The COO Series - Part 6 - The Waiting

“As soon as I get the project, I will start on my piece.”?

“I am waiting on the client to send in their requirements or assets.”

“The truck is late.”

“We have a bottleneck, and until it is cleared, we have to wait.”?

"The container shows it is still in the port."

If these statements are part of your business, then you are sacrificing profitability to the enemy of waiting.

Think about it. You are paying your people to add value to the customer, but they’re waiting on someone or something.?

Your business is not a waiting room, but does it feel like one? Your customer won’t pay for lost time, so why are you?

Waiting is one of the aspects of waste that can kill you, slowly .... while you wait.

There are four areas that waiting typically creeps in and destroys your processes and one where it should:

1. Waiting for information – this is a widespread issue, and it happens at all levels of the organization. Instead of continuing forward with a project there are points where you must stop and wait for information coming from somewhere else.
2. Waiting for management - imagine if everyone waited patiently while one person made what they thought was an informed decision? If there are two or three levels of approval needed, this adds unnecessary delays to your processing time.
3. Waiting for customer approvals – sometimes customer may want to inspect their products before we begin processing them or work with them further; again, this process also includes multiple approval steps that slow down processing time and require more resources. If you can show how much time and money you have lost because of these kinds of delays, it may help your customer understand the need to speed up approvals.
4. Waiting for resources – it’s not just the manufacturing world where equipment, tools or people are shared. We all wear a lot of hats and having to wait until a resource is available to utilize can be a problem.
5. Waiting to get started - many times clients are eager to get started, but then drag their feet granting access, requirements or approvals. In this instance it is far better to wait until all aspects are ready to go and the project can be started and worked on without having to pause. In manufacturing we call the byproduct of waiting WIP or Work in Progress, we start on something, then have to stop because of time, materials or information, then we start again, and again and again throughout the process. When, had we just waiting for everything to be ready we could have done the work more efficiently and in exactly the same timeline.

Waiting in the case of number 5 above can be a good thing because in that case it can protect your flow. But for the most part waiting, for the next phase of a task interrupts your brain. In a study published by the University of California Irvin, interruptions in your flow like waiting have a heavy toll, researchers observed workers in action and tracked their productivity. Gloria Mark, one of the study's authors, said:

You have to completely shift your thinking, it takes you a while to get into it and it takes you a while to get back and remember where you were...We found about 82 percent of all interrupted work is resumed on the same day. But here’s the bad news —?it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to the task.

Do the math - how many times have you been interrupted and have to pause what you are doing (leaving the work waiting for your attention again), how many times are you waiting on something or someone, each time it takes you 23 minutes to get your head and heart back into that task.

If you are struggling with staffing ask yourself how many of those 23 minute segments occur in your business everyday? Three per person, five, ten? Add it up and you will find the people you can't find are actually already present, working for you, they just happen to be in the waiting room.

Serial Entrepreneur, connector, and content creator Derrick Mains has authored three books on?Lean Management?pitched, produced, and starred in the Crackle Original Docuseries?“Riding Phat” ?and helped build (as President and COO) one of the most notable brands to come out of Arizona in the last decade, Phat Scooters.

Derrick applies his experience and unique perspective in his consulting work with?Playbook Systems ?where he works with companies to improve their operational inefficiencies and improve their bottom line.??