Office Kaizen, Part 2/4 (Process Wastes)

This post addresses the second set of wastes in our series of 4 Office Kaizen discussions. There are 12 wastes when it comes to process, and they are briefly discussed below. Lareau (2003) calls our attention to avoid mixing some of the following wastes with some of the people wastes discussed in the first post of this series.

Control Waste: this waste refers to unnecessary and extreme supervision of work. It sometimes creates irrelevant tension in the work environment which, in turn, lowers employee morale. Work groups (or cells) are the ideal setting in an Office Kaizen environment. As well, clear metrics, strategic alignment, and personal development plans should help the organization to rapidly identify issues in the process.

Variability Waste: resources that are utilized due to outcomes that deviate from the expected or normal outcomes. These resources are typically involved with activities related to re-working solutions, recalling products, and amending services that did not deliver the expected outcome in the first place.

Tampering Waste: the effort required to adjust a process which has been arbitrarily changed without foresight, and the efforts to deal with the consequences of those changes. In an Office Kaizen environment, no arbitrary changes without foundation on metrics, impact on outcomes, and employee's morale would take place.

Strategic Waste: relates to value lost due to the efforts that are concentrated on short-term goals and/or immediate internal customer needs only, i.e. it does not impact the company's long term objectives. Normally, an Office Kaizen approach would be to look into the entire value chain and identify perils about the short-term gains versus the long term losses.

Reliability Waste: efforts related to the correction of unpredictable outcomes that are the fruit of unknown causes. The most likely approach to this situation in an Office Kaizen environment would be to have procedures, visual and/or job aids, and standards that inform the operator of the procedures associated with the unpredictable outcomes (call it the B plan).

Standardization Waste: efforts wasted to correct the variance among operators of the same task. In other words, one operator performs better than the other. The ideal solution here is that the best practice be followed by others, and that the best performer trains (or helps) the others to achieve the standard expected.

Sub-optimization Waste: may also be called "the tug of war of processes or departments". This type of waste happens when competing processes a) duplicate the work needed for the entire value chain or b) "compromise each other and degrade the final outcome" (Lareau, 2003, p. 29).

Scheduling Waste: energy spent on compensating activities due to their poor scheduling. A well functioning Office Kaizen would schedule activities respecting their flow, timing, gaps, overlaps, and breathing in between them.

Work-around Waste: the famous informal, out-of-control, and DIY (Do It Yourself) type of procedure that overweighs the formal procedures the organization has in place. Normally the outcome of such procedures are penalties and more control, but in an Office Kaizen mentality, the group involved would look for best practices, share them, and make them the official way of doing things, while at the same time always looking for improvement opportunities.

Uneven Flow Waste: resources allocated to correct the uneven flow of material or information "sitting" somewhere in the process (similar to inventory waste). Just as in a manufacturing setting, the work group in an Office Kaizen would evaluate the value chain and focus on bottlenecks that may be piling up unnecessary materials or information.

Checking Waste: efforts put into the constant inspection of activities due to the poorly designed value stream. Checking, double-checking, and triple-checking are non-paying activities in the eyes (and pockets) of the customer. As in any continuous improvement (CI) approach, the design of the process should aim for an error-free outcome, as once put by Phillip Crosby.

Error Waste: the efforts spent on re-doing, fixing, and amending what has not been done properly in the first place. Although a certain degree of error is expected in all processes, the CI professional in an Office Kaizen environment should always set up the process with enough error-proofing (poka yoke) techniques and methods to secure the correct outcome as much as possible.

The next post will address Information Waste. eZsigma Group offers onsite analysis of processes and their constraints. For a more in-depth discussion on what your organization needs to become a better one, please contact us directly at rperdigao@ezsigmagroup.com.

Reference: Lareau, W. (2003). Transforming Office Operations Into A Strategic Competitive Advantage. Milwaukee, USA: ASQ Quality Press.

9 Steps to Effectively Creating Project Charters

A project charter is a document that describes, authorizes, and defines any given process improvement initiative. It is widely used within the project management community as well as within the quality management field, often for Six Sigma implementation programs. Project charters can be of great value when someone needs information about the project, at review meetings, and to formally address changes needed to the scope and/or objectives of the project - needless to say, a great and necessary tool for quality practitioners seeking documentation and formalization of the project's detailed information. But how do we go about creating a project charter that is rich in information and easy to be used throughout the duration of the initiative? In this post, we offer 9 steps to creating an effective project charter. These steps should cover the basics of any process improvement initiative, however the list below is not by any means all inclusive. The quality professional will certainly need other pertinent information depending on specific requirements such as legislation, market conditions, sine qua non conditions within a contract and so on.

1. Sponsor/champion: who is sponsoring this project? Will he/she be available for conflict resolution and to act as the spokesperson at the leadership level? The sponsor should be involved from the very beginning, i.e. the sponsor should help the team to write the project charter.

2. Project title: what will the team call this project and will it be easily thought of as the initiative it truly represents?   

3. Business case: questions related to this field should sound like: "why are we doing this?", "how does this project relate to our organization's strategy?", and "what is the impact on our various stakeholders once this initiative has been successfully completed?". In a world where ROI (Return On Investment) is used as justification for basically everything, it is vital that your project charter is crystal clear about the business case it supports.

4. Scope: what are the boundaries of the business opportunity? What are the team's responsibilities and liabilities? What is not within the defined scope? Which parts of the process are included and which ones are not? Where does the process start and end? Having a clear scope description helps the team and the organization to avoid frustration on non-expected outcomes.

5. Goals: the old SMART way of setting your goals is still valid. SMART goals will provide the team with specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely metrics. Ideally, these metrics would be mathematically linked to the organization's strategic objectives (check our post on KPIs deployment - September, 2013: 

Ten Steps to the Proper Set Up of KPIs

6. Problem statement: the problem statement might not be the most accurate one at first, but that's OK. It is only after some data collection and validation that the project team will surely address the issue at its root level, based on facts and data. However, organizations often have known problems that need to be addressed through improvement initiatives. One way or the other, a clearly defined problem statement will help the team to focus on the task at hand.

7. Start/end dates and milestones: when does the project start and when does it end? And when should we expect to achieve the expected milestones? Here we emphasize the importance of celebrating these milestones' achievements - this will energize the team and the organization to move forward.

8. People involved: a solid improvement process project should have, at a minimum, a project sponsor, a project manager/leader, a scribe, facilitators, and team members. More sophisticated projects may also have a formal steering committee and the involvement of external stakeholders such as the community or a local legislator.

9. Signature and dates to help with formalization and accountability.

eZsigma's professionals constantly use project charters for the planning and deployment of improvement process initiatives. We are Canada's leading firm in the consulting, training, and certification of Lean and Six Sigma. Contact us to discuss your organization's needs.