Driving out waste - delivering more from less

Doing things that are useful and not doing those that aren’t is a double win, and at the heart of lean thinking. Lean is an approach which turns on its head the idea that an imposed approach is a recipe for doing things better. It focuses on outcomes for the customer, rather than on processes for the provider.

A ‘lean’ organisation is constantly searching for improvements, which means focusing both on what you do and also what you shouldn’t do. This agenda presents a real cultural challenge for many organisations. Its success is reliant on the participation of those who are involved in the day to day delivery of services, and their direct supervisors and managers. Organisations have to empower those people who are best positioned to understand the weaknesses in processes to fix them.

Lean thinking is a mindset and creating that mindset is crucial to making ‘lean’ work. We find a workshop-based approach very helpful in introducing lean thinking to senior managers,  who then understand and become evangelists for it, and empower service delivery teams to make real changes. Benefits realisation must be embedded in any change programme, including lean working initiatives. It is this process that drives home the successes, ensuring that change programmes work and are seen to be working.

Too often the benefits promised in the business case go unmeasured and are not achieved. The transformational organisation can only be truly transformational if it has the numbers to prove it.

How Socitm Consulting can help

• Agenda setting – defining the challenge for senior management
• Using workshops to develop Lean Thinking mindset among staff
• Applying lean systems approaches both council-wide and in individual services
• Using process mapping and business process re-engineering techniques to design and implement change
• Change management approaches to manage the cultural and practice changes
• Benchmarking and performance management
• Benefits realisation

For more information see our pages:

• Change management/culture change