Can lean principles be applied to so-called knowledge work? This issue is addres
ID: 449125 • Letter: C
Question
Can lean principles be applied to so-called knowledge work? This issue is addressed in the following article: B. R. Staats and D. M. Upton, “Lean Knowledge Work,” Harvard Business Review, October 2011, https://hbr.org/2011/10/lean-knowledge-work . After accessing and reading this article, respond to the following set of questions.
Required Answers
1. Define what is meant by the term lean (or lean management). To date, what types of organizations have successfully applied lean? Why have these contexts proven fruitful for the application of lean?
2. According to the authors, what is meant by the term knowledge work? Why is it more difficult/ challenging to apply lean principles to this work context?
3. Based on their own research, what do the authors claim to be the primary benefits of applying lean principles to knowledge work?
4. Based on their experience with over 1,800 projects, the authors developed six principles that they say could be used to guide the implementation of lean in regard to knowledge work (such as software and IT-development projects). Provide an overview of each of these principles.
Explanation / Answer
1. Improving operations on the basis of principles: relentless attention to detail, commitment to data-driven experimentation, and charging workers with the ongoing task of increasing efficiency and eliminating waste in their jobs. This collection of ideas is often termed “lean.”
Till date Lean is successful in Manufacturing industry
As in manufacturing industry , production line has repetitive job where identification of waste and elimination is standard but in knowledge work it is not repetitive wor
2. Knowledge work means where employee need to work on new project every time and require lot of brainstorming, team work and innovation.
Unlike car assembly, it is not repetitive and can’t be unambiguously defined. Consider a bank officer deciding whether to make a loan, an engineer developing a new product, and a social worker ruling on whether a child’s environment is safe: In each instance the work involves expertise and judgment that depend heavily on tacit knowledge—knowledge locked inside the worker’s head.
3. lean principles can be applied in some form to almost all kinds of knowledge work and can generate significant benefits: faster response time, higher quality and creativity, lower costs, reduced drudgery and frustration, and greater job satisfaction.
4.
a) Eliminate Waste
Typical knowledge work sites are loaded with these wastes. Indeed, knowledge work includes many routine activities that don’t involve judgment or expertise and can eat up huge amounts of time: printing documents, requesting information needed to make a decision, and setting up meetings, to name just a few.
b) the five whys.”
Managers at Toyota devised “the five whys”—a process of continually asking questions until you get to the root cause of every activity performed. Why am I attending this meeting? Why am I filling out this report? Why am I standing at the printer?
c) Encourage everyone to look for small forms of waste, not just big ones.
Most successful companies have already eliminated large, obvious forms of waste, but the floors of knowledge operations are typically littered with nickels that no one has bothered to pick up. Think about your own workplace. How many emails clutter your in-box because someone cc’d you unnecessarily? How long did you have to wait to start a regularly scheduled meeting because attendees slowly trickled in? How many reports are created that nobody reads?
d) Periodically review the structure and content of every job.
Many knowledge jobs are unstructured and broad. They tend to expand gradually as one activity after another is added. People can end up with too much on their plates and too much time devoted to low-value tasks.
e) Specify the Work
The practice of writing down exactly how to perform a task—clearly defining the substance, order, timing, and desired result—has delivered significant value to manufacturers. It allows the actual and expected outputs to be compared. If the two don’t match, the organization knows there’s a problem with adherence to the process or the process itself and can take action to fix it.
f) Look for repeatable parts of the process and codify them.
Almost all areas of knowledge work have more commonality than meets the naked eye. At Wipro, teams found it difficult to specify the overall code-writing process, because it often involved onetime novel solutions. But when they reframed the question to ask “What do we do repeatedly?” they realized that many aspects of the process, including peer review, daily builds (integrating all the pieces of code written that day into the program), testing, and customer reviews all occurred frequently within a project and across projects and could be standardized.