<Having worked in government >
I worked for small, medium and large companies plus the government when in the Navy. Waste - major wastes. My mom worked for VA - major waste there.
Again, this seems more like a defense of large government by blanket ideological blessing than any data driven belief. If you have numbers for your agencies about failed Lean efforts, I'd like to see them.
It is the waste you don't see more than the waste you do that makes the difference.
- Defects. Anything that has to be redone or corrected. Employees probably know what work often has to be redone.
- Overproduction. When too much of something is produced (e.g., information) or when something is produced too soon, while the downstream customer (internal or external) waits for something else.
- Waiting. Waiting for anything – people, paper, signatures, etc. This waste is the easiest to find.
- Not using employees. Failing to take advantage of employees’ skills. For example, does management seek out their ideas for improvement? If so, do they act on them?
- Transportation. The time that a piece of work spends in transit until the next step. One critical kind of transport waste is hand-offs. Each time work is handed off from one person to the next in a process, there is an opportunity for the process to break as work gets lost, misunderstood, etc. Minimizing the number of hand offs in a process is essential to making a process lean.
- Inventory/backlog. Not just an abundance of supply, but also a backlog of work that leads to even greater waste as workers must spend time and effort managing and working around the backlog.
- Motion. Excess motion on the part of the worker. For example, a poorly laid out office might require a worker to spend too much time walking between different points where work equipment is located.
- Excess processing. Extra processing that does not add value, from the customer’s perspective (e.g., obtaining too many signatures or double- or triple-checking of work).
It is unlikely that you would have been aware of the details unless you specifically had the goal to Lean out a process. If you have done this and found nothing, it would be a statistical fluke. Unless you specifically initiated a Lean process analysis - I doubt the programs with which you were familiar were anywhere near optimized.
When a budget is $10 B dollars and there is a 10% waste this is $3 for every man, woman and child in America. We throw BILLIONS around that accumulate to TRILLIONS. So, 10% of that is thousands per man woman and child. Since after social entitlements, military is the next largest line item, I'd say 10% is a lower mean estimate for the success of a Lean initiative (I'm going to use my newly coined term Buff). Our government is far from being Buff.
I can pretty much guarantee that almost every organization that has NOT had a systems engineer look at their processes has at least 1 part in 10 waste. The following paper lists numerous processes that were improved from 10 to 70 percent.
gfoa.org |
