At a meeting with his commissioners, Connecticut Governor Dan Malloy recently cited step reduction as an example of how improvements were being made using lean. These tend to be pretty dramatic – 150 down to 50 is pretty typical.
The fact that there are so many steps that can be eliminated shows that problems in government are not, as some politicians might hope, single items that show up in reports and can be fixed with the stroke of a pen. A process that takes months too long will typically be plagued by a collection of dozens or even hundreds of problems. To make matters more difficult, they often cross the boundaries between different agencies, putting them outside the scope of a single manager. But it is the extra steps that are causing files to languish and people to wait.
No manager can cut the steps in a process down by half or two-thirds on his or her own. This kind of effort requires a team of front-line problem solvers who are trained in process improvement and mandated to team up with co-workers and solve these problems.
Governments are no different than factories in this respect – any large complex system is bound to be full of problems. Deming attributed that to variability. But whatever the explanation, managers can’t solve problems in the workplace on their own. The good news is that giving workers the challenge of improving their processes makes their work more engaging and rewarding.