much of their offering via the web or IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems. The book has lots of examples of good and bad cases.

The case that made me laugh was the bank who thought that higher value customers should be given a more personal service. They provided an automated telephone system for lower rated customers to find out their balance but the high value customers were recognised and routed to a call centre agent every time. Obviously people with a lot of money don't want to do thinks quickly and easily they would rather have to talk to someone every time!

The parts about having a system that doesn't generate failure demand I agreed with wholeheartedly, but the over emphasis on self service was a bit strong. They tried to balance it out to say that call centre agents should be able to teach callers how to use the web or phone systems and that you shouldn't have channel wars where the web team and the call centre team try to out do each other. They also said you should make your company easier to contact at the same time as putting more functions onto self service.

Personally I like self service and as long as it is backed up by reliable internal processes such that things go right and I don't have to call a company to get things fixed all the time, then it is a good thing. I just wouldn't want anyone to read this book and then throw everything up on their web site without fixing the broken processes first.

Two more things, they love Amazon. And there is also a weird bit where they draw a Pareto chart for the amount of failure demand for each type (they call failure demand "dumb contacts") then they suggest attaching the cost of resolution. So it ends up that the call type that is 18th in the list for number of calls is the one to tackle first because the cost x quantity calculation is greater for that type of call. I would always start with the problem that is causing the most problem for the customers. And to be fair in the rest of the book they are very customer focused, just in this little section do the authors have their head turned by internal cost saving.

All in all, worth a read for some good ideas, but keep you wits about you and analyse for yourself what it being said.

Best,

Rob

The Customer Sets the Ideal Value

2008-05-12T11:45:00.003+01:00

When we consider customer value, we should be aware that this can be quite a subtle concept and that it can vary for the same customer at different times.

The customer sets the ideal value.

We should be familiar with this. If the customer wants it fast, then get it to him as fast as possible. If the customer wants it cheap then do it. The internal workings of a company mean nothing to the customer. They really don't care about targets for Average Handle Time for calls in a call centre or utilisation of servers or the cost of desk space. They just want the service or product they asked for at the right time and price.

But we should wait a moment before throwing our processes and our system on their heads to give the customer what they want. Ideal value is a changeable thing even for the same customer.

When doing a bit of DIY, trying to level a floor in my flat, I sawed through a central heating pipe. What was my ideal value for the service from the plumber? GET HERE NOW! I have my finger on the pipe and the water is going through the ceiling below.

Last month I phoned the same plumber to get my boiler serviced. Ideal value? Convenience of the appointment. I am home Tuesday, but not Wednesday and could do Thursday morning.

Most of the times I buy a book from Amazon I like the free delivery option. I don't care that it takes a few more days to get here. It is a book. What is the rush? Ideal value? Low cost of shipping.

But the other day I had to buy a birthday present at very short notice. (I didn't forget, I just couldn't think of anything until the last minute!) So I ordered from Amazon and was happy to pay the extra for the next day guaranteed delivery. Ideal value? Don't look like a chump with no birthday present to give.

So we need to revise our statement above and say:

The customer sets the ideal value at the time of request.

This is a reminder that your system needs to be able to absorb variety and standardised work will interfere with that.

Best,

Rob

Right is Cheaper

2007-05-17T17:43:00.000+01:00

Getting it right is cheaper than getting it wrong.

On the first pass they both cost the same. Send out a product to the correct address costs the same as sending it to the wrong address.

It is the rework that adds the cost. The customer calls asking after their product (cost to take that call), you have to verify the address (cost of investigation) you then have to order another product (cost of replacement) and send it (repeat of postage costs). Plus the customer thinks you are rubbish (reputational cost).

So if anyone tells you that higher quality is more expensive ask them to correct themselves and count the calories they burn as they do so.

Best,

Rob

Small start

2006-10-18T14:18:00.000+01:00

In conversations with clients, potential and actual, other consultants and various people who are interested, they always want to know how to get started. Some advocate a top down approach and some start small and spread, some like to hit everywhere at once with a organisational training programme and some talk a lot and never really get going. These are all valid (except the last perhaps!!). And different approaches suit different organisations in different situations.

One way to get going is to pick a small area and do a little project.

Some start with 5S (where you sort, straighten, shine, standardise and sustain) basically throw out the rubbish and clutter, tidy up, clean everything, reorganise what is left to suit the task, make sure everyone knows how the work station works and ensure that it stays tidy. 5S is good, but you can do better. It provides a visual indication that something has been done and in hospitals, factories it can be quite dramatic. But in service work places it can be difficult to know exactly what to do.

Some make a cell. Not to keep the boss in, but a "mortgage application cell" or "trade input cell". They bring together all the people that need to do a particular, currently disparate task and put them all together in the same place. This can be effective. But sometimes you are simple compressing a bad process.

I would start with demand. How does work arrive? How often? How much? How much does it vary? Is it value demand or failure demand? This analysis can be a smallish project (compared to the work that it reveals) but it is cruicial to find out how work comes to you before you try to redesign how it is done. For example what if you found out that 60% of your work was dealing with complaints. And that 90% of those complaints could be removed easily? That would be a very good start. Now imagine if you had not done that and instead tried to improve the complaints handling process. Waste of time.

So start small if you can't start big (I will write about that soon), but start at the beginning. Understand the work coming in. Understand demand.

Who Do You Think You Are?

2006-10-05T15:37:00.000+01:00

So you have read the blogs, scoured the web sites, devoured the books and listened to peers at conferences and you want to have a go at Lean. Why not? Everyone is at it. Even the NHS is giving it a go.

But how exactly do you start? Your conviction and enthusiasm is about to come steaming out your ears - or maybe you kinda like the sound of it and want to test it a little before you roll it out to the whole enterprise.

Okay, one way to start would be to get on the phone to someone like me, a Lean consultant, and they will use their years of experience to tell you what is right for you. But I am going to assume that my phone will not start ringing off the hook right after I upload this, because you, rightly, want to test the water before diving in.

First you need to know who you are. Not in a navel gazing, fluffy, zen kind of way, but in a practical sense. Who are you in your organisation? Are you the CEO? A board member? A director of a division? A middle or line manager? A technical expert (this could be a doctor or any specialised worker, not necessarily a techie type)? Or are you on the shop floor doing the real work of the business?

Also who are you in terms of influence? Have you started off similar programmes before? Were they successful? If you are not the CEO, can you get support from people above you? Are you the influencing, persuasive type? Do you have a network to draw support from?

I ask these questions because these are the questions that I ask my "initiators", the individuals that I go to see. And sometimes it comes about that the people who bring me in have just enough influence to get me in to see someone else but not enough to carry through the programme. But they are happy to get the ball rolling.

So, how far can you push a change to Lean? Do you need to gather some support before you try anything?

Ponder this, and next time I will give a few ways, from small to large, that Lean can get started in an organisation.

Whoever and wherever you are you can get going, but some ways of starting are more appropriate depending on your current situation.

The Lake and the Rocks

2006-06-28T11:00:00.000+01:00

One of the metaphors that they use in Toyota is called the "Lake and the Rocks". Is goes like this.

The lake is the work in progress (WIP). That could be inventory in manufacturing, it could be partially processed mortgages or patients waiting on trolleys in corridors waiting to be treated or admitted. Anything that represents a partially completed job.

The rocks are the problems that slow the work down or cause errors leading to unsatisfactory work.

The main idea of Lean is to make value flow to the customer as fast as possible. One thing you have to do to make value flow faster, is to remove WIP from the work stream. If you want cars to go faster on a motorway it helps to have fewer cars.

So the lake is the WIP and the rocks are the problems. The metaphor says that as you reduce the the water the rocks will be exposed. So as you make work flow by getting the excess WIP out of the system you will come across problems that will hamper further improvements.

So work on the problems and you can continue the improvement.

The trouble is there are always more rocks. That is why Lean is something that an organisation "is". Not something it does and then stops.

Eliminate Waste? Prevent Waste?

2006-06-22T13:21:00.000+01:00

In a conversation with a colleague an intriguing thought came up. Is Lean about eliminating waste or about creating a system that prevents waste in the first place? I think that is the difference between continuous improvement (kaizen) and step-change improvement (kaikaku). Kaizen tries to reduce the waste in the current system. Kaikaku creates a new system with no waste built in.

In the end you need both. Too many trundle on with kaizen and never make the step-changes they need to. Similarly, many make big changes and then sit on their laurels for years wondering why the world is passing them by.

Standardised Work

2006-06-19T13:28:00.000+01:00

Standardised work is bad. If you standardise everything, the work becomes boring, you can't deal with the special cases and the cost of documenting the standards is too high.

Well, yes and no.

There is no point in having standards yellowing away in a dusty folder, locked in a rusty cabinet. There is no point in sticking only to the standards like the script in the call centre that won't let you ask the simplest question until all the verification steps have been gone through. There is no point in making all the staff bored by giving them all the same work to do every day.

But that isn't really what standardised work is for.

At its best, standardised work is a way of capturing the best yet known way of working. No more, no less. I must emphasise the phrase "best yet". Just because it is standard does not mean there is not room for improvement. It is simply the best so far.

The standardisation should encompass variety. In fact some work should not be standardised. A good example is dealing with failure demand. Do not automate failure demand. But the high volume, fast moving value demand probably should be standardised.

Once the fast moving, high volume work is standardised, staff will have more time to work on either other work or perhaps further improvements, thus making work more interesting not less.

So be careful what you standardise and use it to lock in learning and not to control staff.

Let the system be itself

2006-06-14T11:56:00.000+01:00

I was helping to run a workshop for NHS staff to assist them in preparing to meet the 18 week target set by the government. The target requires that the time between a GP referral and treatment be less than 18 weeks. The fact that targets are rubbish is not something that I am going to go into today. The fact remains that the NHS has to try to meet this target by hook or by crook.

During the latter part of the workshop an attendee raised a very interesting question.

"Is there any best practise to tell us how to monitor patients? When should we intervene to ensure that a patient does not breech the 18 weeks."

They went on further to explain that for example, if a patient has not been seen by a consultant for 6 weeks since the referral, should they bump them up the queue to ensure that patient won't breech the 18 weeks.

The problem with this thinking is that it is only thinking of the target and how to hit it. It is not thinking of the current system and its capability to hit the target. In fact I would advocate forgetting about the target in order to hit it.

In order to do what the attendee was asking about, they would have to add in a whole layer of monitoring and expediting mechanisms. This would take resource away from the patient and their journey through the system.

My answer was that, at present there will wide variation in the end-to-end time from referral to treatment and that many patients will breech. You need to understand that, but as long as the system is stable, you must not act upon it. The way to proceed is to understand the variation in end-to-end times, ensure it is stable, then work on the system to improve it. Look at the end-to-end process to improve the work on the ground until the system is predictably capable of hitting the 18 week target.

If you tamper, you will only increase the variation. Everytime you intervene to expedite a patient you displace other patients and the variation increases. You are worsening the system, not improving it.

The attendee replied that that was all very well, but that they would get "killed" if there were target breeches after the deadline.

Ho hum for the real world. Does government or the Department of Health realise what it is making the NHS staff do in order to meet their targets? If they did, I would hope they would stop setting them.

Lumpy Lean

2006-02-22T18:22:00.000Z

How do you take your Lean? One lump or two? It seems that many people within Lean consider it as a project or as something you do in lumps like a series Kaizen Events.

Lean is a method of seeing your organisation in a different way and then heading toward something better. But it does not mean that you have to do it in big jumps. You can incorporate "kaikaku" into your plan. Kaikaku is when you make a big jump in changing the system.

More powerful is when you inch-worm your way to improvement every employee, every day in combination with the big jumps. What would it be worth if every employee saved you £1 every day and that improvement stuck so that each improvement was not just for that day but for every subsequent day? It all adds up.

Frontiers of Lean Summit

2005-11-04T14:29:00.000Z

There have been a lack of postings here for a few days because I have been at the Frontiers of Lean Summit 2005 in Stratford-upon-Avon, eagerly hoovering up new ideas to share. The summit is organised by the Lean Enterprise Academy which is headed up by Dan Jones (co-writer of "Lean Thinking" with James Womack). I would recommend a look at their site at www.leanuk.org.

The biggest idea of the summit was to look at the consumption process. Hitherto, Lean has mostly focused on the steps that a provider goes through to produce their product or service. The thought put forward by Womack and Jones (repeated in their new book "Lean Solutions") was to map the process that the consumer goes through, particularly concentrating on the time and value. They are right when they say that it seems that companies consider that the public's time is of no value. Companies think nothing of making consumers queue multiple times to get value. The reality is that they could cut the provision and consumption processes at the same time and deliver more value at lower cost.

In the 80s and 90s it was shown that quality is free. Moreover, not only does higher quality not cost a company more, but that it will actually save them money. The ideas in "Lean Solutions" say that saving our customers time can actually save the company's time and money.

More from the summit in the next few posts.

Best,

Rob

Our most valuable resource. Honest.

2005-10-27T14:00:00.000+01:00

When planning to improve by implementing Lean, management need to be very wary about what they are going to do with the people that are freed up by the effort. It is inevitable that in some parts of the process, fewer staff will be needed to complete the tasks. It is true that in some situations, letting staff go is necessary to get down to the correct staffing levels to complete the work. However, even in these rare situations, it should only be done once, it should be done in a short time frame and not drag out over weeks and months and it should be made clear to staff that it is a one time hit.

In truth, the situation where companies need to loose staff are few and far between. Lean improvement should be seen as an opportunity to increase capacity. If you provide a better service to your customers by reducing lead times, increasing quality and reliability and cutting cost, you should see demand for your product or service go up. When demand rises you will need all the increased capacity you can get. You should not be tempted to make a group of staff redundant, only to go and rehire staff a few months down the line.

The main reason for not firing staff, is not the capacity argument, but that the staff who are left will not want to continue to improve if they saw their colleagues and friends made redundant as a result of improvement activities. Why would they? Plus who would you rather made suggestions for improvement, staff who have been in the work for a while, or a bunch of newbies, still green to all the idiosyncrasies of your business and sector?

Don't sack 'em, use 'em.

How to pull in the office

2005-10-26T20:14:00.000+01:00

A push system is where each step or in a process works as hard as possible and pushes all the work it completes to the next step. This means that work-in-progress will sit between steps gathering dust and lengthening end-to-end time. It also means that any improvement feedback loops will be ineffective. If work is flowing quickly through a system, any errors that creep in can be quickly spotted by the downstream processes and the source of the error fixed before they produce too much more. If work is sitting between stations for hours or days, it might be days or weeks before errors are spotted and in the meantime that same error might have been repeated many times in the work that is sat around.

So we want to aim for flow and pull. Flow means that the work does not stop anywhere but keeps moving along. Pull is the compromise where flow is not possible. It is when the upstream step does not do anything until the next step is free to work on it. This is sometimes done with kanban, but can equally be achieved with a space on a desk that may only contain one piece of work.

In an office you have to be pretty innovative about pull signals. There is no one technique that will work everywhere. But always try to make whatever you do visual, physical or both. Don't hide flow or pull signals away in computers if at all possible. The above example of the space on the desk is both physical (if a piece of work occupies the space, then the upstream process does nothing), and visual (the upstream worker only need to glance over at the desk to see what the status is). Keeping it simple and not jumping to the conclusion that technology is the way to improve everything is a very powerful lesson to promote pull.

Getting lost before you leave

2005-10-24T10:32:00.000+01:00

A man gets off a train in a small village. As he steps onto the platform he looks around, lost. The new arrival spots an ancient old man dressed as a porter and asks, "Old man, can you tell me the way to Harthpenny House?" The old man looks at him and replies, "Well sir, if I were you, I wouldn't start from here."

It has been suggested to me a few times that we can dispense with the current state map. That we could go much faster if we just did a future state map and implemented the plan to get there. So I always tell that old joke. If you want to go anywhere you always have to start from "here". You have no option. But in many organisations they don't know where "here" is. So you have to find out. Otherwise you will take with you all the sources of variation and error on your travels.

Ups and downs

2005-10-21T21:48:00.000+01:00

"Life is full of ups and downs."

We understand it in a non-business setting. So why is an appreciation for variation so lacking in a business setting? Dunno. But let me give you a (fictional) example.

Rob works in an insurance company, processing claim forms. Rob is measured on how many forms he processes in a day. The more forms, the happier Rob's boss is. Fine.

So on Monday, Rob handles 20 forms. Tuesday he completes 24. Brilliant. Tick and a star. Wednesday we see Rob completing 16 forms. Booo, hisssss. Thursday 21 and Friday 18. Hmmmm...

What is happening here? Is Rob working harder on Monday and especially on Tuesday? Has he suddenly gone thick on Wednesday? Or is there something else happening here? What is happening is that there is variation due to the system. (The system of work, not the IT system, by the way.)

Some insurance claims are longer than others, some more tricky, some are less easy to read and some contain more errors or omissions than others. Some days the computer network responds faster than other days and some days Rob gets more interruptions from his boss (probably more on Thursday morning after Rob's performance on Wednesday!!).

If he was clued up like the reader, Rob's boss would have Rob plot his own forms per day on a control chart. Boss would see that the average is 19.8 and that it would be quite normal for Rob to do as many as 33 forms or as few as 7 forms on any given day. That is the variation that this system could exhibit. If however, Rob did 38 or 2 in a day, Rob's boss would know that something special had happened and that would need to be investigated. But between 7 and 33 nothing need to be done. No employee of the month awards and no "motivational" sessions when the figures get lower.

(Actually, if the boss was really as clued up as the reader, he would know that the number of forms per day is a terrible measure since it can't possibly be aligned to customer purpose!! He would also know that 5 points is really too few to get a proper measure of the variation. But hey, this is fiction.)

So if we wanted to raise that average what do we do? We have to find the sources of variation in the system and remove them. Stop the errors getting onto the forms, ensure clean data from the start of the flow, ensure that the network is reliable etc. But our clued up boss would not work on Rob and his "energy" or "alignment to corporate values", the boss would understand that it was his own responsibility to change the system in which Rob works.

And that understanding, which comes from an appreciation of a fairly simple statistical technique, can be quite profound, since it changes how management see themselves, their staff and their respective responsibilities and tasks.

My eyes!! I can't see.

2005-10-20T21:39:00.000+01:00

What is the difference between manufacturing and service? No, it is not a joke and no I am not talking about those "in service, value is made at the point of transaction" or "in service, the customer is part of the process" statements. All valid points, but get business people of whatever stripe in the same room and ask them that question and you will never get them to agree.

Let's re-ask the question from the point of view of applying Lean Thinking to each. The difference between the two is that waste is much harder to see in service organisations. That is not to say that waste is always easy to see in manufacturing. But in a factory you can walk along a production line and see inventory sitting around, you can watch staff walking to and fro to get tools and parts and you can see the rework bins full of bad parts waiting to be fixed.

In the office people often sit quietly and the work in progress is in email in boxes, paper in-trays, computer systems and postal systems. How do you see the waste? With difficulty, is the answer. The only way to really see is to map the process with the people who do the work. And the trick in doing that is to get them to tell you the secret stuff they do to get the job done. The personal spreadsheet of the people to call in certain situations, the bits of paper that show the product codes that they have collected over the years to help them do their jobs. Some of these things need canning and some need bringing out to become part of the official process to assist all who do that work.

Bringing out these things is not easy in itself. You need to persuade staff that you are not out to expose their tricks to punish them for working around the system, but that you need an accurate picture of the current reality so we can all move to something better.

Involving the staff in the mapping process is essential, since if you don't you will never expose all the waste in an office setting were it is very difficult to see waste just by walking around.

What's my motivation?

2005-10-19T15:31:00.000+01:00

Motivation. Where does it come from? Where does it go? Does it come from outside or from within? Is there an unlimited resource or do you have to pay for every ounce?

W. Edwards Deming said that all motivation was intrinsic, that it came from inside. He said that all management needed to do to motivate staff was to stop DEmotivating them. Deming said that we needed to provide "joy in work", that "pride in workmanship" was where real and lasting motivation came from.

In the news today was the story that the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) was going to award holidays to those staff that had excellent attendance records. Apparently, the civil service has an average of 12.6 sick days per employee per year. That is twice the average in business.

I would bet my bottom dollar that instead of providing extrinsic motivation to turn up to work, that if the DWP management gave their staff non-DEmotivating work to do their absenteeism would fall dramatically. Get out of the way of staff doing a good job. Then they will want to come in of their own accord.

How do you get out of the way? Stop prescribing work, start listening to your staff, implement the improvements they suggest (or have a very good reason why you can't), help staff study the design of work as a system and involve staff in the changes that result.

People like to come to work tomorrow if they did a good job today.

And I believe that people love to come to work when they did a good job today and helped improve the work so that they know they will do a better job tomorrow.

Best,

Rob

Hands off those tools

2005-10-17T22:13:00.000+01:00

If you choose to apply Lean thinking in your organisation you will need to apply some tools. Tools such as Statistical Process Control, Value Stream Mapping, Pareto charts etc. All useful, all to be handled with care.

Lean is not tools.

If you think you can learn some tools and some fancy words and "do" lean, you are in for a big shock. Again...

Lean is not tools.

It is not kanban. It is not heijunka. It is not Value Stream Mapping.

Lean is a way of thinking. Lean is a view of how work is done. Lean says, "How can we reduce the waste in this work and make the value steps flow?". Lean does not say, "Woo-hoo!! Loads of tools and techniques, lets splatter them across the organisation."

If anyone ever says to you, "In order to implement Lean here, we need to teach everyone, A, B, C..." Ditch them.

Also, training in Lean is not being Lean. Lean is something you are, something you do. You learn by doing, not by sitting in a training room. And, at the risk of losing both my readers, it is not something you learn off the internet, even in a brilliant blog like this one!!

You must understand when and why to apply a tool or technique. Ask yourself, "Will this let me see/remove/understand waste or flow?" If the answer is "no" or "not sure" then don't do it. And if you do do it, try it in a small way or for a short time to see if you get any benefit and if you don't get benefit or understanding, then stop.

Lean is about application of principles. All the tools grow out of the principles. But they should only be used when you understand the principle that they are assisting you with.

It is not easy. The tools are very seductive.

Best,

Rob

Targets in Business: Shoot To Kill

2005-10-14T15:41:00.000+01:00

Targets are great. They give us something to aim at (duh!). Targets point us in the right direction. They give everyone a common goal. Targets are clear and unambiguous.

All correct. If that is, it is the target you want to hit. If you want to do something else then setting and even hitting targets won't help at all.

Turn off the Targets and go out and do something less damaging instead...

The "something instead" is to improve your business as your customer would like you to. Targets will take you in an entirely different direction. For example, many call centres have targets about how long it takes to pick up the phone. They express them in the form, "90% of calls must be answered in 30 seconds". Fine. Nice target. But what about what is important to the customer? Sure we want the phone to be picked up before our body breaks down and turns to dust. But actually this is the third time this week we have called about this problem and while they do pick up the phone very briskly, they aren't doing what I want.

Measurements of activity are bad enough, but slap a target on top and you are guiding staff and manager behaviour away from customer purpose and toward hitting that target instead.

Think of the stories about the NHS fiddling the figures about waiting lists. Some of them were changing behaviour like admitting patients to beds to meet the four hour targeted wait in A&E, others were pure diddling of the numbers by the staff making returns to central government in order to be seen to hit the targets. Which is worse? I couldn't possibly comment. Safe to say that both actions are caused by the target setters and those people should not turn round an berate the cheats. They need to look a little closer to home.

Instead, design against demand, design work to meet customer purpose and drop all those nasty targets. Euugghhhghg!!!

Demanding Customers

2005-10-12T19:22:00.000+01:00

Customers. What do they know? Nothing. And everything.

If you wanted to find out what your customers thought you might do a customer survey right? You would think up a bunch of questions, send it out and analyse the results. If you were really serious you might employ a specialist company to assist you. But would you get what you want? Probably not, I would argue. At least you would not be getting information that would be better than that which is at your fingertips right now.

The data that can tell you exactly what the customer want is your demand data. Do you know how many times customers call, write, visit, email? Do you know what it is they want when they contact you? More importantly do you know how much is value demand and how much is failure demand? (I am indebted to John Seddon of Vanguard for this idea.)

Value demand is when a customer contacts you to get value. E.g. "I would like to buy..." or "Can you give me advice about...?" or "I would like more..."

Failure demand is contact that is caused by a failure or inaction on the part of your company. E.g. "You said someone would call. They never came." or "My widget arrived and it is not what I asked for." or "I haven't heard anything. What is going on?"

One of the biggest sources of improvement is the failure demand. Most companies never even realise that they have any. All calls are demand and have to be resourced. No matter that 60% of people are calling back to complain or to chase a previous contact.

If you can identify the causes of failure demand, improve so that those causes go away, you can switch off failure demand and make huge savings. Not only do you no longer have to resource the response to the failure demand, but you have more time for the value demand or time for more value demand.

So before you get into customer surveys, listen to your customer SHOUTING at you by the types of demand they bring to you.

Best,

Rob

Understand Variation

2005-10-10T11:56:00.000+01:00

Last time I talked about the mistake of attributing performance to individuals rather than the system of work. One of the things that comes from an understanding of variation due to a system is why it is a mistake. But that is not the only thing. Understanding variation is one of the major pointers to what you should do next to improve, and sometimes more importantly, what you should NOT try to do.

In the 1920s Walter A. Shewhart worked a Bell Laboratories on trying to improve quality in the equipment they produced. He wanted to find a way of telling when you should act on a measure and when you should not. I.e. if you were measuring something in a system when would it be worth your while to chase down that figure to find the source of the problem and when would it be better use of time and resources to do nothing. He came up with a technique called Statistical Process Control (SPC).

The SPC tool comprises of charting a run of measures and also calculating, from the measures, the average and Control Limits. Usually there will be an Upper Control Limit (UCL) and Lower Control Limit (LCL). The theory says that if all the points lie within the control limits then the system that produced the points is "in control". Another way of saying this is that the system is predictable. You can predict that given the system does not change, future points will also lie within the limits. If there are points outside the limits then the systems is "out of control" and therefore unpredictable.

The points inside the limits are said to be from "common causes" and those out side the limits are "special causes". The common causes come from the system and should NOT be acted on. The specials causes come from out side the system and should be investigated and the causes removed. This gives a formula on when it is economic to act and when not.

If you have special causes you need to work to remove them to get the system in control. If the system is in control, you need to work to reduce the causes of variation.

Here is the thing, all systems produce variation. Think of stock markets, sales figures, time between accidents, the number of calls a contact centre receives each day. They all vary and you need to know if that variation is predictable and when something special has happened that needs investigation.

There will be more on variation as we go. But the thing to remember is that variation is everywhere, but that we shouldn't act on every single point until we know that it is a special cause and then we shouldn't rest until the cause is removed.

Best,

Rob