by Lee Fried, on 19 Oct 2008 04:08 pm
The Journey
Learning How to "Spread" Standard Work
We are now at a place as an organization where we are struggling with how we can effectively “scale” our Lean work across an enterprise of over 10,000 employees with locations across two states. As you can imagine there are all kinds of people and process challenges. One of the most interesting is how do we manage the effective “spread” of standard work across individuals, teams and locations. We have thirty specialty service lines, twenty-six clinics, ancillaries, dozens of administrative teams, etc. all either already standardizing their processes or about to start. Many of these teams are focused on delivering to the same set of customer requirements, but do not currently have the same baseline that they are staring from. For example, everyone of our clinics has a different work environment (some very big and some very small), different staffing ratios and different processes. Its hard enough deploying standard work in one location, but daunting to think about trying to spread it across twenty-six!
Over the last six months my thinking has greatly evolved. I now believe that it is less important for every one of our work teams to have shared standard work for all their processes. To try and drive that level of consistency across work teams would not only take an incredible amount of resources, but also create an enviornment that would be ridgid, slow to improve and take creativity away from the people doing the work. Instead, every team needs to be focused and held accountable to developing their own standard work that everyone follows within the team that reliabily meets the standard each and every time the work is completed. In other words, all teams must meet the standard, but they don’t all have to have the same processes in place to meet that standard. There may still be certain processes that in order to meet customer requirements need to be performed consistently across teams, but most processes are invisible to customers and will not meet this requirement.
By taking this approach the organization can focus its time in more effective ways. Rather then spending a huge amount of resources and time trying to maintain standard work across teams the organization can instead focus on developing systems that make performance transparent and developing incentive systems that encourage teams to share their work. If done right, low performing teams for any process should be incentivized to learn from high performing teams and possibly adopt their standard work. Conversely, high performing teams should always be looking to find low performing teams that they can lend a helping hand in support.
I am wondering if others have thoughts on this approach?
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on 27 Oct 2008 at 6:27 pm 1.Kristianne said …
What you’re suggesting makes sense to me, Lee. If each clinic/facility standardized their key processes to consistent targets, we’d be much improved from the current state. Particularly if we’re all following the same steps to standardize (from CFM), so there is a common language and consistency in the documentation of the standard processes. This would set clearer expectations for all involved, provide a stronger foundation for managers and staff to evaluate performance (both team and process performance), and improve onboarding/orienting for new/visiting/floating employees.
If we had key processes standardized and documented in a consistent way, the organization’s ability to look at what should be standardized across the enterprise would be easier…still daunting, of course, but maybe even manageable…just imagine…
I love your idea of high performing team’s “mentoring” lower performing teams. I wonder if that could be a future step of Gallup follow up. Something like, if you’re team’s average is below a certain value, seek out the manager of a higher performing team to learn from. It could create all kinds of creative actions in impact plans that focus on sharing and learning internally.
on 20 Nov 2008 at 12:03 pm 2.Bryan said …
Probably a sound approach to take. We are adding structure to this approach through the use of Job Instruction, via the TWI Service program.
I share your sentiment, it is mind-boggling to try and “standardize” rigid methods across large organizations. But we can spread the standard work thinking methods by teaching one person at a time.
Each individual can work at the standardization problems in their natural team environment. In this way, they will see for themselves that if their are eight people in the group, there are probably eight methods.
They can then focus on the CFM related measures of quality, cost, value, delivery, safety etc., and standardize the processes needed to meet, exceed and improve those goals.
The Job Instruction method just gives people a common language to analyze and standardize their shared work.