Do you ever find yourself wondering just what the hell you accomplished in the 70 minutes you just spent in the conference room?

Do you ever sob at the thought of all the work that piled up during the pointless excuse for a team meeting you just snored through?

Do you ever wish that your meetings were actually, you know, productive?

Here’s one very simple step that will help ensure your meetings have value: set a GOAL for the meeting. Not a TOPIC.

Most meetings have topics: “2009 New Product Launch.” “New Customer Credit Guidelines.” “Performance Review Policies.” The problem with topics like these is that no one knows what the outcome of the meeting is supposed to be. As a result, there’s a lot of talking without direction — no one knows what they’re supposed to get out of the meeting. Sound and fury signifying nothing, as it were. So you go into the meeting clueless, and walk out not sure what it is you were supposed to accomplish or learn.

Instead, let people know what the goal (the purpose) of the meeting is. For example, “Brainstorm 10 Ideas for Cost Reduction.” Or “Develop a Clear Explanation for the New Credit Policy.” Or “Teach Staff How to Fill Out Performance Reviews Properly.” When you go into a meeting with this title, you know what you’re supposed to achieve at the end of the hour. And while you’re in the meeting, you know whether or not the discussion is getting you to that goal.

Give it a try. You’ll be amazed at the difference such a small change can make. And you’re far less likely to walk out of a meeting thinking, “I’d rather have a root canal than sit through that again.”

Questions? Comments? I’m electronically ubiquitous:

Blog: http://www.timebackmanagement.com/timeback-blog
Twitter: @timeback
Email: dan@timebackmanagement.com

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This project planning template helps managers create standard work for project planning.

The first page of the template is a sample worksheet to give you an idea of how a project might look. The second page is a blank worksheet for your use. The important point is having a standard way of thinking about planning complex projects.

(Note: this is a Word document, not a .pdf)

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This is an Excel spreadsheet (not a PDF) that you can use as a template to help you track variations from standard work for your meetings.

This is a very simple example; you’ll need to modify it to suit your organization’s needs. But it will get you thinking about what you should be tracking. And by making performance visible, you’ll have a greater ability to control and improve your work.

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Toyota calls it “lowering the water level.”

Imagine a value stream or a production process as a river. Reducing the inventory in the process – “lowering the water level” – exposes the “rocks” that represent all of the hidden costs and waste in production. Only by revealing those rocks can you improve the process and reduce the waste.

This metaphor works for knowledge workers, too. In this case, however, their key inventory item is time. Having too much time to do one’s work hides the waste and inefficiencies in the process.

Now, most people would deny they have too much time to do their work. Not too many people are taking three-martini lunches anymore, or leaving the office right at 5:00pm. Hell, on average Americans only take about 79% of their vacation time, and 20% of people work on their vacations. And with our cellphone- and Crackberry-addled days, nights, and weekends, it seems as though there’s an infinite torrent of work. Ironically, these same vacation-skipping, Blackberry-beholden employees complain vociferously about a lack of time for their personal lives.

But here’s the thing: your cellphone, Blackberry, and general willingness to work late and on weekends are part of the problem, not the solution. Counterintuitive, but true.

Yeah, yeah. I can hear you now: “If I didn’t have my Blackberry, if I didn’t put in a few hours on the weekend, I’d never get on top of everything I need to do. I’d be buried. I’d get fired. I’d end up on the street with two Dixie cups and a string instead of an iPhone.”

Let me ask you this (in the words of Dr. Phil): How’s that working for you so far?

Has it helped? Are you on top of your work? Do you spend enough time with your friends and family? How’s your fitness level?

The fact is, if you had less time for your work, you’d get it done more quickly. Parkinson’s Law – work expands to fill the time available for its completion – recognizes this painful aspect of human nature. And if you don’t believe it applies to you, think about what I call the Vacation Paradox: even though you never seem to be able to get all your work done on a regular day, the day(s) right before you go on vacation, you somehow manage to crank through all your daily work plus the backlog of stuff that’s been moldering on your desk for the past month.

What’s going on? Well, when you’re short on time, you work more efficiently. You reduce the waste in your work process so that you can get stuff done. There’s no choice, because you’re on the plane to Maui or St. Moritz tomorrow.

But (to go back to the analogy I started with) when the water level – your inventory of time – is high, there’s less urgency to reduce inefficiency. Why bother removing the waste in your work habits when you can just stay at the office an hour later, or get it done over the weekend? This is just another manifestation of the normalcy of waste.

And that’s the nefarious aspect of living on your Blackberry 24/7, and your willingness to work on weekends and give up your holidays: you effectively raise the water level by increasing the amount of time you have to accomplish your work.

Lower your inventory of time available for work, and then you can reveal and address the inefficiencies in your work habits. In the spirit of kaizen, commit to leaving the office 15 minutes earlier one day this week. Then make it two days next week, and three days the week after. Carve out time for the non-work activities that you regret missing. Schedule time with your family; go for a run; read a book. Fill your calendar with these important commitments, decrease your inventory of work time, and you’ll find ways to become more efficient.

Not only will you expose the rocks, you just might enjoy the trip down the river.

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Barry Schwartz, a social scientist at Swarthmore, has written a book called The Paradox of Choice. In his view, our nearly unlimited options in cellphones, salad dressing, toilet paper, even careers (dotcom entrepreneur? painter? firefighter?) create suffering for people as they try to find the best option in each of these areas.

Schwartz is primarily concerned with people as consumers (single-ply or two-ply? creamy or chunky? organic or free-range?). But I’d argue that his thinking also applies to people as producers – as workers and employees who must attend to overflowing email boxes, endless to-do lists, stacks of paperwork, and continual meetings. How do you choose what to do? How do you select one item from the four-page to-do list?

It’s simple – too simple – to say, “just focus on the most important item.” It’s not always clear which is the most important. And besides, what’s unimportant for you might be absolutely essential for someone else.

More to the point, the act of constantly choosing among the options on your to-do list is itself both time-consuming and fatiguing. (Do I answer email now or later? Do I begin writing Sarah’s performance review, or should I review the latest budget numbers?) When you’re constantly spending time and energy making choices, when you never have the option of running on autopilot, you impair your ability to think creatively. You get so mired in making small decisions that you can’t free your mind to attack the really big stuff. As the psychologist William James said,

The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automation, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their proper work. There is no more miserable person than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision….

I’ve written before how standard work can help make you more productive precisely because it automates simple tasks, in keeping with James’ recommendation. But there are other ways to reduce the constant decision-making, too: by designating time in your calendar to handle specific tasks or projects.

Rather than carrying around a to-do list that provides you with nearly infinite choice about what to do at any moment, block out time in your calendar to handle the important stuff. When you’ve pre-committed to tackling the first draft of the press release at 2pm on Tuesday, “the higher powers of mind will be set free” to focus on that task when the time comes, rather than on the decision about what task to do.

How do you do this? Get into the habit of reviewing and processing all the stuff you have to do with your calendar open. It doesn’t matter whether you do it once at the end of the day or several times during the course of the day: the key issue is that you put a stake in the ground and choose a date, time, and duration for the task.

This, then, is the freedom of discipline: you discipline yourself to “live in” your calendar and follow your own pre-determined directions. You’ve reduced the number and frequency of the decisions you have to make so that you have the freedom to think deeply.

To some extent, your to-do list reduces the number of decisions you need to make. But it doesn’t work that well, because it only addresses half the problem: What do you need to do? However, it doesn’t account for the very real limits on your time — when can you do what you need to do? A calendar entry tied to a specific date, time, and duration is the only way to address your boundless commitments in light of your very bounded time.

Undoubtedly, you’ll still have to modify your calendar. Nothing ever goes according to plan, and when there’s a crisis with a major customer, whatever it is you planned on doing goes out the window. But if you can eliminate some of the choices during the course of each day (prepare my expense report? confront my manager? order new toner for the copier?), you can eliminate the constant mental juggling of tasks, enhance your productivity, and reduce your stress.

Barry Schwartz states that “the choice of when to be a chooser may be the most important choice we have to make.” By embracing the discipline of your calendar, you’ll liberate yourself from having to make choices all the time. And in a world where attention and focus are the most valuable commodities, that’s a priceless kind of freedom.

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Cogitus Interruptus: The Case for Focus

Cogitus Interruptus is the disease of the modern workplace. Its symptoms are familiar to any executive: the inability to complete a thought or a task without losing focus under the onslaught of relentless interruptions. It results in a lack of efficiency, a loss of time to solve problems, to think strategically, to plan, to dream – to get your company from here to there. But there’s hope: there are techniques to help you regain the opportunity to think without interruption.

It’s no surprise that our ability to focus on a single task without interruption is waning. What is a surprise is the extent to which interruptions define our workdays. In a survey of 1000 senior executives, technology research firm Basex found that knowledge workers lose about two hours per day due to unnecessary interruptions such as instant messaging, spam e-mail, telephone calls and the Web. Of course, some of the damage is self-inflicted: more than 60% of the respondents read email immediately or nearly immediately.

Gloria Mark, a researcher at UC Irvine, found a similar situation. Each employee she studied spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted. Moreover, it would take 25 minutes on average to return to that task.

To some extent, an increase in interruptions is an inevitable result of today’s larger, more complex organizations. Managing sprawling enterprises requires more team interactions, and dotted line relationships in matrix structures abound. The pervasiveness, ease, and zero cost of email, IM, and SMS has exacerbated the situation by encouraging communication, even when it’s not valuable.

But in fact, there is a real cost to this communication; it’s just not borne by the sender. It’s borne by the recipient. Mary Czerwinski, at Microsoft Research Labs, found that 40% of the time, workers wander off in a new direction when an interruption ends, distracted by the technological equivalent of shiny objects. As the New York Times put it,

The central danger of interruptions, Czerwinski realized, is not really the interruption at all. It is the havoc they wreak with our short-term memory: “What the heck was I just doing?”

But even when people remember what they’re supposed to do, they’re less efficient in completing those tasks. David E. Meyer, a cognitive scientist and director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan, says,

Multitasking is going to slow you down, increasing the chances of mistakes. Disruptions and interruptions are a bad deal from the standpoint of our ability to process information.

And René Marois, a neuroscientist and director of the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt University points out that for all of the hundred billion neurons in the brain, “a core limitation is an inability to concentrate on two things at once.”

The University of Michigan and the FAA found that people who switch between different types of tasks – say, email and spreadsheets, or drafting a contract and talking to a colleague – lose 20-40% of their efficiency. Just as there’s changeover time for machines on a production line, the human brain loses time in changing over from one type of task to another. Peter Drucker saw this forty years ago: in The Effective Executive, he wrote,

To be effective, every knowledge worker, and especially every executive, therefore needs to be able to dispose of time in fairly large chunks. To have dribs and drabs of time at his disposal will not be sufficient even if the total is an impressive number of hours.

On a less quantifiable – but no less important – note, the interruptions prevent executives from achieving what psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi describes as the “flow” of work. In his book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, he theorizes that people are happiest when they’re in a state of flow (or “in the zone”), totally immersed in a task that is fulfilling and intrinsically rewarding. One of the prerequisites for getting in the “flow,” of course, is the ability to focus and concentrate on the task at hand – which is impossible in an environment of constant interruptions.

I believe that at their core, talented, motivated people yearn for uninterrupted periods of work when they can feel both productive and fulfilled. I know the president of a mid-sized residential construction firm who goes to the office every Saturday for three hours to design new homes; only then can he find such a large block of time for his work, and only then does he “get in the groove.” Similarly, partners at a large law firm I’ve consulted to regularly work at home at night and on weekends for the same reason: it’s the only time when they “can get things done.”

So what’s the solution? If you’re Sandy Weill or Warren Buffet, you just don’t use email – and although that doesn’t eliminate interruptions (there are still phone calls and knocks on the door, after all), it does reduce them. But that’s not a practical option for most people. For those who can’t unilaterally dictate modes of communication, here are some ideas:

1. Group similar tasks into blocks of activities in order to reduce the time lost to switchover. Do your budgets, your drawing, your contract reviews, etc. at one time rather than switching between them.

2. Establish meeting “corridors” – essentially office hours when you’re available to meet with colleagues. Obviously, during emergencies people will disturb you, but this will reduce the non-urgent interruptions. A company I know has a totally open floor plan. They don’t have any offices, and the cube walls are low – about chest height – so there’s no privacy. They’ve found a simple solution: each person has made two paper signs. A green sign (made with green highlighter) says “open,” which means they’re available to talk. A red sign has a time written on it – in other words, “do not disturb until ___ o’clock.” Even better, set up standard check-in periods during the day for the people with whom you interact the most: when they know they’ll get to see you for 10 minutes each morning and afternoon, they’ll be more willing to wait.

3. Turn off email alerts to reduce distractions. Even if you don’t respond to an email immediately, the very act of reading (or hearing) the alert fractures your concentration. Learn to deal with email in blocks – twice a day, four times a day, once an hour – whatever is the appropriate interval for you and your firm.

4. Set “service level agreements” that support your work. With email in particular, there’s an assumption that because a message can be sent immediately, it must be answered immediately. And in point of fact, we’ve trained people to expect instantaneous response. But more often than not, people don’t really need an immediate answer; they need a predictable response – say, within a few hours or within the day. To address emergencies effectively, set up a “white list” for certain people, and an email rule that notifies you when those people send you a message. Or better yet, have people use the phone for urgent issues. After all, if the issue is that critical and time-sensitive, asynchronous communication tools are not the best option.

Making these changes can be disruptive, so it’s important to inform clients and coworkers in advance. And while these new ways of working may seem odd and cause friction at first, in the long run, they’ll make you – and your team – more productive.

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Get Lean.  Get Innovative.

You need to innovate to remain competitive.  But are you willing to make the necessary investment?

“Innovate or die.”  That’s the mandate of the global economy these days.  And though you’ve been trying to create a culture of innovation at your firm, you’ve had little success.  Why do some companies seem to be breeding grounds of innovation, while yours is, at best, a breeding ground for mosquitoes?

Innovation requires investment.

You’re not Mr. Bumble, and you don’t run Oliver Twist’s workhouse for starving orphans.  So simply ordering people to work harder and innovate probably isn’t a great strategy.  (Besides, you’d have to serve gruel in the company cafeteria, and just try to find a food service company that has that on the menu.)   As a result, companies that consistently innovate are ones that invest in working conditions that enable workers to be creative.

Google, for example, is well-known for its “20% time,” in which employees are allowed – even encouraged – to use 20% of their time on offbeat projects.  But Google pays a price for that: the company has a gourmet cafeteria that runs all day, operates shuttle buses to and from work from 6am to 9pm, and pool tables and other games to encourage people to stay at the office for more than 40 hours per week.

3M predates Google in this approach.  The company has a similar “15% rule” that encourages technical staff to work on projects of their own choosing.  And it offers venture capital-like “Genesis Grants” of $50,000 to for researchers to develop prototypes.

Chiquita, recently profiled in Industry Week for its ongoing innovation, picks its best people – even pulling them out of areas where they’re contributing – and tells them not to worry about the day-to-day business, but rather to think about how they’re going to make their quota in two years.  Similarly, Lockheed Martin is legendary for its Skunk Works.  The company built an entirely separate facility to house people they feel can dream up breakthrough innovations.

Are you willing to invest in these ways to stimulate innovation?  Do you have the financial and human resources to allow this kind of investment?  If not, don’t despair.  There’s hope.

Time, the most precious resource.

More than anything else, innovation requires time: time to think, to dream, to experiment, to break the rules, and to rewrite them.  Does your staff have this time?  Or are they so busy fighting fires, digging themselves out of email hell, wasting away in one-hour meetings that last actually last 75 minutes, and dealing with the consequences of poor planning by their supervisors, that it’s all they can do to keep their email inboxes below 8000 before running out of the office at 6pm to catch Seinfeld reruns?

The waste is under your nose.

Make no mistake: Lean isn’t just about reducing defects and WIP.  It’s about finding better ways to work.  It’s about eliminating waste of all forms.  And business processes and administrative functions are as ridden with waste as any other process.  (Probably even more so: while many companies have applied Lean to their production lines, they haven’t yet applied it to accounting, or HR, or product development.)

Take a close look around your offices, and spot the waste.  See the office that looks like Katrina just hit?  Calculate the time squandered searching for a file in that mess – time that could be spent innovating.  Think the 8000 messages in someone’s email inbox is just a hassle for the IT department?  Imagine each of those emails as inventory, an inventory of ideas that’s not flowing smoothly down the value stream to the customer, an inventory that’s impeding innovation.  See the multi-tasking rampant in your workplace (often caused by you, by the way, when you interrupt with a sudden question)?  Think of the inefficiency caused by those interruptions – a loss from 20-40%, according to a study by the University of Michigan and the FAA – and think of the innovation that could have been occurring.
Get Lean.  Get time.

So what’s the solution?  Apply Lean methodology to the way knowledge workers operate.

Teach people to examine their work processes, and challenge them to find better ways to do their work. That’s the first step in getting enough time for the innovation that’s crucial to your survival.  Teach them how to create a robust architecture for their files and workspace that embodies 5S principles.  Teach them the process by which they can reduce the 3Ms that undermine their efforts.  Teach them how to plan projects so that they can level the flow of work throughout their department.

Teach people to act Lean and think Lean.  If you show your staff how to apply Lean methods to their knowledge work, they’ll have more time and energy during the day to start innovating.

Either that, or I can get you a good deal on a bunch of pool tables.

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Originally published in The New York Enterprise Report | Download PDF

You Don’t Need A Gulag To Run An Effective Meeting

We’ve all experienced the never-ending meeting – the one that’s supposed to last one hour, but instead drags on for 2½ hours, because of side discussions and interesting – but completely tangential – points. It’s enough to make you swear off of meetings and rely exclusively on . . . email. Or to turn you into Stalin and make you banish people who talk too much to a gulag.

But you don’t have to be a tyrant to have productive meetings that cover the necessary ground in the allotted time. Here’s how to do it.

A clear objective eliminates most problems. Participants in a meeting are genuinely trying to be helpful. They want to add value and contribute to the health of the company. But if they don’t know what the objective of the meeting is, you can’t blame them for bringing up irrelevant topics.

When you distribute the meeting agenda in advance (which you always do, right?), you should also clearly state the objective in big, bold, beautiful letters right at the top of the page. Remember that an objective is a goal, not a description of the meeting. So, “Implementation of New Pricing Policy” is not an objective (unless your goal is to ensure unproductive digressions). “Develop A Communication Strategy for Price Increase” is a clear goal that tells participants where the meeting is going and keeps them focused on the destination. Remember, meetings don’t go off-topic; people do.

The parking lot – respect, security, and no need to reserve a space. Even with an agenda and a clear objective, participants will inevitably raise unrelated ideas that are valuable – just not at that meeting. Quashing those ideas is bad for morale and runs the risk of having people call you a dictator. Unless you like the thought of employees goose-stepping to your command, you need to handle their contributions respectfully. That’s where the parking lot comes in.

Use a whiteboard or an easel with paper as the “parking lot” for their ideas. Let the people know that their contributions are important and that you (or even the group) will discuss it at a later date, but that right now everyone should focus on today’s objective. Making their ideas clearly visible demonstrates your respect for them, gives them security that you will address it at some point, and allows the meeting to move smoothly forward.

Catching lightning in a bottle. Sometimes the side discussion or the off-topic idea is too good to pass up. You (or the group) decide that there’s more value to be gained by pursuing this topic than the original purpose of the meeting. That’s fine: while an agenda is a vital tool for managing a meeting, you don’t want to shackle participants so completely as to stifle creative thinking. So how do you catch that lightning?

Get the group’s attention and then say: “Excuse me, I don’t think this conversation is on-topic, but I’d like to check to see if it’s important to pursue now.” If everyone feels that they ought to pursue this new topic, then do so – but with these two important caveats. First, the meeting still needs to end at its designated time. Your team has other commitments they have to fulfill. Second, you must choose another time to complete your original agenda. You may find that people are less eager to abandon it when they realize that they’re signing up for an additional meeting. Irrespective of the group’s decision, you will have demonstrated respect for their time and ideas, without compromising your ability to accomplish your goals.

As the leader of the meeting, it’s your responsibility to avoid topic drift while ensuring that people feel respected. Follow these steps, and you’ll have more efficient meetings without fomenting a revolution in the ranks.

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TPS: the Thinking Production System

It’s easy to spot waste on an assembly line. But what do you look for in an office?

Teruyuki Minoura of Toyota, and John Shook, co-author of Learning To See and senior advisor in the Lean Enterprise Institute, say that “TPS” should really stand for “Thinking Production System.” In their view, more than anything else, a manager committed to Lean must constantly ask questions: Why do we have parts piled up here? Why is this worker falling behind? Why are there errors in this process? Managers need to think, to ask questions, to find ways to improve the system.

But what do you look for in a business process? What are the signs of waste? How do you spot the problems? When you’re dealing with knowledge workers in an office, critical process inefficiencies aren’t as visible as they are in a factory. Value stream mapping is only part of the answer. You also need to see and eliminate the waste inherent in how people work.

Here’s a guide to some of the questions you should be asking.

Sclerosis of the inbox.
How often does your IT department have to buy new storage space for the mail server? How often do they suspend mail privileges because people are storing emails about mission-critical issues like, say, the decision to have Chinese food for lunch. . . last April?

Your knowledge workers’ inboxes are gorged with junk like late-career Orson Wells because they don’t have a Lean process for managing the tidal wave of email. The real cost of these clogged inboxes isn’t the server space, however – that’s pretty cheap these days. It’s the terrible “signal to noise” ratio that makes it more difficult to identify and respond to what’s truly important. Consider this: in 1999, NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter burned up in orbit due to a miscommunication regarding English and metric units. A task force found that a simple, unanswered email about the correct measurement units led to the disaster. The total loss to NASA – $327 million.

Each email contains information and ideas that are part of the value streams that flow through your knowledge workers. When that information gets stuck in someone’s inbox – when the value stream stops flowing – you’re looking at nothing more than another form of excess inventory. And as NASA learned, when the value stream backs up and puddles of inventory form, the consequences can be very expensive, indeed. What’s lurking in your inbox?

When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight. Because you goofed.
Did your company single-handedly rescue United Airlines from bankruptcy by booking a lot of last-minutes airline tickets? Does your firm send a lot of overnight mail? FedEx has made a pretty good living off of knowledge workers who don’t create effective project implementation plans, and as a result need their phenomenal service to pull the fat out of the fire.

Of course, nothing ever goes perfectly according to plan. There will always be a need for a last-minute bail out. But by using Lean planning techniques – determining responsibility for each task in a complex project, identifying clear mid-course check-in points, and (most importantly) letting people know in advance what will be required of them and when – you can reduce the frequency of those desperate scrambles to catch the FedEx truck at 4:00pm for the privilege of spending $20.75 to mail a letter. For you non-math majors, that’s 53 times the cost of regular mail.

“Damn it Jim, I’m an accountant, not an archaeologist!”
Is your conference room always booked because people are embarrassed to use their offices for meetings? Does your CFO use Carbon-14 dating when he needs to find client files on the bottom of the pile near his door? (No, not that pile. The one on the other side of the door. You know, next to the other pile.)

If it looks like an archaeological dig in your beautifully appointed offices, your knowledge workers don’t know how to process the information that flows to them down a value stream. As with email, each piece of paper represents inventory that you should strive to eliminate. Moreover, the odds are excellent that someone farther down the value stream is waiting (which is a form of waste, remember?) for that information. And if it’s worthless or obsolete information that no one is waiting for? Well, then you’re paying rent on garbage – on average, about 11 square feet of file space per person.

It’s an office. Not a game of Whack-A-Mole.
Why are people staying so late at work? Are people coming in on weekends to catch up on their projects? Do people ever get to focus on their work, or are they always being interrupted? Why are people responding to email as soon as it arrives?

If your office looks like a game of Whack-A-Mole, with heads continually popping out of office doors or over cubicle walls, and the sound of email alerts dinging relentlessly, your knowledge workers aren’t getting their work done very efficiently. Of course, they’re in good company: a UC Irvine study found that knowledge workers are interrupted in their tasks every 11 minutes, while a Basex survey revealed that 55% of executives read their email as soon as it arrives.

This constant fracturing of attention is expensive. The FAA found that switching from one task to another reduces efficiency by 20-40%, meaning that people aren’t getting their work done as quickly as they could. Consider: your knowledge workers are losing 45 minutes per day just because of non-Lean work habits. Over the course of a full year, that’s about 4½ work weeks. Would you like to calculate the titanic expense of that inefficiency?

A better way to work.
A typical Toyota assembly line in the United States makes thousands of operational changes in the course of a single year. Journalist Charles Fishman points out “that number is not just large, it’s arresting, it’s mind-boggling. How much have you changed your work routine in the past decade? Toyota’s line employees change the way they work dozens of times a year.”

In fact, Toyota isn’t really dedicated to producing cars. Toyota is dedicated to finding better ways to produce cars. If you manage a business process, you need the same mentality. You need to focus on improving the process by which knowledge workers move value forward. And that involves both the way the value stream is organized, and the way people work within that stream.

As John Shook says, “doing the task, and doing the task better, become one and the same thing.” And that’s a better way to work.

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Lean Methods, Lean Planning

Increase sales, reduce waste by applying Lean principles to business planning

Wednesday, November 1, 2006

Can Lean techniques, mastered on the factory floor, drive costs from the front office?

How much money is your company losing due to wasted effort and low productivity of knowledge workers employed in your business processes?  How many opportunities are lost?  How many customers are irritated?  Teaching your knowledge workers effective planning techniques based on Lean principles can solve these problems.

Imagine running a production line without knowing each day what to make and in what quantities.  Crazy, right?  The lack of that critical information guarantees uneven production, overburdened workers, and waste – a disaster in the world of Lean.  Yet this is precisely the situation for most knowledge workers, even those in Lean organizations.

Whereas Lean line workers and managers have learned how to plan their workflow to keep the manufacturing process running smoothly and efficiently, knowledge workers generally don’t plan effectively, if at all.

The only way to manage the multiple value streams that flow through them is to plan their work like a Lean production line.

Lean Principles Apply To The Front Office Too

Whether workers are building spacecraft assemblies or budget spreadsheets, they must know their production schedule in order to level the flow of work.  Heijunka is central to Lean philosophy because it plays a critical role in avoiding the 3 M’s – mura, muri, and muda – that are anathema to Lean.  Leveling production, of course, requires Lean workers to plan their output properly, which means knowing what they’re going to build, what materials they’ll need, and when they’ll need them.  Lean plant managers understand this fact well.

Surprisingly, few knowledge workers seem to understand this.  Although they work with ideas and information instead of physical materials, the rules are identical.  Poor planning (or no planning) among the majority of knowledge workers results in the same terrible mura, muri, and muda that manufacturing workers face.

No Plan? Lost Sales and Worthless Inventory

With knowledge workers, however, the 3M’s take a different form.  For example, the Director of sales at a small footwear manufacturer in Southern California didn’t plan her work and allocate time to provide input on an IT upgrade; as a result, the project was delayed one week, which led to lost revenue at a key trade show.  Similarly, at a NJ-based manufacturer of semi-custom homes, the VP of construction didn’t accurately assess the time needed to write new specs for bricks or schedule that time in his calendar.  When the brick supplier delivered the old bricks, the company lost money on the unneeded bricks, and had to delay production until the new bricks were delivered.

To be fair, multiple value streams flow through knowledge workers, making it difficult for them to move value forward smoothly.  In addition to their primary jobs, they sit on committees, get roped into meetings, manage special projects, and must always be available to handle the inevitable crisis.  Moreover, the accelerating speed and volume of information that they must process constantly increases the turbulence of the value stream.  But with an increasing amount of work to do and a finite amount of time in which to do it, planning of their workload is not a luxury; it’s a necessity.  Planning is the only tool that enables them to effectively “level their production” and avoid mura, muri, and muda.

So how do knowledge workers implement heijunka for their jobs?  Just as production managers work backwards from the target delivery date to plan shipping schedules, production runs, material preparation, and material ordering, knowledge workers in a business process must work backwards from the target completion date and schedule time for editing and revising, drafting proposals, presentations, meetings and research.  Most importantly, just as production managers need to accommodate capacity constraints in the manufacturing process, knowledge workers need to accommodate constraints in their work as well.  In their case, of course, the critical constraint is time.

Breaking Projects Down

A “project implementation plan” is the tool that gives knowledge workers the ability to manage their complex work.  A well-written project implementation plan breaks complicated and/or long-term projects into simple, sequenced, discrete steps with clearly assigned responsibilities and interim due dates. Workers schedule time in their calendars to complete each task for which they are responsible (or to follow up with the person responsible for a given task).

Of course, since knowledge workers either manage or participate in multiple value streams simultaneously, every project, every meeting, and every action that consumes time must be rigorously entered into the calendar.  Only by doing so can they see the total demand on their time, identify capacity constraints in advance, and by applying heijunka, adjust their commitments appropriately.  The result is fewer crises, better allocation of resources, and lower stress for everyone.

Start Simple

According to the Lean Manufacturing Report 06 by The Manufacturing Research Center, fewer than half of the responding companies have extended Lean principles into business processes, despite recognizing the value of doing so.

But incorporating Lean principles into business processes doesn’t have to start with a major project like value stream mapping, a comprehensive change in accounting methods, or a wholesale restructuring of the company.  Rather, Lean principles can be applied to the individual’s work habits – and many of the same benefits can be realized.

Recently, the CFO of a custom printing company lost a major contract for his firm.  His inability to allocate the time and the staff necessary to determine pricing resulted in a last-minute proposal.  Had he been able to complete his work earlier, the sales team could have negotiated with the customer and made the deal work.  But there was no time left, and the customer went to another supplier.

Can your company really afford knowledge workers who don’t know how to plan?

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