Discipline makes Daring possible.

Musings from The Disappearing Boss on People, Process and Responsible Autonomy for small-business employers.

Category: Efficiency

Commuting
September 27, 2019

Commuting

Get a bunch of small business owners together where I live and they’ll wax lyrical about no longer having to commute to London to work.    For some it means as much as 15 hours a week to spend on something else – family; sleep; self-care or productive business.

There are good reasons why teams sometimes need to get together to work, but to me at least it seems odd to see bigger and bigger white collar factories go up in London, when most people would be more productive working from home.   After all F International cracked how to do this successfully way back in the ’70s – long before the technology we have now made remote working easy.

In which case the need to commute must be about something else.   A need for community perhaps?  Cross-pollination?   Status?   Control?

I don’t know the answer, but it might be worth asking the question for your business.

Asking for help
September 25, 2019

Asking for help

We’re not trained to ask for help.   We’re meant to be knowledgeable enough and competent enough to manage everything ourselves.   We like to present as swans, serene on top, paddling madly underneath.

Independence is overrated.

Sometimes the quickest and best solution is to ask for help.   And your accountant can be a good place to start.

Growing up
September 18, 2019

Growing up

The thing my mum hated most about her role in our family was that she was the one who nagged us.  To tidy our rooms, do our homework or put our clothes in for washing.

Because, as all grown-ups know, getting things in good order doesn’t happen by accident.   There is no ‘housework fairy’ that does it all by magic.

There isn’t a book-keeping fairy either.   Although many small business owners seem to think there is.   There’s only your poor accountant trying to drag the information out of you in time for the deadline, or ploughing through that jumbled bag of receipts you’ve handed in, trying to make sense of them for your tax return.

One of the best things my mum did for us was to go on strike.  It helped us grow up and take responsibility for keeping our own order.

Perhaps its time accountants did the same.   Because keeping your business in order is far more important than housework.  It’s the foundation for growing up.

Good Design makes a product understandable
September 2, 2019

Good Design makes a product understandable

It clarifies the product’s structure.  Better still, it can make the product clearly express its function by making use of the user’s intuition.  At best, it is self-explanatory.   Dieter Rams, Design Principle number 4.

How many times have you pulled at a door that was meant to be pushed?  Or pushed a door that was meant to be pulled?

There are 4 simple design solutions that would prevent that tiny but all too frequent source of wasted energy and frustration:

  1. Put a flat plate on the ‘push’ side and a handle on the ‘pull’ side.
  2. Allow the door to swing both ways, and have a flat plate on both sides (because both are now ‘push’).
  3. Allow the door to swing both ways, and have a handle on both sides (because both are now ‘pull’).
  4. Have the door open automatically as someone approaches it.

1, 2 and 3 make the door understandable, 4 makes it self-explanatory.

 

We live and work among millions of designed products every day, from doors to roundabouts and office blocks to business processes, organisational structures and governments, many of which provide all too frequent sources of wasted energy and frustration.

How would you re-design them?

Performance – costs and revenues
July 31, 2019

Performance – costs and revenues

As we all know, profit is what’s left of revenue after you’ve taken out all the cost.

Revenue is easy to measure.  Cost is a little harder.

Ideally, you would directly attribute every cost incurred by a business (including what would normally be called ‘overhead’) to the end-to-end process of acquiring and serving a single client with their chosen product or service.

This is a time-consuming thing to do, which is why many small businesses work on a rule of thumb of some kind, such as the ‘one third wages, one third overhead, one third profits’ approximation used by many accountants.

It turns out though*, that ‘time spent’ is a pretty accurate proxy for all costs, so a relatively easy way to get an accurate picture of how much a process is costing to run, is to measure how much time is spent on running it.

This means that the efficiency of a business as a system can be measured in a straightforward way – by simple observation.

I like simple and straightforward systems, so this makes me extremely happy.

*”Duration-Based Costing: Utilizing Time in Assigning Costs” Anne-Marie Lelkes, Ph.D., CPA, Management Accounting Quarterly, Summer 2017.

Systems and processes
May 9, 2019

Systems and processes

Having a staff member sat idle at an empty checkout lane feels wasteful.

So the company policy is to train staff to do everything in the store, so when its quiet, they can be re-stocking, tidying up or whatever else needs to be done. When it gets busy, people jump back onto their checkouts to quickly get the queue down.

Not a bad policy, provided you have enough people.

But having a staff member sat idle at an empty checkout lane, or casting about for something to do still feels wasteful. So its tempting to the store manager to cut the total number of people. “We have a self-checkout people can use, so unless its really busy, we don’t need any other checkout open, and I can handle that – I can make more profit with a smaller team.”

Now you’ve introduced a bottleneck for customers, a bottleneck some of them are going to dislike so much they will stop shopping with you, despite all the changing stock you put in to encourage return visits, browsing and impluse buys.

Your shop gets less busy, so you cut down further on staffing levels. The queues at the self-checkout get longer, the queue at the manned checkout even longer.

Suddenly you’re hardly ever busy, and company management are wondering whether your store is viable.

3 points:

  1. Checking out is merely one step in the customers’ cyclical process of shopping. Before optimising any step, consider its impact on the process as a whole.

  2. A store is a system designed to enable that process for the people you serve locally. All systems need slack if they are to work efficiently.

  3. A store is part of a larger company system designed to make and keep a particular promise to a particular set of people. Before optimising anything, consider whether it will reinforce that promise or undermine it.

It is of course perfectly OK to put some people off shopping with you – so long as you do it on purpose, and only to the right people.

Reporting
April 24, 2019

Reporting

Nobody likes reporting. It gets in the way of doing the job.

Because it feels like an extra task, it gets pushed back to the last minute, and possibly even made up. Worse, it can be very tempting to request more information in a report, because ‘they’re reporting anyway’.

On the other hand, feedback is essential if a business is to thrive and evolve.

So how best to get feedback you can rely on?

Firstly, keep it simple. What is the least you need to know whether are not things are going well?

Secondly, make collecting that information a side-effect of doing the job. The trick here is to find a step in your process that creates its own trail. A step that either gives you the data you need or can act as a proxy for it. If that’s not possible, sample instead of monitoring continuously.

Of course, reporting as we know it only happens because the person doing the job is not the person making decisions about how best to do the job.

That’s where the real problem lies, and the solution to that is responsible autonomy.

Rest
April 18, 2019

Rest

For at least the last 189 years, we’ve known that overburdening people, equipment and systems leads to mistakes, wasted effort and sometimes, tragedy. We know that people, systems and even equipment need rest. Time out to repair, recharge and recalibrate.

In the past, days off work were imposed by law – admittedly not so people could rest, but so they could observe religious holy days, but at least they were guaranteed non-working days for almost everyone.

That is no longer the case. Now that consumerism is the national religion and online shopping never stops, we are individually responsible for making sure we take rest days. And the vestiges of our national holidays make that a bit easier to achieve.

So, this is my reminder to have a break. From work, from shopping, from the day-to-day.

Enjoy the long weekend.

See you Tuesday.

Wasted effort
April 17, 2019

Wasted effort

It’s easy to get very excited about increasing efficiency through digitalisation, automation and AI.

But in the excitement we can forget that by ‘increasing efficiency’ what we are really trying to do is reduce ‘waste’, or to put it better, ‘wasted effort’.

In Lean, ‘wasted effort’ falls under 3 categories:

  1. ‘Mura’ or wasted effort due to variation
  2. ‘Muri’ or wasted effort due to overburdening or stressing the people, equipment or system.
  3. ‘Muda’ also known as the “seven forms of wasted effort”

Muri seems like the kind of wasted effort we should always try to eliminate (and interestingly, is the least talked about).

Otherwise, what makes effort wasted?

Quite simply that the customer is not willing to pay for it.

This seems blindingly obvious. Less obvious is the necessary implication – that if a customer is willing to pay for effort, it is not wasted.

So if a certain type of customer is happy to pay extra to be treated differently, this is not Mura. If a customer is willing to pay to have their papers picked up in person, this is not Muda.

The customer’s perception of value is your source of profit. Don’t throw it out with the bathwater.