Design4Services

  • Home
  • Concepts
  • Methods
  • Practice
  • Design Guides
  • Showcase
  • Consultancy
  • Contact
  • Site Policies
You are here: Home / service design / Standard Work in Lean Services – proceed with caution

23/02/2014 By Tim Manning

Standard Work in Lean Services – proceed with caution

The folly of average call timesStandard Work plays quite a significant role in Lean practice.  But in the wrong hands it can do a lot of damage.

Standardisation is very appealing, particularly to managers.  They tend to like uniformity, a sense of order – doing everything in the same way.  It makes their  life easier.

As an improvement technique, standard work has an important role to play, but the conditions need to be right.

The ability to standardise  something is directly proportional to the variation in demand.

If you attempt to standardise the response to a highly variable demand, you will end up only meeting some of that demand.  Result – unhappy/lost customers, failed school children and patients; and lots of failure demand.

It is the nature of services that many have highly variable demand, so the scope for standardisation is limited.  It is not like building cars.

In the private sector you can standardise by limiting your market, i.e. by attracting only those customers that fit your standardised offering, thus reducing the variation in demand.  But this will deny you total market share.  Ryanair is a good example of this.  In the public sector, this is rarely an option, but state-funded selective schools are an example of this.

So, when designing services, use Standard Work with caution.  Understand the problem you are trying to solve and always ask yourself, what is the variation in demand.

 

Filed Under: service design Tagged With: lean, service design, standard-work, standardisation, variation-in-demand

Wise Words

The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking

Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955)

All Posts

  • Business Capability Modelling 26/03/2018
  • So who is the Design Lead on your project ? 15/03/2014
  • Standard Work in Lean Services – proceed with caution 23/02/2014
  • Open data and service design 30/10/2013
  • Universal Credit – at least they stopped digging 09/09/2013
  • Putting the thinking back into Lean 03/09/2013
  • Setting meaningful performance targets 30/06/2013
  • Making good sourcing decisions 25/03/2013
  • Supplier Relationship Management in the Public Sector 06/12/2012
  • Shared Services in the Public Sector 23/10/2012
  • Harnessing the power of User Innovation 27/09/2012
  • BPR Revisited 06/09/2012
  • Major Project Assurance in the Public Sector 09/05/2012
  • Rural Payments Agency – avoiding the mistakes of the past 12/03/2012
  • Bringing some clarity to service design 03/03/2012

Categories

Subscribe by Email

Get notified of new posts by Email

BlogSphere

  • Jeff Howard (US)
  • David Boyle (UK)
  • Distruptive Design, Legla Acaroglu
  • Tim Brown
  • Alexander Osterwalder
  • Richard Arnott (UK)

Powered by Wordpress and Genesis Theme Framework