Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value. – Albert Einstein
In my last post I introduced Rich Notes, my approach to understanding a system.
Once you understand a situation, you can start to do something about improving it.
But what are you trying to do – what does improvement look like?
It’s worth taking a step back here and looking at what you do as a whole and what “better” might look like.
Let’s start with your customer – your purpose as a business is to improve her experience.
You do that by providing value.
The lean literature talks about value as being provided by a value stream.
I find this term hard to visualise but I think it’s very similar to what I would see as “activities” in Soft Systems Methodology.
A stream is a flowing thing, something that is linear and step by step.
Activities are a little fuzzier, sets of steps that follow on, but that also split and join in different ways.
This is a little pedantic, so as long as you see that value emerges from the value stream or the activities we do you get the picture.
The activities are where we spend most of our time.
For example, if you’re a consultancy one of the activities you will spend a lot of time on is writing proposals.
Early in my career we used to write huge proposals – 70-100 pages was not uncommon.
I think we thought that the more we put in front of the client the more impressed they would be.
Later, I worked with a law firm that sent me a simple 4 page proposal.
The first page was a letter, the second page was a list of bullet points of the work they would do, the third page was pricing, and the fourth page was a signature sheet.
You had some boilerplate terms and conditions at the back but the essence was in a page – what we’re going to do for you.
Adopting this process took proposal writing time from weeks to half an hour.
And, I think it provided more value. Clients want to know what you’re going to do for them and a rambling document makes them do more work and is really not as impressive as you might think.
Clarity and economy of thought is.
In the image above you’ll notice five elements – these are the five lean principles.
We’ve talked about value and the value stream.
Next comes flow – sequence what you do so that one step naturally flows into the other.
Don’t introduce non-value adding steps that slow you down or make the experience for the customer worse.
Do those in parallel, focus on keeping things moving.
Again, in service, a simple example is that once you’ve had the conversation get the proposal out the next day.
What’s important is that the client has an idea of what you can do.
If you wait for legal approval before issuing each proposal then that introduces a delay – you need to do that anyway so do it once the client indicates they are ready to go ahead.
The next principle is pull – do things once they are needed.
I cannot tell you the number of times we have done analysis and created material “just in case”.
This happens if you go into a meeting and the client asks for more information – you should always direct them to something you have done already.
Doing anything new, or spending time on stuff is work – and should be done if you are being compensated.
There are exceptions, of course, stuff that you would reuse, the first versions of things that you need.
But you shouldn’t do free work – and the client needs to see that value is being created when they ask for it – but only when there is a commercial relationship in place.
Now, once you have these four elements in place you will have a system that works better – for you and for your clients.
So now you can work on perfecting the system, making it better.
That involves identifying common weaknesses and starting to fix them.
Let’s look at that in the next post.
Cheers,
Karthik Suresh
Handcrafted insight 