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/ Canadian Government Executive
// June 2016
Craig
Szelestowski
The Capacity Squeeze:
A
s an executive you’re likely frustrated when you ask for
something and it takes weeks to appear. There is a good
chance that your processes are too complex, have too
many steps and require more effort than they should to
get the job done. It’s known as Excessive Processing and it is one
of the worst of the eight Lean wastes that can drain staff capacity
and lead to a backlog of work. Fortunately you can do something
about it, so long as you know what to look for.
Here are four categories of Excessive Processing that typically oc-
cur in government.
1. One Size Fits All: pushing low-risk files
into a complex process designed for
high-risk files.
We worked with a team at a federal agency to improve their brief-
ing note (docket) process. After a review of the types of dockets
produced, the stages of the process, the length of time it took
to get to approval and other data, the team found that a typical
medium-complexity docket took more than 25 hours of effort
and four weeks to get to the Deputy Minister for approval. Heavy
tracking, numerous levels of review, endless formatting and pre-
ventable editing were the main culprits. This level of effort was
necessary for high-risk, complex files comprising about 60 percent
of the workload but for the remaining low-risk files it was a clas-
sic case of overkill. Instead of defaulting to a one-size-fits-all ap-
proach, the improvement team built a tasking checklist to ensure
that the simplest, low effort options were considered. This left the
existing process to handle the more complex files it was originally
designed for.
2. Over-writing: answering a question posed
by the requestor, plus seven other unasked
questions and/or spending as much (or
more) time on a document’s
formatting as on the
content.
Over-writing occurs when the person drafting a document isn’t
100% clear on what question the end-user needs answered and so
drafts a longer response to address multiple questions, asked or
not. The longer the document, the more likely it is to be over-ed-
ited, making the problem even worse. Add to that the compulsion
many of us have to spend as much time formatting documents as
we do on the content itself and excessive processing relating to
Management
Excessive Processing
document creation and approval can get out of control.
Asking questions upfront about the job a written document is
destined to fulfill is a good way to avoid this. Here are some sug-
gestions:
1.
Ask your client, “what job are you hiring this document for? What
problem should it solve?”
2. Ask yourself, “what does this document need in order to that job, or
solve that problem?”
3. Is a document the right solution? Is this really a value-added out-
put?
4. Draft with these questions as your guiding star.
Creating editing guidelines and using templates can reduce effort,
number of drafts and elapsed time by up to 50% in the case of one
communications shop we worked with.
3. Bureaucratic Coral: when we identify a
weakness, so we add new controls or
reports on top of the existing
controls or reports, creating processes that
are needlessly heavy.
When something goes wrong in a process the knee-jerk reac-
tion is put an immediate counter-measure in place to correct the
problem. Over time, the new controls are installed on top of old
controls from previous generations and presto, bureaucratic coral
takes over and excessive processing kicks in. Similarly, requests
for ad hoc reports have a habit of becoming permanent. One
branch with a staff of 50 produced more than 200 regular reports
annually, many of which sat unused. The sad part is that deliver-
ing these unnecessary reports makes us too busy to take time to
Is a formal briefing note
Consider instead:
the best option?
Data table
Verbal briefing at next meeting Diagram
Other