Toyota pioneered this idea of flow in a manufacturing environment, but whether you are in a factory, or in an office, the process is the same. There has to be a process for continuous improvement, or at the least one to identify and remove impediments to orderly and consistent flow, in any organisation that aspires to survive and prosper. It results in the optimisation of the process, which is usually radically different to what is required to encourage innovation, which is by its nature more ‘scrappy’ and disorganized, as the activity seeks to test its viability and grow.
Improvement only comes from a stable environment, where things happen in a consistent and predictable manner. When you have stability, you are in a position to experiment, and observe quantitatively the result of the experiment. Was it beneficial, is it worth incorporating into the standard process? If so, then the process check list is changed to incorporate the change as the new standard procedure. If not, a note is made so that at a later time someone can review and know the change has been tested, or indeed, use it as the base for construction of a hypothesis and further experiment that takes the change one step further to where it may make the difference.
A client some time ago installed a coffee machine in the tea room. An expensive unit, that took beans, ground them and dispensed with hot water and milk on demand. The unit has three things that needed to be done. Beans added to the container, water added to its dispenser, and the line from the milk bottle, held in a small refrigerated unit on the side, needed to be removed and cleaned each day.
These seemingly simple things caused a lot of problems, and really shitty coffee. Water was put into the bean dispenser, (strangely perhaps, beans did not seem to find their way into the water dispenser) requiring an extensive service (twice) and the milk line seemed immune to any cleaning.
To address this challenge, we engaged the staff in a bit of a game, using a fishbone diagram and post it notes.
Within a few days, the diagram was covered in suggestions, which at a lunchtime meeting we ‘workshopped’ down to those that the people using the machine thought were the best. We wrote a checklist, or standard operating procedure for the coffee machine, which was tested over a few weeks by a small group of heavy users, then posted on the wall of the kitchen, as well as included in the businesses then developing library of SOP’s. We also left a big framed photo of the fishbone on the wall in reception, as a reminder to all that improvement was everybody’s job, and that it could be fun, as well as useful.
And, far fewer problems with the coffee machine since.
Header photo courtesy Alwin kroon via Flikr
