Canadian Government Executive - Volume 22 - Issue 6

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June 2016 // Canadian Government Executive / 19
Management
identify and eliminate the ones that don’t add value or focus on
what really needs attention.
The best way to find and eliminate bureaucratic coral is to make
it visible. Map the process. Taking the time to show, visually, the
steps in a process will highlight where redundancy occurs allow-
ing for fewer, more effective controls and reports while keeping
the auditors happy.
4. Handoffs: when work gets passed on from
one person to another
When someone takes over a piece of work from someone else,
the total effort expended is increased. Why? The recipient needs
to review the file, ask clarifying questions and get up to speed.
Misunderstanding often occurs during the transfer, creating even
more work. Instead of breaking a task up into small pieces con-
sider combining steps to reduce the number of handoffs and the
accompanying preventable effort.
These four examples are by no means the only types of exces-
sive processing but they are illustrative of what to look for. Even
if you see them happening in your organization and take steps to
address them you may need to go a step further and look at the
root causes that lead to the excessive processing before you can
eliminate it.
Root Cause #1: Lack of trust.
In environments of low trust, processes expand to add more time
and effort spent verifying, checking and re-checking. In a high-
trust workplace and when the business process is robust enough
that it has proven to be trustworthy much of the over-reviewing
and controlling drops away. Stephen M.R. Covey’s book The Speed
of Trust: The One Thing that Changes Everything (2006) is required
reading on this topic.
Root cause #2: Lack of
visibility
Nobody likes to spin their wheels. The previous examples of ex-
cessive processing would likely not have occurred if people could
have seen what was going on. Mapping the steps in the process,
the effort involved and the time it takes makes the issues visible
so they can be addressed. You can’t manage what you can’t see
and if you can’t see it, you probably can’t improve it. Nor can the
people you rely on to get the job done. Making the process visible
is the first step, keeping it visible so people stay on track is crucial.
Lastly, creating habits like a weekly stand-up to identify and ad-
dress problems can prevent excessive processing from creeping
back onto the scene.
Root cause #3: Overwhelm
If someone told you “I’m too busy mopping up the floor to turn
off the faucet” as a deluge of water poured out of a nearby sink
you would think they were crazy — but it happens all time in the
workplace. When we are overwhelmed by a high volume of work,
it is incredibly difficult to understand and remove the root cause
of the problem. We go into a kind of hyper-drive to try and get
things done without taking the time to consider if there are other,
better ways to complete a task.
We will look at how to spot if people are overwhelmed, and
what to do about it in the next article in this series.
Craig Szelestowski heads Lean Agility’s Lean Government
practice. In his time as a Vice President at the Royal Canadian
Mint, and later as an independent Lean Government facili-
tator, trainer and coach, he initiated and has led some of
Canada’s most notable public sector Lean transformations.