Waste in Speed?

A core aspect of lean is execution, fast execution.  Ohno and Shingo often pushed their folks to just try new ideas and refine later instead of endlessly discussing every possible nuance in an attempt at perfect planning... and thereby getting nothing done.  There's a lot of logic in that, and many of us have been at organizations that experienced "improvement paralysis."

But there's another side of the story, another aspect or extreme that needs to be avoided as well.

President Barack Obama has pledged to "wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost," but many in the field warn that rushing the process of digitizing patients' records could lead to wasteful spending.

[snip political aspects of story, from both sides]

An unrealistically fast rollout could lead to unqualified technicians installing systems in ways that lead to frustration and backlash among doctors, warns Mr. Glaser, who serves on the board of the National eHealth Collaborative, a public-private partnership that aims to accelerate the development of health IT. "If it's too hasty, you can create so many bad experiences that people say...'My data's a mess and my patients are angry,'" Mr. Glaser says.

Waiting for the perfect solution doesn't work.  Jumping too quick is wasteful as well, both in terms of inappropriate or ineffective technologies and solutions being installed, but also in terms of creating customer frustration... which leads to difficulty embracing what could be a positive change over the long haul.

Comments

[Jason Yip]

I think the important distinction is that just trying new ideas and refining should imply quick but also small.

So a lot of small trials and then a larger rollout makes more sense than a large rollout and a lot of expensive corrections.

[Norm]

Great commentary ... lack of execution is certainly something that cripples many organizations as they fear doing the wrong thing.

But lean thinking also teaches us to be wary of technology as an improvement aid. Processes that are disfunctional should not be automated (they will become disfunctional faster). Rather, lean teaches us to eliminate the wastes and prove the process before automating through technology.

We always seem to look for the quick fix, the silver bullet that fixes our organizations quicly with little effort. Unfortunately, cultural and organizational change take time and effort to succeed and to become engrained and replace the old methods.

Norm
www.normanbain.com

[david foster]

For some reason, I'm thinking about the candy company that installed a massive ERP system just in time to screw up to orders for Halloween...

Would be a little more serious to do that to the entire national healthcare system...

[Mark Graban]

There are plenty of badly implemented hospital information systems already... systems that don't match up with workflow or systems that weren't selected with input from any of the end users (like nurses).

Rushing into this technology push could really make things worse... are we ready for that?

[James Sandfield]

Try looking at the UK National Health Service (Information technology to digitize patients records) for a lesson that could be learn't very quickly:

"When it comes to IT, big is not beautiful"
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article5645288.ece

£100 billion being spent on IT, £19 billion overrun and still going to have problems.

Guess they don't understand what Lean can deliver for them.

[martinb]

I still remember '70s Britain and Prime Minister Harold Wilson's pledge to "master the white heat of the technological revolution."

We can see from the results that governments are not good at surfing the technological leading edge.