See Beyond the Horizon

  Today's theme is standardized work. What is a standard? It is a basis for comparison.  Some well known and common standards include time (minutes, seconds, hours), weight (pounds, kilograms) and  distance (yards, feet, meters).  We use these standards daily to compare one item versus another.  For example this is longer than that, or this is lighter than that.  The important thing to remember is that without a standard there can be no improvement. This is because we have no baseline to compare the improvement against. Healthcare as an industry,  is very weak on following standards. Many activities are optional, or of guideline in nature. This generates a lot of waste caused by variation in process. The Mayo Clinic reported in a research project that ~50% of the wastes in their health system were caused by an unassignable variance in physician practice. The Institute of Medicine reports that only 54% of all patients are managed according to the best ...

  Many organizations stopped their improvement activities during the pandemic.   The risk of face-to-face meetings and going to Gemba were oftentimes too great for an organization.   But other organizations were able to maintain their improvement efforts.   Even with the entirety of the team working remotely, some organizations were still able to generate improvements. With the more widespread efforts of vaccination against COVID-19, we should expect businesses to start opening their offices.   This should bode well for continuous improvement practitioners.   The timing could not be better with what appears to be a rapidly expanding economy as business and individuals get back to work to meet pent up demand.   As we return to “normalcy” are there any lessons learned we can take from the organizations that worked remotely in applying the scientific method?   Interestingly, organizations that operate on a global footprint have been working and col...