Great post on standard work

As Ohno says in The Birth of Lean: "If you're going to do kaizen continuously, you've got to assume that things are a mess." Brilliant.  If everything is OK, I have no need to improve.    Why is this hard for us to do??  Is it our culture of self-esteem, holding "feeling good about ourselves" as a supreme value? Do we simply compare ourselves to ourselves, so we always look OK?  Are we all from Lake Wobegon, the ficticious Minnesota town where all of the children are above average? A view of a zero-waste state will shake us out of this arrogant stupor.  With that perspective, things are indeed a mess.

When you are at the gemba, you are watching the work. We like to say you are "looking for waste" and list seven, or eight, or ten different categories of waste that you are supposed to look for. I think it is simpler than that. An ideal workflow is smooth. The product moves smoothly, without starts and stops, without sudden changes in momentum. The people move smoothly. Each of their motions engages the product and advances the work in some way. Machines do not interfere with the smooth movement of product or people. Information flows the same way. There is nothing in how it is stored, retrieved, or presented that causes people to break their smooth rhythm. When you watch the work, try to visualize what smooth would look like. Smooth has no wasted motions, no excessive activities. Anything that doesn't look smooth is likely the result of an accommodation, an awkward operation, poor information presentation, poor computer screen layout and workflow. Just another way of looking at it.

Within virtually any serious lean transformation effort, there are moments of truth. The "truth" represents not the orthodoxy of lean tools and even systems, both extremely important, but lean principles themselves. Violate the principles and fail that moment of truth. Do it consistently and the lean transformation will be nothing more than a lean charade. Effective lean leaders must be unbending when it comes to principles. See figure below for the lean principles as identified in the Shingo Prize Model. So, why do lean leaders waffle on lean principles?

I recently reviewed a new webapp call Pomodoro Daisuki on a tip from Jim Benson at Personal Kanban. Pomodoro Daisuki is a chrome app that combines  a simple digital personal kanban board along with the the basic functionality of the pomodoro technique.

A good article on the basics.

So, the Lean takeaway from this? Always ask yourself if hitting the metric will make you get closer to your goal, or further from it. There will always be a cost to hitting metrics. If it was easy, you would not be measuring it. Don't let a local cost override the big picture purpose of tracking the data in the first place. When you tweak your data collection methods for convenience or cost reasons, ask yourself if the customer is better off because of it. You are better off eliminating a metric that has been twisted around than to pretend that it is indicating success.

"We don't know what the problems are…..that's why we make them visible. We don't know what the root causes of the problems are….that's why we ask 5 Whys? We don't know what the evidence is….that's why we collect data. We don't know what is actually happening….that's why we observe. We don't know what solutions will succeed….that's why we experiment."

I think there are some applications here for our electronic processes.

Or you can show this 47 second video! In "real time", you can see how quickly the customer receives their order. You can see the reduction in inventory. You can see less work in process. And you can see the order fulfilled in 29 seconds vs 60. Half the time! Imagine how much time you save with a longer chain of processes. Because the video's so short, you can easily work it into your session, between phases of a lean game or after a more intensive sit and listen session.

Skip it. Avoid it. Leave it out. Never touch the stuff. Don't be tempted. Stick to the story. Succeed through subtraction. This man is a lean thinker. And he bears an uncanny physical resemblance to both John Shook and James Womack, after they borrowed some hair from Mike Rother. If Elmore Leonard cared what a gemba walk was, he might say something like this:

In this article, he shares a simple and effective application of Kaizen and the Kaizen frame of mind to a common activity in business meetings: drinking coffee.

I'm putting each of these on my Amazon wish list.

Too often [kaizen] has come to mean assembling a special team for a project using lean of Six Sigma methods, or perhaps organizing a kaizen "event" for a week to make a burst of changes. We sometimes hear the phrase "doing a kaizen" as if it were a one-off activity. At Toyota, kaizen […] is how the company operates at the most fundamental level.

His approach to expose problems and to help workers visualize the problems was simple:

Limit work in progress
Limit the number of workers
By doing both (1) and (2), Ohno believed that it will place workers in challenging situations that will force them to improve their processes and thereby creating a culture of continuous improvement.

In sum, 1. The reality of the shop floor is clearly reflected in the standard work 2. Standard work must be realistic and applicable on the shop floor 3. Standard work must lead to continuous improvement opportunities

In all, I see the principle of respect for people thrown about sometimes casually, and sometimes in direct conflict of what I believe the principle is truly about.

Article about waste in office operations and personal waste as well.

"Challenge" is one of the explicit values in The Toyota Way 2001 but it looks quite different. Yes, there are challenges issued. But behind that challenge is a support structure. The leaders, at all levels are expected to stretch their own personal development, but to do so within the context of kaizen, deep understanding gained by genchi genbutsu, team work and most important of all, respect. The leader's development level is gauged by how the challenge is met even more than whether it is met. Just "get-r-done" doesn't work here.

When we start removing the 8th waste, stop ignoring people as idea generators, listen and put into practice their kaizen suggestions, we are engaging more of a person's potential. It is an quantitative improvement. Instead of only physical ability or trained-in job skills, we are making use capacity for creativity, problem solving and so forth.