by Ted Eytan, on 13 Mar 2007 04:33 am
The Journey
Come work in the sandbox, and challenge the status quo
In in the Information Technology sphere, we’re doing a lot of great things. We are also receiving a lot of great ideas. We cannot act on all of them, and our way of dealing with this issue is challenging to some - giving access to build tools in our system using standard work.
In most Information Technology Divisions, there are appropriate “change controls” on systems used by practicing providers. We have those too. At the same time, we realized that once we completed successful rollout of our system and began studying LEAN, there could be a different way to maintain system stability while supporting innovation.
Instead of requests being passed to Department members here to be acted on, from idea through to production, we have established standard work for building updates to our system, that allows a much larger pool of talented individuals to grow the tool.
On the one hand, it might seem convenient and less challenging to pass a request on to an expert builder, at least in the short term. In the long run, however, I think it is less challenging to be sufficiently empowered to build the tools yourself, because you’ll see the impact of them being built well or not.
In deciding what is a candidate for standard work and decentralized building, a key criteria is whether the builder will feel the impact of the quality of the work. If they need to access a portion of the system that could create impacts on others but not themselves, then this is not a good candidate for standard work. If they access a portion of the system that creates impacts on the services they provide only, this is a good candidate.
There are certainly negotiations that take place around this and we are doing this slowly and deliberately. The numbers so far show that a significant portion of our physicians report being engaged in tool building of some kind since we created standard work.
I have really liked the part about LEAN philosophy that focuses on each individual seeing the impact of what they do for our patients. It taps right into the primary reason we are all here - we are here because of them, not the other way around.
on 26 Mar 2007 at 4:45 am 1.DailyKaizen » “Inventory” said …
[...] way we create different environments is to empower local experts to implement ideas on the spot, which we do. Another way is to rotate a team into the environment who can also take more complicated ideas an [...]