Building Lean into Government — One Brick at a Time
Is the idea of using Lean Systems techniques in government an oxymoron? After all, the fundamentals of Lean originated at Toyota — a manufacturing company — and include ideas such as: removing waste, reducing lead time, just-in-time delivery and all manner of fancy Japanese words that seem remote from the public sector. Here in Pittsburgh we are going to test our hypothesis that applying Lean principles to government can work to help us achieve goals that currently seem far-fetched, if not downright impossible.
Lean is commonly defined as a systematic approach to the identification and elimination of waste and non-value added activities through employee development and continuous improvement in all products and services. I’ve read books, papers and blogs on this topic and there is a lot of really good advice on what to do, and not do, when introducing Lean in government. However I am not able to find very many resources that tell me what exactly was done, how it was done, what worked or didn’t, and why. So that’s what we’re going to do in this series: discuss Lean techniques that we are using within municipal government and tell you what we did, how we did it and whether it worked — or not.
“We” are primarily a team of two leading performance improvement for the City of Pittsburgh: Heidi Norman (that’s me) and Srin Jagannath. (I also want to acknowledge that there is an extended team of 60+ terrific people who make everything we do possible.) I am an Assistant Director in the Department of Innovation and Performance at the City of Pittsburgh, and Srin is a Performance Improvement Coach. My background and expertise includes Toyota Production System/Lean operations, information technology, customer service and talent development. Srin is an industrial engineer by training and a Black Belt in Six Sigma. We will share writing duties for this blog series.
You might wonder why we chose to use Lean rather than Six Sigma or another methodology. Six Sigma is a useful approach when there is a lot of data to analyze for a large project with milestones and plenty of time to complete it. Lean is better suited for situations where early, quick wins and continuous small improvements are needed; which is the situation where we work. We will primarily use and discuss Lean in this blog series, but we can and do use both methods depending on the situation.
Let us get going by introducing you to our plans for applying the principles of Lean to city government. In the SlideShare below we will talk about our approach and methodology, where we are starting our work, and the groundwork that has already been laid.
We hope you will follow us on our journey toward continuous performance improvement in government. Up next will be a post on Pouring the Foundation to Stabilize our House, where we will discuss customer needs and team needs as the first steps in stabilizing a system. We look forward to your comments and questions!
Keep up with series on Pittsburgh I&P under Process Improvement and feel free to comment here with questions or concerns!
