Are You Updating Your Standard Work As Improvements Are Made?

Ultimately, standard work is the foundation for continuous improvement because it provides a basis for evaluation. There is no way to know whether an improvement is truly an improvement if we don’t have a standard to compare it against.

As Taiichi Ohno once said, “Where there is no standard, there can be no Kaizen.”

Let’s take that one step further. Some people have this idea that standard work is a fixed thing. That it’s set in stone and it never changes. Some people feel standard work is a restriction or limitation for doing work differently than the standard suggests. That’s just not true.

In rock climbing, there is a form of climbing called "Lead Climbing." In Lead Climbing, the climbers and their rope start climbing from the ground-up, with no protection or safeguards above them. The climber places protection (small, removable anchors) in rock features as they climb (traditional leading). The climber clips the rope to each piece of gear as they pass. If the climber should fall, the rope will catch their most recent protection and limit the fall so the climber does not hit the ground.

Imagine you have developed the "best known way" of doing a particular task. You developed standard work and trained the team to the standard. Everyone is now using the standard. Now imagine this standard is your lead climber anchor that has been placed in the rock face. There are two points to remember about these anchors. First, climbers never place an anchor and then stop climbing. Multiple anchors are used as a climber traverses a rock face moving closer to their destination. Once you have established your true north (perfection), workers should know how their work contributes to the overall vision and should be continuously striving toward the destination. In a lean environment, workers should be continuously improving their work which should result in updated standard (new anchors). Second, these anchors act as a safety point. If a climber was to fall, the anchor points will catch them and keep them from falling too far down the rock face. Standards do the same. As workers are empowered to experiment and try new ways of doing things, they are essentially experimenting to find the correct path up the rock face. Standards are in place to keep us from falling further back than our last proven "best way."

Remember, anchors are "set in stone" for a given time to establish stability, but they are also removeable. An important point to keep in mind is that standard work is?not?static. You won’t develop standard work processes and then leave them in place without changing them. As a matter of fact, I had someone once tell me “If your standard work hasn’t changed in four or five months, it really isn’t standard work.” While there might be some opinions as to the validity of that statement, one thing is for sure, you should always be striving to improve...and any improvements would result in changes to standard work.

Toyota teaches that every employee has two jobs; first to complete their work. And second, to improve their work. Using standard work as the current best way, with an eye for improvement, can help an organization capture small suggestions from operators. Capturing these suggestions, and the tribal knowledge that exists among your team, is something that everyone can learn and benefit from. Your standard work should be a living document that is constantly changing and evolving by way of continuous improvement, and scientific experimentation using the Plan Do Check Act cycle. Standard work is simply a part of the continual improvement cycle, and necessary if we want to make our Kaizen gains stick. If you are going to declare something as a continuous improvement, then you’re claiming that this new way is better than the old way. It is vital that our standard work changes to keep up with these improvements.

Having standard work that evolves over time is essential for creating team member engagement. When your team realizes you actually take improvement ideas and implement them as the “new standard” they can see that you are practicing a culture of continuous improvement, and not just continuous appearance. You can tell your team their ideas are welcome, and make a difference, but unless we prove out those suggestions and implement them, we are conveying the message that we really don’t value our teammates recommendations. Standard work is a tool everyone can use. Let’s make sure our associates feel empowered to use it.?

In this weeks episode of The Lean Solutions Podcast, I was able to have Bob Emiliani back for a second time to discuss many topics to include his views on ‘Fake Lean.’

What You’ll Learn This Episode:

• What is Fake Lean?
• Findings of an Ongoing Root Cause Analysis on Lean Transformation Failures
• Research studies Bob is currently working on
• What is Bob’s favorite topic to discuss?