Some recommended books
About 15 years ago I was involved with the world of Total Quality Management. As Quality & Technical Director at software house Praxis, I found myself sitting at the same table as the Quality Directors of BT, ICL, and three other major companies who founded the UK arm of the European Foundation for Quality Management. I soon came to discover the logic and power in the work of W Edwards Deming and had the privilege of hearing him talk. If you haven’t read ‘Out of the crisis’ it’s the first book I recommend here. First published in 1982 it described in vivid terms what needed to be done to concentrate on quality first and foremost and how many of the ’standard’ management techniques were misguided and even counter-productive. With the increasing interest in ‘process’ over the last decade, his thinking has found new application.
Following the theme, in particular in manufacturing, Womack, Jones and Roos’s book ‘The machine that changed the world’ describes how Taiichi Ohno revolutionised the Toyota production lines in Japan again by breaking the mould in process design and management.
More recently, service industries, and especially government bureaucracies, have been given the treatment by John Seddon, firstly in ‘Freedom from command and control’ and most recently in ‘Systems thinking in the public sector’. I highly recommend the latter. Seddon would probably refer to me as a ‘tool head’, but I have been encouraged by the degree to which (I believe) Riva can be used to support the approach Seddon advocates and have been bringing a greater TQM bias into the method. In particular, he stresses the distinction between value demand and failure demand: a value demand is when you call to place an order; a failure demand is when you call to chase your order. You get more efficient not by improving the efficiency with which you handle people chasing orders but by reducing the level of or (better)removing that sort of failure demand altogether. Similarly, batching does not add value. All this ties in of course with the distinction in Riva between essential and designed units of work.
I’d welcome comments on this.
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This is exactly how we are beginning to apply the Riva method. The process architecture diagrams are an excellent tool for looking at the flow of value through an organisation and in particular for ensuring that all work done by an organisation can be connected to value demand.
We do however struggle with the distinction between essential and designed units of work. Initially, we tend to take the view that if the organisation feels that the work is essential then we will accept this position. By applying the ideas of Lean Thinking to the resulting unit of work and process architecture diagrams we can then search for and engineer out units of work that on more rigorous analysis no longer appear to be fundamental.
Similarly, the unit of work diagrams and process architecture diagrams can be used to determine how much work is created by failure demand and start to understand the root causes of the failure demand to engineer out this non-value adding work.
David,
Sorry not to have been around for a while. I have worked with Martyn in implementing RIVA in my organisation. I would be interested to know more about how you are applying lean thinking using the Process Architecture and UOW diagrams. I would have thought you may have neeed to got RADs to do this?
Hi David,
I have not read this blog for a while but I am interested in your experience of applying lean thinking to the process architecure and units of work in RIVA. I have worked with Martyn who has helped me adopt RIVA into our organisation and I would like to build on this work by applying lean concepts to the RIVA work. Are you able to say more?