Insisting on Standard Work

Most of my readers will be familiar with Kaoru Ishikawa who taught that there are six factors toward improving any process including man (person), machine, materials, methods, measurements, and mother nature, conveniently called the 6 M's. However, only one of these M's is comprehensive, controlling, independently deterministic in it's effect on the process, and immune to decay - that is methods. Methods, or standard work is what identifies a process with it's inputs process and outputs.

Fig. 1 Ishikawa Process Elements

What do I mean by "immune to decay"? Tools may change and wear out, people move into different jobs, materials eventually become obsolete, but standard work -is forever. Effectively, it serves as an immutable contract to achieve the desired outcome regardless of other variables in play.

Standard work has been popularized recently in the book Checklist Manifesto, which highlights the benefits of "mistake proofing". David Allen also introduced the idea of externalized cognition another fancy name for standard work, in his latest book Getting Things Done. This is the idea that we can create an external brain or system of knowledge outside our own brain. This was also first introduced by none other than Edward W. Deming with his "System of Profound Knowledge" as illustrated in the right side of the picture below.

Fig 2. Distributed Cognition

As we insist on Standard Work, we are fundamentally helping our suppliers and ourselves. We begin to secure our future against the half-life of non-standard work improvements such as tools or people.

COST/BENEFIT:

The cost of standard work is the up-front, non-recurring planning effort, or engineering analysis in coordination with all other related processes, stake holders, tools (including software), materials etc. The benefits of standard work are unbounded as they are re-curing over time. Do we fully appreciate that last sentence?

Note: In the next article, I will build on this by discussing how to maximize the value of standard work by carefully selecting the right format.