The following article appears in the Summer 1995 edition of _The_Public_Sector_Network_News_, pages 1-3.] FOCUS ON THE WORK: PICK IMPROVEMENT PROJECTS THAT REALLY HELP YOUR AGENCY'S OPERATIONS Some Tips for Managers Who Want Their Clients and Staff Members to Work on the Right Things Agency improvement efforts must be focused on making changes that will produce tangible benefits both for the agency and for customers. In addition, these efforts must be carried out enthusiastically by people with the knowledge needed to succeed. Managers and consultants should guide process improvement teams to work on projects that will contribute to increasing the output of goods and services that customers are willing to pay for or use right now. This objective can be achieved by following these steps: * Find the critical resource or leverage point that controls your department's capacity. * Decide what needs to be changed. * Decide what to change to. * Make the change. This article offers advice on how to select the right area to work on, how to work through improvement steps, and how to keep the participants energized. HOW TO DECIDE WHAT NEEDS TO BE CHANGED To find what needs to be changed, find the key leverage point or critical resource in your department. In many cases, the method for finding this leverage point or resource is straightforward: We can just pick it! Here is how: First, make a list of the major resources used to produce your product or service. From that list, determine which resource is: 1. An expensive resource (a printing press in a printing department, for instance) 2. A resource that takes a long time to acquire more of (an experienced accounting clerk) 3. A resource that directly adds value to your product or service (a driver's license examiner at the Department of Motor Vehicles) 4. A capacity-limiting resource that your customer would feel makes sense (Probably makes sense: "Sorry, all our examiners are fully booked, so we can't audit you for several weeks." Probably doesn't make sense: "Sorry, we can't schedule your audit for several weeks because the clerk that schedules examiner visits is on leave.") For example, take a doctor's office. Most office and clinics are organized around the doctor being the critical resource. The amount of revenue from patient consultations is directly dependent on the number and type of consultations performed by the doctor. In this system, the doctor is certainly the most expensive resource: it takes many years to train a new doctor to add capacity; the doctor is the primary value-adding resource, and it would make sense to new patients to be told the doctor is fully booked and isn't taking new patients. Using the criteria given above, the doctor seems the logical choice for the critical resource if maximizing patient visits is your objective. WHAT SHOULD WE CHANGE? Use the Critical Resource to Control the Flow of Work Through Your Organization Now that you've decided what the critical resource in your department is, you need to change something to produce better results. This sequence of steps should be followed: 1. Change something to make sure the critical resource is always busy. In the doctor's office, we should first look to see if the doctor is always busy consulting with patients during office hours. If the critical resource is idle part of the time AND there is work waiting in the system, we need to break the bottlenecks that are starving the critical resource so we get more output. Most clinics are organized to make sure there is a waiting room full of patients, and examining rooms full of fully prepped patients so that the doctor can move from patient to patient with no time being idle and little time doing overhead work. If there are patients in the clinic and the doctor can't find a patient to consult with, we need to find where the patients are waiting and change to a system to get them to the doctor faster. If there are no patients to work on, we need to change the service offering, the marketing, the pricing, or other variable to increase the number of patients, or else have the doctor work fewer hours. The first step then, is to make sure the critical resource (the doctor) is busy working on the right stuff. 2. Change the system to reduce costs. The next step is to make sure work flows smoothly and quickly through the system, stopping only in front of the critical resource, minimizing the cost and use of capital, and providing a better experience to any customers in the system. Ideally, the patients should flow through the clinic and be prepped and then wait only for the critical resource. How many prepped patients do we need waiting for the doctor to ensure the doctor is always busy? Only enough to handle the variation in consultation process time and patient arrival times to ensure the doctor doesn't run out of work. If we have too many patients waiting, we add complexity and costs to the system and make patients dissatisfied. Once the patient completes a consultation with the critical resource, the patient should flow smoothly out of the system. 3. Change the system to raise throughput. Once patients are flowing through the clinic waiting ONLY for the doctor, what should we work on next? Can we find a way to increase the doctor's productivity by providing better tools, off-loading some simple tasks to doctors' aides, or helping the doctor keep up a good work pace? If the doctor can do more work and no new bottlenecks are created, the system throughput (number of patient consultations) increases. To summarize the steps above: * Identify a critical resource. * Make sure the resource is busy. * Break the bottlenecks in non-critical resources. * Raise the capacity of the critical resource. If your improvement projects are selected from an analysis of how work flows through your critical resource, you can be sure successful projects will benefit both your organization's bottom line and your customer's perception of the value of your product or service. HOW DO WE GET KNOWLEDGEABLE PEOPLE WORKING ON THE OBJECTIVE WITH ENERGY? Now that we've selected an improvement that we know will help the organization, how do we staff the project with capable people who will supply enough energy to take the project to completion! Here are some guidelines to raise your chances for success: Analyze your system and determine what needs to be changed using the steps above. For example, we decide that the doctor spends much time reading the patient history file before starting a consultation. State the change objective clearly so you can determine the knowledge and skills required by team members to solve the problem. A clear objective also lets you know when you are done. For example: "Form a team to make it easier for the doctor to prepare for each patient consultation." Put the right people on the team and build the team. Select people who understand the process and have the time to work on the project. The members selected must also have enough authority to carry out these solutions. In the doctor example, we may decide to have the receptionist, nurse, and doctor work together to solve the problem. We may want some help from a specialist to conduct team-building activities if team members have not worked together to achieve an objective before. Provide support to the team. Supply a facilitator if the team members are not experienced in solving problems as a team. Train them to use any analytical tools that are necessary for solving the problem. Consider the impacts of the required changes on the people doing the work and take steps to ease the transition for them. In our doctor example, the need for outside help would probably be minimal since the group is self-contained, and solving the stated problem should be straightforward. In a more complex system, special attention should be paid to support and transition issues. Keep the team members motivated. Teach the team members about how work should flow through the organization and how their particular project will improve the flow. This doctor's team should understand the overall objective of providing the maximum number of effective consultations to patients and how helping the doctor prepare for each patient will increase throughput while raising the quality of the consultation and increasing patient satisfaction. Be sure the problem is challenging to the members, but not overwhelming, so they don't give up in frustration. Keep track of the team progress and encourage the team to keep working toward a solution. The doctor should give feedback to the other members of the team about the effectiveness of changes that have been made. Provide incentives to the organization for achieving the maximum throughput. In the doctor's office, the best solution is to have a busy doctor and patients that are always moving through the system. The receptionist and nurse may be idle from time to time when there are no patients to work with, and being idle occasionally is essential to maximize throughput. What incentive can we provide so that everyone will continue to run the system in the best way and continue to look for improvements? Being out of work temporarily may be uncomfortable to people, so we might want to provide interesting work for them to do when they have idle time. Education, skill development, and cross-training may be good incentives to making running out of work a good idea. Once people get tuned in to this new way of work, there are good reasons for everyone to improve the daily work. Profit sharing is an excellent way to share the gains from improvement work. Eliminate barriers to working this new way. A policy of keeping the support people busy will work against this objective. Measuring the productivity of support people will work against this objective. A manager who frowns when support people are out of work will inhibit progress. Performance appraisals that stress individual achievement or rank employees against each other may work against improvement activities. SOME EXAMPLES 1. A printing company selected printing presses to be the critical resource. Projects were undertaken to raise capacity in the customer service, pre-press, and bindery departments to eliminate work in process except directly in front of the presses. Work was metered into the system to keep the backlog in front of the press at a manageable level. The result has been a reduction in cycle time, happier customers, less work in process, and improved morale in some departments. More efforts are planned to reduce costs by taking advantage of improved productivity and to add throughput by improving press utilization. 2. In a law firm, the attorneys were selected as the critical resource. An investigation revealed that attorneys were idle for short periods of time because: a. They were waiting for a client file to be delivered. b. They were waiting for a document to be typed and returned. c. Access to a computer network was blocked because of a system problem. Several groups worked on projects to get the work flowing faster. A theme in two departments was to get completely caught up at least once a day. In both departments, this new way of working has been difficult to achieve because some people feel management is asking the people to work harder. Also, some people don't see the logic of working very hard when work is in the shop to be done and then resting when there is no work-why not just work at a constant pace and let the backlog absorb the variation? 3. In a social science research facility, the manager was interested in applying these principles to the work of conducting large telephone surveys. However, it was difficult to find a critical resource since the work was routine and new telephone interviewers could be hired fairly quickly. The old way of conducting surveys was analyzed and it was noted that operators would call all cases (some surveys might have 20,000 people to call) and get interviews with the people that were home, then start working on the categories that were left until only very hard cases remained. This method caused problems because it was difficult to forecast the cost, completion rate, and completion date, and management would have to wait until the survey was done to answer these questions. The manager came up with an innovative solution to create a critical resource and decided on interview appointments." Cases were metered in just at the rate that appointments could be made and kept on a daily basis. This meant that a few hundred new cases would be started each day and an attempt was made to take this small group to completion rather than allow partially completed cases to remain as work-in-process inventory. The results were very encouraging. The next two surveys were completed faster, required less manpower, and achieved higher than expected hit rates. Daily metering of cases also meant repetitive work cycles which were ideal for continuous improvement efforts. 4. A new project being undertaken in a software development company identifies the development engineers as the critical resource. Product marketing will supply a firm list of features to the development group to ensure engineers are always busy producing well-specified products. An analysis of past projects showed long cycle times with much variability in completion dates and quality of the software. A proposed solution to this problem is to start with a stable system and have the whole team design, develop, and test one feature at a time, again setting up a repetitive work system that can be improved more quickly. In addition, some features may be ready earlier. The support group is working on improvements to raise their capacity so that installations, documentation, and support call handling can always be delivered at a rate to match what engineering puts out. SUMMARY Application of the techniques mentioned can be applied to a wide variety of work situations and often produces innovative solutions that won't be found through normal methods. Linear flowing manufacturing applications are relatively straightforward. Applications where the flow is not apparent require some creativity. People interested in improvements of this type are encouraged to consult the references given below. In summary: * Find the critical resource or leverage point that can increase your organization's capacity. * Decide what needs to be changed. * Decide what to change to. * Make the change using an enthusiastic team. References Fuller, F. Timothy. "Eliminating Complexity From Work: Improving Productivity by Enhancing Quality." National Productivity Review, (Autumn 1985): 327-344. Gluckman, Perry, and Diana Reynolds Roome. Everyday Heroes. Los Altos, CA: Process Plus, 1989. Goldratt, Eliyahu M. The Goal. Croton-on-Hudson, NY: North River Press, 1984. For more information, contact: Tim Fuller, Fuller Associates, 424 Ferne Ave., Palo Alto, CA 94306 (415) 493-4565, Fax (415) 493-4688. E-mail: timf7@aol.com.