Are you managing your people or managing the work?
We have been trained and conditioned through our daily experiences to manage people as opposed to managing the work and the system of work.
What we should be doing is managing and changing our work system; this is hard, but it is where we should focus on improving the value flow!
I want to manage the system of work, but how and where do I start?
Step 1: Visualise your Value Stream
Step 2: Measure your capability
Step 3: Make your working policies explicit
Step 4: Tackle the sources of delay
Step 5: Build a daily improvement cadence
Visualise your value stream
Customer
Starting with the customer, who is the customer (customer segment, user) of the service, create your customer personas. You must understand who is the ultimate customer for your service, how they will interact with it and what problem you are solving for them.
Even when you work in a larger organisation and work is given to you, resist the temptation of just building stuff without knowing who it is for and why you are doing it.
Outcome
What is the outcome from the customer’s perspective? The customer perspective is the key here? How do they define value and success?
Service
Now that we know who the customer is, how they measure success, and the problem we are addressing, we can look at the service.
In our organisations, we are too quick to start the build or delivery because it is our job. We will serve our organisations and customers better if we start with the customer, purpose and success measures.
Visualise how the service is delivered, start coarse-grained and refine when needed. After the major steps in the workflow, our free value stream visualisation dialogue will guide you on how to do your value stream mapping.
Measure your capability
First, you need to know your types of work. Let us look at an example to make it easier.
At a Post Office, people come to
post letters
post parcels
Government services, for example, Passport application
Travel Money
Travel Insurance
These are our types of work; we may treat posting as one type of work, so whether it is a letter or a parcel, we will treat them as the same type.
Now we know our types of work and can measure our capacity for each type of work. We want to know how long it takes us to service the work, work item lead time and how many we can do in an hour, work item delivery rate, and how many people are working.
Arrival rate
The other measure we need is the arrival rate or our demand rate. How many customers do we get per hour? Post Offices and other retailers will most likely need to know this per hour of day and month and look for patterns as this may impact the staffing. For example, lunchtime peaks and Christmas peaks.
Waiting Time
When the arrival rate is greater than our delivery rate we have to wait, at a post office, this is easy to see as we can see the queue of people in front of us, in knowledge work, this is not the case and is another reason why we need to visualise our value stream. When we visualise the work and represent the work items by visual tokens, we can see what is going on and, how much work is in progress, where it is waiting.
How long do I have to wait?
When I join a queue like the one in a Post Office, I measure how long it takes to move in the queue, and I do this four times as follows. Ignore the first one, as I did not know when the staff started serving the person who had just left. The next three will indicate how long I have to wait; I know how fast people are served, i.e., the lead time and the number of people ahead of me. I can estimate my wait time and decide whether to stay or leave.
Classes of Service
When I get to the counter to post a letter, the Post Office offers me three classes of service,
Second Class
First Class
Next Day
The class of service indicates how they will service my request, the routeing and the delivery schedule. There is a cost associated with the different classes of service, and I can pay more for faster service when I need to.
Make your work policies explicit.
Defining and visualising the work item types is the start. We also need to make our working policies explicit and visible.
Making the policies explicit and written allows people to question them, improve them and achieve a consistent approach.
Here is an example
Tackle the sources of delay.
- Reduce the number of items in progress
- Make the work item the first-class citizen
- Build quality in your ways of working
- Focus on finishing what is started
- Work at a sustainable pace
Build a daily improvement cadence
Visualise
- Visualise your flow
- Visualise your work item types
- Measure your lead time and delivery rates
Stabilise
- Use your measure to estimate when you are likely to deliver
- Measure work item ageing
- Establish work-in-progress limits
Optimise
- Build a daily improvement cadence
- Act on the sources of delay
- Review and improve ways of working
- Reduce failure demand
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