Last week, a bit of a discussion occurred on the blog, in response to my post, "Raising Awareness of ROWE and Lean" I was happy to see all of the comments, and especially enjoyed the points of view from some those whose primary background is in Lean. While I still think there's a significant place within Lean for ROWE-based management styles, I also found the challenges to some of my assumptions to be quite thought-provoking. Clearly, this is not an idea that has reached its full maturity.
If your analysis stops only at what activities took place, without an understanding of how people, organizations and people within organizations work, you will never correct the underlying problem. You have to look at the behavioral elements.
when does anyone start to examine how we do things, to look for inefficiency? If we eliminated that inefficiency, how many hours of unnecessary processing, running around to find things or people, sitting in pointless meetings, etc. etc. could be done away with?
What's being done right now to make sure that the workforce they have today will be able to meet the needs of the future, or will we be hearing about this labor market mismatch in the future, too? Are businesses really just hoping that the right graduates come out of college with the necessary skills, or that mid-career pros will be able to utilize existing skills in entirely new ways, or are they providing guidance and resources so that the labor pool stays stocked with talent?
When getting a jump on things isn't accompanied by also finishing ahead of time, you tend to get the exact opposite of what you'd hoped for. The problem gets exacerbated when, by directing work to begin in advance of the arrival of necessary inputs, the team gets too far ahead. Managers who are pressured to keep their people busy will create tasking of suspicious value for the appearance of looking productive. Why not let the staff determine how to spend that time, whether at work or away, as long as all obligations are met?
I had a conversation with a seasoned project / program manager the other day, that revealed some fundamental flaws in how people deal with uncertainty, as well as how the failure to embrace constant learning short changes both the individual and the group. A few details have been changed to protect the guilty….. In discussing how to plan for a fairly large and complex engineering development projects, I questioned why the baseline plan in his projects’ detailed schedules were often being done over and overwritten, or only went out a few months (which, inevitably, would be changed every couple...
I caught a great article from Brad Power that was posted a couple weeks ago on the Harvard Busines Review, entitled "Shifting Finance from Controlling to Improving." What Power demonstrates are several CFO's who have endeavored to make understanding finances simple to those who don't live & breathe it in daily lives. They change the terminology to something more intutitve. They measure performance in a way that makes bottom-line impacts intutive. They help to spread the word about Lean to others with no-nonsense, easily articulated, and most importantly - easily acted-upon information.
The focus of improvement, and not just in lean, is in cost reduction and increased cycle time. That focus misses the point entirely, and remains unaware of just how brilliant the Easier, Better, Faster Cheaper methodology - when pursued in that order and that order only, truly is.
In baseball, batting .500 is pretty good right? In basketball or hockey, staying above .500 pretty well guarantees at least a run at the playoffs. But? Doesn’t that still mean that the remaining .500 were failures? There is a quotation that I have heard attributed to hockey legend Wayne Gretzky that states; ‘You miss 100% of the shots that you don’t take’ Yet in many small to medium businesses, any hint of the term failurecauses organizational apoplexy, stroke, and other defense mechanisms. Narrowing down Failure First, lets get one big thing clear, there are failures of ambition and there are failures from sloth or laziness. Quite simply, they are not the...
It’s late September, and that means it’s time to order up some firewood and begin stacking it for when the cold weather hits. This weekend, I had my wood delivered, and my father happened to be in town as well. He pitched in and helped me stack up my wood into a corral I had built last year, and we got the job done fairly quickly. It was interesting to watch his approach, as he was reluctant to begin since he had never stacked wood before.
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