by Ted Eytan, on 08 May 2006 09:15 am
The Journey
Planning and Implementation
Lately I have been struggling with the amount of time one should spend planning versus implementation. It is said that in the Toyota world, it should be 80 percent planning time. In most American companies, it is 20 percent planning.
We are doing rapid process improvement events with physicians and staff in medical centers. In theory we should spend 80 percent of our effort planning for the event before we get there. But here’s the problem. We can’t plan what to do without the physicians, staff, and patients. In the LEAN world, I suppose you would ideally invite a medical center staff to participate in the planning up front. We don’t have the ability to do that though.
What I think, instead, is that we should do 80 percent planning, but on site. This reduces the implementation time when we are there. However, why would we want to spend all of our time implementing if we don’t know what the customer will pay for?
I think I am done struggling with this now.
on 09 May 2006 at 7:30 am 1.Lee Fried said …
Ted,
I think you answered your question: “that we should do 80% of the planning, but onsite.” When we do LEAN Workshops one or maybe two consultants do prep work for 4-6 weeks. Most of this prep is done onsite doing observations of the work, collecting data and talking to staff about problems. All of this prep may seem wasteful, but in my opinion it allows us to maximize our efficency. This is because the prep work of one or two consultants before the events sets the stage for the event when ten or twenty often highly paid staff members come together and get right to work.
Lee
on 11 May 2006 at 9:49 am 2.Ted Eytan said …
Ahh..but I am not speaking of the workshops. I am speaking of the rapid improvement events. These are different entirely. How can we plan what work will be done to help patients if the patients are not involved in the planning?