Practical ways to become lean

In last weeks blog I talked about creating a lean office and how lean is not just the realm of manufacturing. This week I’m going to share some practical ideas for making your office lean. It’s really all about continuous improvement and its useful to have a few tools to encourage this.

The first tool is visual management. All the other tools fall out of this one really. This is about displaying your results in an easily readable and public way. The best way to do this is as a team. For example, as an HR team or a customer services team. What are the KPIs (key performance indicators) you have for your team? Can you measure these each week or month? Keep a track of them on a graph and put it up where everyone can see it. Now, what is your goal? For example, if you measure something like turnover or time to hire (these are very HRey examples but you'll have your own), you might want to reduce them. How do you do that? That's where some problem solving tools come in.

Keeping track of your KPIs and identifying where you want to be will help you identify gaps . These gaps trigger a problem solving process that generate ideas. You could use a variety of problem solving techniques. My favorite is brainstorming. You get a bunch of people together, who have some knowledge of the problem, and throw ideas up on a board or sheet of paper. No idea is a bad idea. When it works really well you can get some great innovations.

And that brings me to another tool to encourage innovation. Because it’s all about continuous improvement and innovation is really the cornerstone of that. To encourage it, publicize and celebrate it. If people are working in teams get them to present each month an innovation that their team has successfully implemented. This could be quite informal, you don’t necessarily need power point, but it gets people talking about it and highlights innovation as something important. An innovation is simply something done differently, so it doesn’t have to be big. But all the little things add up.

Speaking of little things adding up, integral to these tools is consistency. It’s all small steps to continual improvement but continual is really the key word. Lean is about continually fine-tuning your processes so that you are doing it faster, cheaper and to higher quality. Everything changes so quickly nowadays that no one can afford to improve as a one-off. 

I hope that you find these useful and I’d be interested in hearing your ideas for making business lean.