A simple 5S improvement in the Pressroom

A simple improvement to make their work a bit easier!

More from our team in the Distribution Center.

Some recent pictures of CIs in the Distribution Center.

A push system, where work is foisted upon a department from the outside, by its very nature will lead to overloading a system and exploding lead times. A pull system, where work is taken from a pile of projects by the people doing the work when they're ready for it, ensures that the department matches inputs and outputs for maximum efficiency. Interestingly, this approach is rare. There's a tendency in the office environment to treat "production" capacity as infinite. Partly this tendency is due to people's willingness to work late into the night or on weekends. Partly this tendency is due to the difficulty of calculating how much time a particular project will take. Inherent in knowledge work is the inability to take a project to completion in a smooth, uninterrupted flow.

How about JT production. JTs are currently pushed into the Planning Dept from Program Mgt. Let's see how we would install a pull system.

Watch the Neuroscience of Deming video - pretty interesting. Makes me want to re-read Deming.

And so we look for innovative, unique, breakthrough improvements and overlook seemingly mundane, simple ones. Here's how simple it can be. A few weeks ago, I was in Derby , England, at Pride Park, home of the Derby County Rams. While in a conference room overlooking the football pitch (or soccer field, for Americans), I watched one of the groundskeepers painstakingly but quickly laying out orange cones very precisely on both ends. Once I saw what he was doing, it was so simple yet effective.

I can attest to this from personal experience. Small & simple rules the day!

I think, in looking at the total of Deming's work, that the point he is trying to make is that looking to blame people is not a good strategy for improvement. The impact due solely to a person's direct action (not including their interaction with the system and with others) is small in comparison to that of the system within which they work. So, Deming (and I) want people to focus on improving the system; which will achieve better results than searching for what people did wrong.

In my talk, I argue that we should forget about "change management." Instead, we should involve people in solving business problems. Human beings are problem solving machines. We love solving problems. Someone invented the bow & arrow when she realized that the fastest human carrying a knife wasn't going to outrun the slowest gazelle. The brilliance of Angry Birds is that each level requires a new round of problem solving - which birds to use and where to aim them.

Targets are useful because they let you measure something specific. Target conditions are useful because they help make sure that your targets don't blind you to the big picture.

The same goes for the four basic questions around the daily accountability process - the process by which leaders facilitate effective follow-through. The follow-through that I am referring to is about the countermeasures necessary for what some refer to as (team-based):

Super fast document creation.

Demonstrating respect for people goes beyond just being nice to them. Showing respect in the workplace is all about the relationship we develop with other people and how we value them. To explain this more here are another 10 ways to show respect for people in your organization:

Very cool office improvement

Simple!

A simple white board that follows the tried and true principle of Standard Work help me a lot. Let me share with you the white board I use at work that helps me remain productive and keeps me focused on the right things.

Some good coaching questions on process improvement

Good article about FastCap