Follow these five steps to improve your system of work
1 Understand the end to end system of the value flow to the customer
- Study how the flow of work and visualise your work and map the flow
- Run the map, watch work items flow through the map
- Limit the number of tokens
2 Understand the system capabilities
- Types of work
- System lead time for fulfilling each type of work
- Arrival rate for each type of work
- Departure rate for each type of work
- Failure demand for each type of work, demand caused by failure to do something or to do something right for the customer – John Seddon
3 Understand your system variability
- For each type of work, measure
- Common cause variation, act on the system to change the common cause variation
- Assignable cause variation, act on the cause to remove assignable cause variation
4 Measure the flow efficiency for each type of work
- Measure the flow of each major knowledge discovery step
5 Purposeful change
- understand the root causes of the failure demand and tackle them
- Use the arrival, departure rate and the flow efficiency to target your improvement efforts and achieve better results for your investment
- Evolve your system of work and improve your system of work
Kanban Management Professionals are experts in visualizing and improving the system of work.
