The Lean Book of Lean. Earley John

should be eliminated and the resources used for something more useful.

      Sounds simple, but it's not. Persuading a large number of people that the majority of what they do on a day-to-day basis amounts to waste is hard, both for the message giver and the message receiver. Over the years, whole departments have been created to generate and distribute waste, which others use to generate more waste, and so the cycle goes on. At the risk of getting locked up for treason, just look at governments of countries for outstanding examples of this. Breaking this will be one of the hardest things you will have to do, as you will be butting up against company hierarchy and politics.

      In this section I will leave you with one final comment on waste. Your most precious commodity is time. Time marches on relentlessly and once gone, you never get it back again. Ensuring time is not wasted must be the number one priority. If you think about it, the implications of this are quite profound. As someone who is getting on a bit now, I really am beginning to understand the meaning of this in every aspect of life.

Declare war on variation

      Variation is the killer of Lean processes: it generates so much waste planning for it, trying to quantify it and buffering against it. All of which is treating the symptom, not the cause. This is where our friend, Six Sigma, comes into play. The Six Sigma suite of tools provides a systematic approach to defining, measuring and analysing variability and then designing and implementing changes to reduce and control it. This was codified into a method by Motorola in the 1980s under the acronym DMAIC (Define opportunity area, Measure current performance, Analyse opportunity potential, Improve performance, Control performance). Again, at the risk of sounding evasive, there are many books on the subject written by people far more versed in these tools than me. If you really want the full works on this you can do worse than getting your hands on a copy of one of Michael L. George's books, founder of The George Group. Briefly however, in principle it works like this:

      Firstly, identify an area that is not performing well, or where there is a specific problem that needs fixing. This needs to be agreed and sponsored, as there needs to be real commitment to fixing it.

      Secondly, spend some time understanding how the area you are trying to improve works and get some real data on performance at each step of the process. It is important that this is done properly as it is the basis of all to come. This means that you need to take the time to get a statistically relevant sample, taking in the true variability of the process.

      Thirdly, analyse the data to understand the root causes of the behaviours that the process is exhibiting. It's important not just to focus on the down side; it's just as important to understand the causes of good outcomes so they can be replicated. There is a whole host of tools and models available to do this.

      Fourthly, figure out how to improve performance or fix the problem and implement the solution (Ha! That sounds simple doesn't it? In practice it can be far from it).

      Fifthly and finally, put measures, controls, accountabilities and fail-safe mechanisms in place to stop everything sliding back to the old ways.

      I'm sure there will be many Six Sigma black belts having palpitations and fuming after reading this very brief explanation. If you are one of those, please be assured that I'm in no way trying to downplay the importance or effectiveness of this method for turning around performance. As will be discussed later, Six Sigma and Lean are good friends and, indeed, should be blended in any broad improvement programme.

      Variation can kill the process, but much variation can be eliminated by applying some simple discipline into the way activities are carried out without the need to resort to some of the more powerful tools mentioned above. Empowerment is a much overused buzzword these days and I keep hearing how “everyone needs to be empowered”. While this might be true, if not done with a little discipline, all you end up with is a free-for-all and everything gets out of control. If the ways of working are inconsistent, the outcomes will be too. This is a problem for any business, but if you operate in any of the numerous regulated industries, it's a major issue, hence the enormous quality management departments in many of these businesses. There has to be “one right way” for everything. However, if you can't get to the “right” way then at least get to “one way” while you figure out what the “right” way is. This can be as simple as looking around your organisation at all the people doing a particular task and doing a rough evaluation on who does it the best. For production, this is fairly easy as there are probably pretty good measures around. For other tasks, this might be a bit more tricky, but don't sweat it too much, we're only looking for rank, not absolutes, here. Once discovered, get the people from the best group to document how they carry out the task and then teach the rest how to do it. The more difficult issue is then to make sure everyone does it, and sometimes this can involve a real battle against the “not invented here” brigade. Everyone will insist they are different and so-and-so's solution won't work here, but don't be having any of it. If there are differences, get them to prove it; the onus of proof should be on them, not you.

      “Ah,” I hear you say. “Doesn't all this standardisation stifle innovation, the cornerstone of continuous improvement?” Not really, but continuous improvement needs to be introduced in a controlled way, not randomly. Once the new way is tested and shown to be better, this then becomes the new standard, hence my message above about not necessarily being “right” right off the bat. By way of an example of what I mean here: Imagine the person replacing the left rear wheel in the middle of a Formula One race having a bright idea about how to do it better and then trying it out there and then. Result, a three-wheeled F1 car exiting the pit lane into the barrier at a high rate of knots! No, these guys follow a well-rehearsed process to the letter; everything has to be done exactly to plan with no deviations. But, once back at base, they try out all sorts of stuff to shave 0.1 seconds off the time it takes, but this is done in a development environment, not in “production”. Once they find, test and perfect a better way, then this becomes the new standard. This is how F1 wheel changes have steadily reduced from 20+ seconds to fewer than 5 over the years, with a distinct lack of three-wheeled missiles coming out of the pit lane. So, proof positive the standard ways of working and innovation do work very well together.

Organise your people around outcomes you want

      Companies over the decades (centuries?) have been organised by departments of people focusing on the same activities: finance; marketing; production; sales; quality; planning, etc. In turn, these departments have usually been sub-divided into groups of people all doing the same thing. The reasons for this are many, including skills development, economies of scale, “centres of excellence” and a myriad of other reasons, but one stands out for me: it's easier to manage a group of people if they all have similar skills and are doing similar work. This also makes it easier to “manage talent” and create career paths and promotion opportunities. So, it seems that the majority of companies are organised for the benefit of the people and managers in them, rather than what they are supposed to be delivering to the customer. In addition, this type of organisation creates a lot of barriers and “handoffs” between these departments, resulting in inevitable delay as your value moves through its process towards the customer, and a lot of finger pointing and bickering when things don't go quite according to plan.