Pull the process, don't push it.
You wake up in the morning, roll out of bed and go to the bathroom. Next you turn on the sink and notice the water starting to back up. A quick check tells you the drain isn't closed, what's the very next thing you do?
Maybe you thought get some draino or something to unclog it, but I'd bet without even thinking, the first thing you did was turn off the faucet.
So why in business when the work starts backing up the first thing we do is turn the faucet up? It may feel like your getting more work done, but ultimately you just create a mess.
Next time you are seeing a process back up, figure out how to unclog the drain and get the process flowing. In lean, this is called a pull system. The process step at the end calls for work to be done before it. Here are a couple of tips for doing that:
- Understand what the full process is. This may seem like a simple step, but it may surprise you on how often this is missed. When we work on process, many have a tendency to fix their portion, not really paying attention to what that does to the process as a whole. This is "sub-optimizing" at it's finest. It creates rework and bottlenecks as your portion of the task runs faster than everything else. So be sure to identify the whole value stream from end-to-end.
- Determine if there is any area of the process that always seems to back up. We generally call this a bottleneck, often it seems to be a buzzword more than anything. Take a simple process, say 3 steps, the first takes 6 seconds, the second takes 4 seconds and the last takes 10 seconds. Likely what you will see is a bunch of work piling up at step 2 before step 3, more than likely the worker at step 2 will just slow down, so even though they could do the task in 4 seconds, they will take all 10, hello inefficiency!
- Get creative on solutions to clear the "bottleneck". If the solution feels easy and comfortable, you're probably doing something wrong.
“We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them”
Thank you for reading.
Retired- Senior Workshop Consultant
6 年Well said Rob. Identifying how to best create pull is often overlooked or misunderstood so companies double down on push exacerbating the problem down the road.
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6 年Great analogy Rob. Why do we turn the faucet up in business? Is it the pressure to reach our goals? Stopping to find the root cause makes perfect sense. Most of us need to develop that discipline. Thanks for sharing Rob!