EveryJoe » continual improvement

Cut Waste! Stop Spreadsheet Sloppiness

Bob Turek — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 11:33:00 +0000

I read with some pain, but also a chuckle or two, CFO on-line’s sloppy spreadsheet practices article. I like to be organized, send files with naming conventions (source, date, and revision numbers), and like to assist the user of my excel files by using borders, bolded titles, and generally making them readable and printable. Amazingly, according to the article, most students and employees seem to simply send very poor looking documents that at first are unprintable. It’s simply work-creating laziness!

This creates an amazing amount of waste especially if you send your files to two or more people who have to fix your mess.

So here are four things everybody should do to help the world handle your spreadsheets:

1. Title your columns

2. Bold and italicize where necessary to make them easier to read

3. Wrap text (in comment fields in particular)

4. Make them printable

Apparently you will be one of the few who do these simple things and will probably be loved for it. Who knows, it could lead to a promotion.

Do you have any pet peaves related to spreadsheets? Share them! Are you a lazy spreadsheet user? REPENT!

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Cut Waste! Stop Spreadsheet Sloppiness

Efficiency Might Be An Enemy to Quality

Bob Turek — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 11:34:00 +0000

Very interesting issue popped up the other day as I was speaking with a food manufacturer. They are very high quality and taste is everything. They therefore cringe when talk of continual improvement comes along because they do NOT want to mess with the process of food preparation even though they are a manufacturer and not a restaurant. Efficiency, as it relates to continual improvement, can lead to what they call recipe “drift”. In other words, many companies have started small with taste and quality of their food as the key differentiator, only to inexplicably lose that taste edge as they became “efficient” in their manufacturing. This is a great example because everyone understands what happens when your mom’s great recipe is passed onto the next generation the first time.

This got me thinking about other manufacturing processes, of very high quality, that might be subject to inexplicable “drift”. Over-engineering is generally a problem of not listening to the customer. The other thought is to concentrate on waste and NOT efficiency. Waste seems to be a more palatable target for the firm that is hesitant to embrace the efficiency side of continual improvement. The other approach might be to simply separate what you apply continual improvement approaches to. In the case of a food manufacturer maybe packaging, distribution and planning processes could be targets for waste reduction. Always remembering what your customer must have to continue to do business with you reigns supreme.

Do you have a high quality manufacturing process that could be subject to “drift”? Does focusing on waste and not on efficiency help combat “drift”? Is it possible to introduce continual improvement into an organization in one area and not another?

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Efficiency Might Be An Enemy to Quality

Calendaring and Preparation Fight Bad Multi-Tasking on Projects

Bob Turek — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 11:39:00 +0000

Becky at www.myorgnanizedbiz.com recently wrote about the value of calendaring your “biz” and your life. One thing that stuck out was her proposal to try a two week experiment that could change your life:

Becky: Try this for the next two weeks: each day, figure out the five most important things that you need to accomplish that day. Then schedule time for them on your calendar. Schedule it around meetings and e-mail and errands. Actually block out time where you concentrate on that task.

And when that time comes, work on the task. If you only have a 1/2 hour, then see how much you can get done in a 1/2 hour. Don’t answer e-mail. Don’t pick up the phone. Just stick to your calendar.

Didn’t get your task done in the allotted time? That’s okay. Did you make progress? That’s the important part.

My response to her post was to link this thinking to project management best practices, preparation, and actually doing more by doing less:

PM411: Becky- really like the “capacity planning” emphasis. Many are great at calendaring but end up going from one activity to the next being unprepared. I find that lack of preparation means a lot of what I call “stops, starts and redos” which waste a lot of time. We almost need to do less in a better way to cut down the bad multi-tasking- this is what I love to write about at http://www.projectmanagement411.com, i.e., the ways good project management practices enable efficient prioritization of projects and alignment with strategies- whether it be on a personal or business level.

How about you? Do you have examples of doing more by doing less? The Theory of Constraints (Goldratt) deals with issues like suboptimization, slowing down certain activities to actually get more done because of the alignment with rates of other processes- do you see an application for this in your office? Your Plant? Your personal life?

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Calendaring and Preparation Fight Bad Multi-Tasking on Projects

SOA as a Continual Improvement Initiative

Bob Turek — Mon, 19 May 2008 11:58:00 +0000

Sometimes things happen that are seemingly unrelated but the timing and topics are alarmingly similar. I was speaking to a technologist about selling Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) approaches to companies. The struggle is that it is very much an IT sell and it should be a business sell. Using my strategy mapping mentality I related how I first find a couple of key strategies from executive discussions and then tie tactical technology enabling projects to them. This usually opens executive’s eyes to projects that are aligned, or not aligned, with strategies. But we came to no conclusions about how to sell what seemed to be pure technology to a business person.

Just before this discussion I was reading a seemingly unrelated article about a technology “framework” for enabling better decision making and continual improvement of business processes. After the discussion above I reread the article in Manufacturing Business Technology magazine and realized that the two (my discussion and the article) had a lot to do with each other. In the article, Chevron’s Mike Brooks “evangelizes” about a “framework” that helps companies make better decisions:

“Consider the situation in which a production operator sees a sensor pointing to an impending failure,” he explains. “The maintenance department will want to take that machine down immediately and repair it, but the operations department will want to keep it running to keep from delaying orders. But which is the right answer?”
Giving the current state of systems in most process plants, there is no way to know definitively, Brooks argues. “Under the current work processes, a decision is made in the daily production meeting, and usually the guy who shouts the loudest gets his way.”
With the right technology framework in place, Brooks contends, appropriate data from all departments could be shared at the meeting, and a collaborative process would yield an objective decision that is best for the entire business, not just a single department.

What Mike seems to be talking about is having a technology “framework” that allows easy access and manipulation of information through building of a new or changed/improved business process. This is not simply report writing but rather a business process with multiple steps and inputs and outputs. In this case the new process would allow better decision making. Companies that realize that continual improvement of business processes is important need a “framework” that allows fast implementation of new business processes no matter how small or large.

Could SOA provide this? Some SOA messages concentrate on cutting integration costs. Others enabling quick building, by users or technologists, of new business processes. Most say that you have to have a need for one or more new applications in a business area. What if a “framework” enabled a company’s continual improvement culture? In other words, what if the technology helped not only integrate but build new business processes fast enough, no matter how small, to support a continual improvement strategy designed to stay ahead of the competition?

How do you view SOA? from a business or technology perspective? What helps you understand the value of an SOA “framework” to a company? What strategies does such a solution fit with?

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Post from: EveryJoe

SOA as a Continual Improvement Initiative