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.
Sports are often an example
Sports are often an example of effective PDCA cycle. Not only football (which in Europe doesn't exist, but I watched the game yesterday on satellite...) but also in other sports.
But in the football it becomes more obvious because the game stops after every play and you must THINK of the previous points and hopefully adjust for the next ones.
In basketball for example there is lot more action and players need to think without stopping the game, without the outside influence from the bench.
In our factories though the situation is much more similar to football then basketball because every product, every takt time can be utilised for problem solving and PDCA. And in between one product and the next one should be the coach (team leader) who observes the situation and compares it to standard work and eventually adjusts to meet the schedule.
The problem is: the team leader is not always present within takt time when needed, when the cord is pulled. That is the main distinction between a lean and a non lean...
Team leader can be viewed as the offensive coordinator, while the group leader as the coach, who intervenes when the problem is too difficult to solve for the team leader within takt time.