Over the years, best practice project management frameworks and methodologies such as Prince2, Agile, Lean, ITIL and COBIT have been adopted across both public and private sectors to facilitate significant change programmes and business transformation.
Having spent many years in the public sector driving change and innovation, I’ve consistently leaned (excuse the pun) towards Lean and Continuous Improvement methods. Let’s explore my reasons for doing so.
A brief history of Lean and Continuous Improvement
In the late 1940s, Toyota’s Taiichi Ohno pioneered the Toyota Production System (TPS), emphasising just-in-time production and waste elimination. By the 1990s, James Womack and Daniel Jones expanded these Lean principles beyond manufacturing. In their publication ‘Lean Thinking’, they adapted these principles for broader business operations. The five key Lean principles they focused on are below (I’ve added housing examples for relevance).
- Identify value – what do your tenants truly value and why? Understanding this allows you to tailor your services to meet their actual needs effectively.
- Map the value stream – what services do you offer, and how do tenants engage with you? Mapping this helps to streamline processes and enhance tenant satisfaction.
- Create flow – your goal is to minimise non-value-adding tasks, focusing on first-time fixes to avoid recurrent problems.
- Establish pull – how do tenants prefer to interact with you, and what information are you currently pushing to them? Promoting bi-directional communications improves responsiveness and service quality.
- Seek perfection – although challenging and potentially expensive, it’s crucial to continuously monitor and improve your processes to attain the highest level of tenant satisfaction and operational efficiency.
What is Lean?
Lean is far more than just a toolkit; it’s a mindset, a methodology and a philosophy aimed at doing more with less. It focuses on meeting customer needs with minimal resources, bringing structure and standardisation to operational processes, and embedding a culture of continuous improvement within an organisation.
My journey with Lean
My Lean journey began in 2007 with a transformative three-day course provided by the National School of Government (now Civil Service Learning). Further training over the years in Lean Six Sigma only reinforced the simplicity and effectiveness of these methods.
This training empowered me to effect change and to witness and produce tangible results. For example, applying some of these tools and techniques in a recent project to improve a choice-based lettings service led to a 30 per cent reduction in administrative time by eliminating wasteful steps and rework. While the previous process was ‘digital by design’, it still used multiple systems (web, webform, email and CRM) which required manual interventions at various stages of the process.
Eliminating waste
As tenant input becomes increasingly valued, the focus on eliminating wasteful steps is more relevant than ever. The ‘eight wastes’ or TIMWOODS (below) model has been particularly useful over the years to sharpen the focus towards what matters. It helps to identify inefficiencies in processes and services; below are some examples with a housing context.
- Time – lengthy delays in processing maintenance requests due to inefficient systems.
- Inventory – keeping outdated or duplicated tenant records, causing service errors.
- Motion – maintenance staff travelling inefficient routes, wasting time and resources.
- Waiting – tenants experiencing delays in receiving feedback on complaints or enquiries.
- Overproduction – sending redundant communications to tenants, causing confusion.
- Over-processing – requiring excessive paperwork for simple requests from tenants.
- Defects – mistakes in billing or tenant information that lead to rework and/or disputes.
- Skills – housing staff lacking the necessary training and skills to effectively address tenants’ needs.
The TIMWOODS model for identifying waste can be invaluable in understanding customers’ journeys and designing more efficient service models at both micro- and macro-levels, while also keeping in mind that process steps are wasteful and people (i.e. your team) are valuable.
Challenges and opportunities
Adopting Lean can be challenging, primarily due to the potential lack of buy-in at an executive or leadership level. For Lean to effectively transform an organisation, it must be fully embraced, fostering a culture of empowerment focusing on delivering value to clients while not being overly-critical of the ‘as is’ state.
Organisations that embed this culture of continuous improvement and invest appropriately in their people will see a real transformation that delivers excellent services, led by empowered, skilled and engaged workforce.
As I’ve experienced over the year, embracing Lean isn’t just about adopting a new set of tools; it’s about committing to a philosophy and way of doing things that places tenants’ satisfaction and operational efficiency at the heart of everything you do.
Ian Crocker is the founder of LeanIT and a non-executive director at Kingdom Housing.
