Office Lean

Understanding and Implementing Flow in a Professional and Administrative Environment

Ken Eakin

• Publisher: Productivity Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781032349442
• eBook ISBN: 9780429515651
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

Struggling to apply Lean effectively in your office environment? Office Lean is a book for anyone who wants to apply Lean better in contexts where the work is both intangible and complex. it explains in simple terms, what Lean is -- and what Lean isn't -- enabling office professionals to understand how it can be successfully applied to their complex office-based work environments.

Contrary to popular opinion, Lean is not only for mass manufacturing or healthcare. It applies just as much to the digital world of "knowledge work" industries such as banking and financial services, software development, and government. But the fundamental concepts, straight from the factory floor, need a fair amount of translation to be effectively applied in cube farms.

Overturning the common perception that Lean is about imposing rigid rules, or simply eliminating waste in the name of "efficiency", Eakin presents Lean as a dynamic, flexible, people-centric philosophy that delivers outstanding business results by improving employee engagement and customer experience.

Office Lean helps Lean practitioners (leaders/managers and coaches/consultants) working in professional office environments access the amazing, transformative results Lean can bring to their specific domains. It combines clear explanations of the core concepts of the Lean philosophy with relevant, practical examples from the fields of accounting, finance, insurance, IT and government.

Grasping the Situation 1

Chapter 1

The Legacy of Industrial Management

Bing! The elevator signals that it has arrived at your floor. Its doors open. You step in, turn around 180 degrees, press the button corresponding to your destination floor, then step back slightly, everyone doing a little shuffle to try to accommodate everyone’s personal space as best they can. You notice in your peripheral vision that Bob is in the elevator. You worked with Bob on the initial phase of Project X last year and have not seen him in a while.

“How’s it going Bob?” you ask.

“Oh, you know, busy.”

“Project X?”

“Yeah, it’s launching next month and it’s feeling a little crazy these days. How are you?”

“Busy. Volume has gone up 35% since last year, and with Sylvia on vacation we’re really struggling.”

“Yeah, I can imagine.”

Have you ever noticed how everyone at your office, during small talk in the elevator, or at the cafeteria, or in the break room, says they are “busy”? Or when asked why they cannot deliver their projects on time, it is because they have “too much on their plate” or “over capacity”? Do ever you think to yourself that it is a freaking miracle that anything ever gets done at all in your office because everyone is so busy with 100 different things going on all the time?

Chaos

Competing priorities, unread or misunderstood emails, too many projects on the go, unclear expectations, preparation of unnecessary reports and presentations, unplanned work, staffing shortages, badly designed software, poorly thought-out corporate metrics, politics, favoritism, turf warfare, information overload, long hours, endless meetings, smartphone addiction, and an utter lack of coordination between different functional areas of the business. Everyone is constantly busy (see Sidebar), yet so little ever seems to get done. Does this sound like your workplace?

How Much Work Is the Right Amount of Work?

Saying one is busy sounds like a complaint, but it is often a bit of boast. Being “busy” signals to yourself and others that you’re “in demand”, that your boss shows she appreciates you by giving you more work, and that you have job security. The odd thing is that if your work was moving along at a healthy, reasonable pace—in that rare sweet spot between boredom and stress—you would still tell your overburdened co-workers you were busy, lest they think you are not as appreciated or valuable as they are. In fact, if you were in an even rarer moment of slack, where your workload allowed you some spare time to breathe and think, you would still tell your co-workers you were busy, wouldn’t you? Because not only would you be feeling underappreciated, you would also be inwardly panicked that if word got out that you were not so busy, someone higher up might start thinking, “Hmm, if we’re not so busy in department X, could we reduce headcount to save some money?” In this perverse state of affairs, we are stressed when we have too much work, and also when we have too little! But do we truly know how much work is just the right amount? And if we did know, how could we ensure that our work remained at such a level?

Unfortunately, this example describes many office workplaces. It is a dysfunctional system, and, sadly, it is the norm. There is widespread burnout, demoralization, and lack of engagement: according to Gallup’s 2013 State of the Global Workplace report, 87% of employees worldwide are “disengaged” or “actively disengaged”¹ at work. In the US, 80% of employees say that they suffer from high levels of stress in their job, and more than half do not take their full vacation entitlement (and when they do, 59% check their emails)² .

In such a dysfunctional system, heroism, fire-fighting, and workarounds prevail³ . People resort to heroics simply because they have multiple deadlines and insufficient time to meet them all. Since everyone is waiting on someone else, work moves at a tortoise’s pace. Waiting employees amplify their multitasking, creating the conditions where they will very likely have to work long hours under high stress to meet their deadlines at the last minute. Management, also often working heroically long hours, often makes things worse by recognizing and rewarding such behavior.

When problems arise, or a boatload of unanticipated work suddenly appears (because an important customer or high-ranking executive just asked for something), people resort to fire-fighting: they douse the flames of a problem to make it go away as fast as possible for the sole purpose of moving on to the next most pressing fire as fast as possible. People are usually so busy putting out fires that they do not have the time or inclination to pause and think about how they might prevent the fires in the first place. In fact, they would much rather have their bosses appreciate them as fire-fighters than go unnoticed as fire-preventers.

Workarounds emerge when people feel powerless to change their chaotic reality for the better. They resort to working outside the formal system: the folkloric tips and tricks, tribal knowledge, and political maneuvering that allow them to get things done faster than others. Often you can find all three dysfunctional behaviors at once: someone finds a workaround to put out the fire and meet the customer deadline at the last minute. This employee becomes the heroic “fire-fighter” of the month. The greatest fire-fighters of all are often promoted, rewarded with larger staffs, larger budgets, and larger salaries. And so, the dysfunctional system propagates.

Is this really the best that contemporary management can do? Since, as Bob Emiliani writes, “better management of organizations is so important and consequential to people’s lives and livelihoods, and to society”⁴ , why can we not do better?

Industrial Management

The origins of our current management system date back about 250 years. It is a product of the Industrial Revolution. By the mid-19th century, craft production had been almost entirely supplanted by mass production, and many commercial firms had grown so large in size, wealth, and complexity that their owners simply could not manage them on their own, especially if they were geographically dispersed (like the railroad companies). These growing firms needed new roles and organizational structures as a form of governance.

At the time, the Church and the military were the only existing models of large-scale organization. Following these models, business owners divided up the work into functional specializations and organized the reporting structures hierarchically. It may come as a surprise, but the standard, pyramidal org-chart that we are all so familiar with today has not existed since the dawn of time. It originally came about in the mid-19th century because many companies had simply grown too large (and, in the case of railroads and banks, geographically dispersed). Employees and owners needed a diagram to keep track of (and enforce) who did what in which part of the company. For the same reason, companies created a new role: someone who was paid to oversee the work of others, but who had no ownership stake in the company—they called them “managers”. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, workers reported directly to the owner of the company (or the owner of the land). During the Industrial Age, as the size of firms grew larger in the mid-1800s, workers became narrowly specialized in their designated tasks (often simple and repeatable), and were overseen not by the owners directly, but through a vertically organized chain of command of intermediate managers and supervisors⁵ .

Business owners were, for the first time in history, removed from direct supervision of the work, and came to rely on their hired managers to report back to them the status of their business. Because of their growing size, 19th century firms organized themselves in ways that structurally altered the relationship between owners and the work being done. Previously, in the era of craft production, owners monitored both the process ⁶ of producing widgets and the results of their sale. This was now split in two. Lower-level managers, not owners, were now responsible for running operational processes successfully, while the business results—the numbers of sales and expenses; profits and losses—became the exclusive purview of the owners and higher-level executives. (Not coincidentally, modern financial accounting arose during this period of business history too). The advent of the joint-stock company and the formation of large, limited liability ownership associations further diffused the relationship between owners and the daily operations of the business.

What has resulted from the advent of the large company is a mechanistic, top-down, disconnected (aka “siloed”) model of organizing and running a business. This industrial model of management has endured into the present because it has served the financial interests of business owners quite well for much of the 19th and 20th centuries. While working conditions have certainly improved, the fundamental philosophy of management has not.

Yet this old industrial model of management appears now to be far less useful (even to owners) than it once was. Many giant (and formerly very successful) corporations are now struggling, as technology companies have displaced the old giants of industry and have become giants themselves. Silicon Valley firms are generating a lot more buzz in the business press, as well as value for their shareholders, than the old stalwarts like General Electric, Procter and Gamble, or ExxonMobil.

Developing countries perform much of the world’s industrial manufacturing, and that which remains in the developed world is highly automated. Developed economies are becoming increasingly service- and office-based. Most of the highest-valued public companies today produce few, if any, physical goods. They produce instead things like operating systems, information and data sharing platforms, e-commerce platforms, predictive algorithms, and cloud computing capabilities. In professional businesses, employees are often experts in their fields, with high levels of education and knowledge. The computer has become the dominant technology of professional value creation, and information and money move easily and quickly within and between firms globally, through vast electronic networks. Meanwhile, the internet has given customers much more choice—and much more power over the sellers of goods and services in many markets. In short, times have changed.

Compliance Machines

Given that the nature of business has changed so much in the world’s developed economies since the late 1800s, and increasing digitization only appears to be accelerating the cycle of “creative destruction” in our current moment, it is perplexing that most companies today persist with a traditional, industrial model of management that was developed in an era when companies mass-produced physical goods in labor-intensive factories. The nature of office work has become much more complex, inter-connected and fast-paced, yet it is still organized into narrow areas of expertise, and employees are still organized in vertical, hierarchical silos, much like an assembly line.

“The corporate bureaucracies we’ve built are compliance machines”, writes the great Lean author, consultant and thinker Michael Ballé⁷ . While most leaders are usually laissez-faire (“hire smart people and leave them alone”) in professional offices, when the big decisions have to get made, industrial age command-and-control (or its politer cousin “review-and-approve”) is still the pervasive management style. Executives of these compliance machines, under intense pressure to please boards of directors and shareholders, sequester themselves in closed-door meeting rooms t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface: Caring for People
• Acknowledgments
• Author
• Introduction: We Don’t Make Widgets
• PART I GRASPING THE SITUATION
• PART II DESIGNING FOR FLOW
• PART III THINKING BEYOND FLOW
• Conclusion: Work Is a Human System
• Appendix: Value Stream, System, and Process: Understanding Three Fundamental Terms
• Index