About Dan Markovitz
Dan Markovitz is the founder and president of TimeBack Management. Prior to founding his own firm, Mr. Markovitz held management positions at Sierra Designs, Adidas, CNET and Asics Tiger. Learn More...
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Leveling; smoothing out the flow; e.g., doing two performance evaluations a day for 3 weeks, rather than ten a day for three days -- and then needing to take a vacation because you're so burned out.
Overburdening people, process, or equipment; e.g., people working 100 hour weeks for months on end -- come to think of it, like most lawyers and accountants.
Uneveness or variability; e.g., leaving work at the normal time on Thursday, but having to stay at the office till midnight on Friday because the boss finally got around to giving you that project...at 4:30pm.
Waste; activities that your customer doesn't value and doesn't want to pay for; e.g., billing your customer for the really expensive 10am FedEx delivery because you didn't finish the document on time.
TIMEBACK BLOG 
How to apply standard work to meetings
Posted March 30, 2008 @ 10:24 AM
I've been writing a lot recently about standard work, and how it can reduce waste and improve efficiency. But knowledge workers often feel that standard work isn't applicable to their jobs, because they're so highly variable and unpredictable. This simply isn't true.
Let's take meetings (please). If your meetings are like those in most organizations, they're flaccid, bloated, puffy things have half the attendees struggling to control hypnic jerks and the other half checking their Blackberries.
Last year, I wrote about how Fabtech Systems, a custom prosthetics manufacturer in Washington, has defined standard work for its weekly meetings. The company figured out how long it takes to cover all the bases in the weekly meetings. Each operator has a standard reporting sequence that lasts a specified period of time. And everyone follows the standard work to the minute. The company also tracks performance on a variety of metrics after meetings. Are people getting the answers they need? Are problems resolved? Is there a higher or lower level of production problems following the meeting? Etc.
This is a great step in standardizing meetings. But you can go one better by making these metrics visible to everyone involved, including you. A simple andon system can help you identify variation from the ideal, spot trends, and create countermeasures for commonly recurring problems. I've created a sample Excel spreadsheet that you can download here to see what this kind of andon might look like.
This isn't perfect or complete by a long shot, and your specific needs will certainly be different from what I've created here. But it might serve as a starting point for you to apply standard work to your job.
Let me know what you think of it.
When you're able to get this
When you're able to get this level of detailed reporting out of a meeting, you're clearly way more advanced than I am! I'm always amazed by how finely grained your advice is...keep up the good stuff, Dan!