Canadian Government Executive - Volume 22 - Issue 1

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January 2016 // Canadian Government Executive / 11
How can you reduce Preventable Work
and the Eight Wastes?
• Get a Lean mentor/facilitator (public
servant or an outside facilitator, with a
solid track record in Lean Government)
to lead an improvement session. The
public servant leading the charge at
the provincial ministry took a facilitator
course that I co-led and led the process
improvement event to create buy-in,
map the process, identify the non-value
steps and sources of Preventable Work,
and to eliminate them using Lean think-
ing and the Lean toolkit.
• Teach your team about Preventable
Work and the Eight Wastes – then create
habits to eliminate them as second na-
ture – the team in our case study began
doing daily 10 minute stand-up meet-
ings to identify and eliminate waste.
Step 4. Team Spends its
Capacity on Client Progress
Chasing and Backlog
Reporting
Unhappy clients make phone calls or send
emails to complain and ask for a status up-
date on a file. This is pure preventable work
createdmainly by the failure of the process to
deliver the final output as quickly as the cli-
ent needs it. By speeding up the process, and
using freed-up capacity to swiftly complete
the job, you can reduce the number of incom-
ing calls and blow up the backlog spiral.
How can you reduce the effort spent on
Client progress chasing calls and backlog
reporting?
• Improve the process, address varia-
tions in demand, reduce overwhelm,
eliminate preventable work so that cli-
ents get what they need faster.
Post-Script
Blowing up a backlog is usually a function
of addressing three major factors:
1. Unaddressed increase in client demand
or decrease in workforce supply, which
causes
2. Overwhelm, reducing productivity,
which is lowered further by
3. Preventable Work and non-value add-
ed activities which together, cause a
downward spiral of growing backlogs
and despair.
Eighteen months and several peak peri-
ods later, the team in the permit renewal
process delivered renewals in three to five
days, and the backlog has not returned. In
fact, they found the inspiration and capac-
ity to eliminate a backlog of over 1,000 files
in a second process, reducing the waiting
time for a permit for a first-time applicant
from one month to a couple of days. All
without investing in technology, head-
count, or working harder.
They understood that to be sustainable,
a one-time process improvement is not
enough to eliminate a backlog forever.
Without continuous improvement, back-
logs can easily return. Processes, like na-
ture, are subject to entropy – it takes energy
and good habits to maintain a high level of
performance or else performance (as actu-
aries say) regresses back to mediocrity, or
chaos. In a future article we’ll explain how
to create and sustain good Lean habits to
break the backlog spiral permanently.
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 facilitator, trainer and
coach, he initiated and has led some of
Canada’s most notable public sector
Lean transformations.
Management