Lean Office. Get Intimate.

In modern Service Companies up to 40% of the work time is wasted on activities that do not add value.

“Lean” has thus reached the Office – but has a hard time getting traction.

Also, because of the most intimate zone at the office: Your Screen!

Let’s step back from my screen for a moment.

Lean Management/Leadership pursues the goal to continually improve a company’s competitiveness. True Lean leads to developing the employees’ innovation capability – versus experts to come in and tell everyone else what and how to do things from now on.

Pretty simply put, Value Stream Optimization is the basis to do so. (Read my post on Lean Leadership. How to Foster Fruit Farmers. to go a step deeper into mapping processes and working with a team to innovate.)

The team gets a good understanding how a current value stream (a “process”) runs, and then starts improving it experiment by experiment, guided by a coaching team leader. As Toyota and many followers show us this is tedious, but sustainable and successful.

So far, the great stories usually come from production companies, with shopfloor lines, robots swinging, machines stamping, conveyor belts whizzing, etc. Which makes it difficult to relate to for Service Companies.

The key success factor why they are (more) successful: The process is visible.

But you still have to go (take your time!) and see. (More on the amazing power of “Going to See” in Gemba. Our Office Cat.) It’s like nudging forward in your car, stuck in a single lane, next to a construction site and you see this: 1 guy working, 3 guys watching/discussing. It’s pretty obvious, who is currently adding value, right?

Now look up from your screen (if you’re reading this at the office – … :-)) and take a look at your colleagues around you. What do you see?

Can you tell what they are doing right now? I can’t.

Also, all of them would find it very odd, if I walked over and stood behind them to watch what they were doing. Many of my colleagues wouldn’t think this to be ok. Thinking about this made me realize, that your screen is a very delicate zone.

It is widely accepted that you consider your screen totally private – for your eyes only. Nobody should have his/her nose in it. It is your personal, most intimate space at work.

How you organize your tasks or work off your emails, which applications and files you keep open, where you store your files, how you name them, how you actually follow a process, how you fill out a form or use a template, how you search for that form, or store a filled-out one on your desktop, what short cuts you use, how you swap between screens, how you name your folders, how you use Word/PowerPoint, etc, etc.

Nobody really knows exactly what you’re doing. And there can’t be any standards, really. And – after talking to many colleagues about this – all of us (including me!) think that we’re pretty well organized and efficient. (It reminds me of the 80% that claim to be above-average drivers.)

The facts prove a difference: 38% of our time is wasted through interruptions, waiting, searching, explaining, correcting, sorting, following and transporting stuff.

38% is huge!

We’ve had great success with mixed teams mapping their Value Stream with sticky notes. We can underline these 35-40% as the teams back these estimates after looking at what they currently do. Think about this: We’d be done working every Wednesday night.

Liberate your screens.

In order to systematically gain competitiveness we need to get better at “seeing”. We need to create a transparency unknown until today at the Office. Culturally, this is huge!

It wouldn’t be your laptop and your screen, it would be the company’s – and you operate it.

If you worked on construction sites (I did.), you are used to seeing each other at work, the tools and machinery being used. It allows to see things happening before they lead to damages or even accidents – but most of all, you very quickly start copying something that works better than the way you were doing it until now.

I’ve not come across a gardener that wouldn’t let me watch him use his shovel, or a back hoe, or a painter setting up scaffolding and plastic covers – certainly not when I was in the same team.

Share what you’re doing, all the time…

Value Stream across multiple screens
Picture from spiel-ideen.ch. (c) Lars Diener-Kimmich

… AND get a production line set up.

I often hear “Well, we’re not a production floor. So, lean isn’t as easy to set up.” I disagree. If I think of processes like “writing an offer”, or “producing an employment reference”, or “organizing a meeting”, or “writing a business case”, I can quickly relate to it as a process that produces repeatedly and in large numbers.

What if you sat together at a long table in the order of the activities – and let each other see your screens? You’d openly comment what you see, clarify questions immediately, improve as fast as you can fix and/or copy ways of doing things.

Could me massive, right?

And, thinking about it, it isn’t that impossible, really.

So, before committing to a Lean project (or at least the expected gains), ask yourselves whether you are ready to share your screens.

Now, since this is probably a tough one, here’s a sweet one to consider for yourself only
(based on Kenneth W. Dailey, “The Kaizen Pocket Handbook”

The 30 Second Improvement “If you can reduce the time it takes to carry out your daily tasks by 30 seconds every business day of the year, your productivity will have increased by 26%.”

At the Core of Agile. Limited WIP.

Know your 3 Brains. Amygdala.