Let us introduce you to Tim Woods | Making work easy

IDK about you, but we’re SITD when it comes to lots of the acronyms in use ATM. Working with different clients in many different sectors certainly exposes us to lots of company jargon, TLAs, FLAs and even some SLA’s too.

The world of Continuous Improvement is no different, having its own acronyms, and tools and techniques with some pretty strange sounding names. In this post we’d like to share with you a couple that can be incredibly helpful in work and in life.

These are two of the most engaging, accessible and memorable tools, which have the potential to remove frustration and make things easier, and which can be considered anywhere, by anyone. Wow.

So with no further ado we’d like to introduce you to…Tim Woods…and...(drumroll)…..a Wombat!

Tim Woods provides a helpful way of remembering the types of waste at play in processes.

Identifying and removing Tim Woods is key to taking the frustration and waste out of work activities:

T - TRANSPORT

We’re talking about the movement of things (people, materials, information) from one place to another. As the saying goes, “never confuse movement with action”. Examples of transport waste include moving information from a system into a spreadsheet and travelling between sites and locations to attend meetings.

I - INVENTORY

Inventory can take the form of stocks and provisions, for example materials that have been requisitioned in advance to ensure that a future requirement can be fulfilled, or items that have been ordered in bulk to achieve a discounted price. Inventory ties up the organisation’s cash, meaning it’s not free to use elsewhere, and it also takes up space. Furthermore, the items of inventory could get damaged or lost while in storage, or become obsolete.

Inventory can also take the form of ‘work in progress’. It is the stuff building up in your in-tray, your email inbox and your ‘to do’ list. Those things that require your review, sign off or input? They’re inventory.

M - MOTION

This could be described as ‘ergonomics’ – the efficiency of people in their working environment. Inefficiency could come about because of badly a designed work area.  For example, having to walk to the other side of the room to collect a printout, or having to reach up high to retrieve a file. It also applies to the way IT systems are designed and information is stored when we’re using them. All that scrolling down the screen to access the information you need is motion waste. Clicking on a sub folder, then into another sub folder, and then into a further subfolder, and then into another folder? Motion waste.

W - WAITING

What are you waiting for?

More information, a decision or approval, the resolution of an IT issue?

If we’re waiting for something it’s likely that the customer of the process will end up waiting too.

O - OVER-PROCESSING

Over-processing is adding work that’s not required.

For example, adding more fields to a template than are really needed, including more information in a report than has been requested or cc’ing more people on an email than necessary.

O - OVERPRODUCTION

Here we’re looking at producing too much or too many of something, and about producing them earlier than the customer (or the next process) needs.

Lean thinkers will tell you that this is most dangerous of all the wastes, as it contributes to all of the others!

D - DEFECTS

Anything that isn’t done right first time is a defect.

It results in correction (rework) that shouldn’t be necessary and is costly in a number of ways. For example, if a proposal was processed with an incorrect value, it will need to be corrected.

This is just the tip of the iceberg – there’s also an impact on materials in some cases, and set up, as well as reputation if the defect gets through to the customer.

Then there is the knock-on effect of lost productivity elsewhere. Costly indeed.

S - SKILLS

Skills waste is about failing to use the potential of people in the process.

Examples could also relate to goal alignment – the effort expended by people working at cross purposes and the effort required to resolve it, for example introducing a third party to make travel bookings, to reduce expenditure on travel.

So there you are – a list of wastes to find and address, in work and everywhere else as well!

If Tim Woods doesn’t work for you, the Wombat might 

Wombat simply stands for Waste of Money, Brains and Time.

We’ve got nothing against real-life wombats, but this type of wombat should not be tolerated, and there are bound to be some lurking about in your organisation, like those reports that no one reads.

When you’re tuned in to Wombat spotting you see them everywhere, and can challenge, in a positive way, current ways of working.

Some may represent quick win improvement opportunities (let’s just stop doing that!) and some might require a more significant improvement effort. But tacking these wastes is the right thing to do.

Reducing the amount of effort and time spent on non-value adding activities provides the opportunity to spend time and effort on things that add value.

And that is a BFD.

Martin Brenig-Jones and Jo Dowdall are authors of Lean Six Sigma For Leaders: A Practical Guide for Leaders to Transform the Way They Run Their Organisation (Wiley, April 2018)