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If your portfolio is your central nervous system and leadership is your DNA, then productivity is certainly the circulatory system of your organisation. Awareness and monitoring of value flow is one of highest indicators of a resilient organisation.
In a previous post, we identified the top three tips for productivity, and here I'd like to go into some more detail, but first a note on productivity. Personal productivity has been a hot topic around the different internet forums for a while now, and has even experienced some backlash as being "productivity porn" with unintended negative effects. As a self-professed productivity geek, I think the most important thing to note is that this, whether personal or team productivity, is not about doing more 'stuff' in less time, rather, it's about fundamentally enhancing the value creation process.
For organisational productivity, our top three tips are:
- Limit the WIP
- Visualise Value Streams
- Create a Culture of Commitment and Accountability
1. Limit the WIP
Limiting the Work In Progress (WIP) can be one of the most counterintuitive, yet most impactful things an organisation can do. Limiting WIP is based on the Theory of Constraints, or the principle that any system of work will have constraints, and exploiting them is the key to maximising value flow.
Having a limit on the amount of work flowing throw a system at any point in time is key to identifying and measuring where your constraints are and making improvements. Your "speedometer", or metric, is the throughput of value through your system of work.
To start limiting WIP, first you must ruthlessly prioritise the work flowing through your value streams. To prioritise, you must identify the criteria for what is valuable to your organisation and then apply a mechanic based on that criteria. As with most things, this should be done in a collaborative workshop across all areas of the organisation to create alignment. Perhaps most importantly, Highlander rules apply. In other words, THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE number one.
After prioritising, determine how many items should be in progress within a value stream at any point in time. Deliver some value whilst measuring the throughput, or number of value items completed in a period of time. Decide if the WIP limit should increase, decrease, or stay the same. Make small adjustments and continue to monitor the throughput to determine if it is improving or declining with the adjustments.
2. Visualise Value Streams
Value Stream Mapping is an incredibly valuable tool where you create a visualisation of the flow of value through your organisation, starting with the customer and ending with the customer.
The first step of value stream mapping is similar to process mapping, but with a few additional steps of adding the time spent in process steps, the flow of information, and, critically, the lead time from a customer requesting something to the customer receiving that thing.
The second step in value stream mapping is leveraging Lean principles to identify areas where productivity could be enhanced (refer back to the constraints from the first tip). When changes are made, apply the scientific method and see each change as an experiment. Monitor the throughput of the value stream and lead time (from a customer perspective) to understand if the improvements are working or not.
3. Create a Culture of Commitment and Accountability
It may have become apparent by now, but these three tips (in fact all of our tips) all work in relation with each other to create an ecosystem of a robust organisation. On their own, they are useful, but to realise the true potential, they work together. In this case I meathat for a team to truly commit, the prioritisation included in Limiting WIP is critical. When it is understood what the top priority is, and the organisation is aligned horizontally and vertically on why something is a priority, then commitment comes quite easily and in fact is unshakeable.
Therefore, we can focus on creating accountability. The formula for accountability that most resonates with me is:
Accountability = Commitment + Transparency
If we already have the commitment needed for this formula, then the only remaining element is transparency. There are only two steps for this:
- Visualise the work within the team, or sub-section of value stream map
- Encourage teams to be real with this. A problem (or constraint) is to be celebrated as an opportunity to improve productivity
- Highlight work status, problems and decisions that need to be made
- Create the events where information can flow within steps of the value stream and across the entirety of the value stream, and use the visualisation as the basis for that discussion
- When does the team talk about their work amongst themselves?
- When do teams talk about work across the value stream?
- When do people interested in the work receive information?
There are many more aspects of productivity, but following these three tips will have your organisation well on their way to being a productive and robust business.
The purpose of this was not to touch on personal productivity, although the three tips would be the same for personal productivity. Let us know if you're interested in hearing more about personal productivity, as I've been a productivity geek (yes, I love productivity porn) for over 20 years, and can share my personal workflow and tools that I I find most valuable.