What does this mean?

Well often the first improve­ment is the worst improve­ment! We’re tak­ing a bad process (or no process!) and improv­ing upon it. But when we share it with oth­ers then they can often improve on this improve­ment and so it goes. One improve­ment begets anoth­er.

There were numer­ous exam­ples of this at Seat­ing Mat­ters but we were see­ing the result of 10 years of imple­ment­ing lean, so instead I thought I’d share an exam­ple from our busi­ness.

Lock­ing up the office was a pain! Now you might be think­ing, what has this got to do with run­ning an accoun­tan­cy firm and this exam­ple seems “super­flu­ous” to day to day oper­a­tions — but it ties in with a few of the oth­er lean phras­es (how you do any­thing is how you do every­thing and fix what bugs you — more on those in lat­er weeks) and so actu­al­ly had a pos­i­tive impact.

If you were last in the office, it was prob­a­bly because you had a meet­ing that over­ran down­stairs in the meet­ing rooms, or because you had a bit of work that you had your head in and you over­ran. Either way, the last thing you want­ed to do was do a full check of the office — but that’s what you end­ed up doing. Going through all 4 floors, check­ing all the lights were off, check­ing win­dows were closed, lock­ing up. Or even worse, lock­ing up and get­ting out to the car only to see that there was a light still on and hav­ing to go back in and sort it. (Or not notic­ing a win­dow was open and com­ing in to a freez­ing cold room the next morning….which did hap­pen!).

So we set up a sys­tem. A sim­ple process to fol­low when you left your room

Check the win­dows are closed

Check the heaters are off

Turn off the lights

Close the door behind you

The next improve­ment was to actu­al­ly print this out and add it to the back of each door so it is vis­i­ble when you leave. (Visu­al cues are a huge part of lean)

That way when some­one leaves the build­ing they just need to check that the doors are closed and they can lock up (rather than going into each room). Sweep­ing a floor takes sec­onds rather than min­utes. Again — very visu­al. Door closed — the room has been locked up.

But what it the door was closed because you were on a call? Or it was cold and so you had the heater on?

So the next improve­ment was to add slid­ers to the doors to show if some­one was IN or OUT. Again very visu­al.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly the slid­ers were a pain and didn’t slide across effort­less­ly so we improved on it again and made it eas­i­er by adding a but­ton to grip.

We’ve come up with a fur­ther improve­ment (that we are yet to imple­ment) – where­by there are fur­ther slid­ers on each floor so you don’t even have to go up the stairs to check that the doors are mar­ket as out, the last per­son on that floor will mark the floor as being clear.

And that’s just the start, we’re now look­ing for more and more ways to improve.

Take care until the next time

Rus­sell + Rus­sell