Lean Back Office

The End of Management?

23 August 2010 0 comments

A recent Wall Street Journal article by Alan Murray has posed the question about the end of management, with a silly subtitle we will get to shortly.  The article is part of a book called The Guide to Management.  The part of the article which is interesting is the discussion of the advent of professional [...]

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Improve Back Office Efficiency By Finding the “Checkers”

10 August 2010 0 comments

Yes, most organizations would be well served by identifying all the people checking other peoples work as all or part of their job.  Big organizations are just full of checking and any process where work products wind through various teams is sure to have lots of it.  It is easy to miss though because traditional [...]

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Management Approach – Beyond Management by Walking Around

4 August 2010 0 comments

Most executives pride themselves on being connected to their business, no matter how large. They perform site visits to far flung operations with lots of small talk, hand shaking, and conference room meetings. It often looks like the practices decribed in this article and this one which is better.   In my experience, these activities can [...]

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How Multitasking Erodes Productivity

24 June 2010 0 comments

The dangers of multitasking received some attention on the heels of a report published by the British Institute of Psychiatry back in 2005.  In addition to finding that multitasking erodes productivity, it also found amusing impacts which it likened to smoking pot and taking 10 points off of an employees IQ.

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Back Office Productivity Goals – How Come These Never Exist

10 May 2010 0 comments

For some reason, the back office seems to never have productivity goals or at least not in the same way as the manufacturing side of the business.  I started thinking about this in the context of a series of articles this week fretting about whether US companies have achieved better productivity by actually working better [...]

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Visual Workplace in a Pre-K Classroom

9 April 2010 0 comments

Dropping my 5 year old off at school today, I remarked at how many visual workplace elements were implemented in her pre-K classroom.  Yes you read that correctly.  These teachers have implemented a bunch of concepts without even explicitly knowing it.  Here are a few examples of visual workplace in the classroom. The floor in [...]

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Organizational Health and the Engagement Survey Fad

8 April 2010 1 comment

Organizational health is not something that most execs think of every day – at least not explicitly.  At this point in the economic cycle though, it is a very important attribute to evaluate and consider change.  So what is organization health?  It is not so different from evaluating your own personal health.  In a very [...]

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Lean Office Practices for Repetitive Work

16 March 2010 0 comments

Lean office practices for repetitive work should be the easiest to implement and actually view. For some reason they are rarely implemented in an effective way in office environments. Please reference my previous post on work types to get some context on our first focus area here. Just to summarize, repetitive work in an office [...]

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Visual Management in the Office – Considering the Type of Work

4 March 2010 1 comment

Thinking about visual management in an office setting requires consideration of the work type, just like the factory.  Unfortunately, few companies spend any time at all designing office work utilizing the best practices learned in the factory.  Read my previous post on this here.   In a factory environment, there are many build models.  Some [...]

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Visual Workplace Definition – How You See Performance in the Plant and in the Office

23 February 2010 2 comments

I wrote previously about the lack of any decent definitions of visual workplace (and visual management) on the web.  In fact, what I found was dreadful.  The original post is here.  Amazingly, Wikipedia seems to have deleted the really terrible definition of visual management that I found before.  Now I only find the Lean Manufacturing [...]

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