Great article by Bob Mosher, 'Do We Make Learning Easier or Harder?' in the January edition of Chief Learning Officer magazine.
He writes about how learning assets reside in pockets around companies and are largely unknown to the entire community of learners. This causes redundancy as people recreate assets and wastes time as people try to find the right asset to help them.
This is an excellent example of one of the Seven Wastes in the Toyota Production System. Wasted 'motion'.
Motion waste applied to training and learning is the time spent searching for the right learning tool, document, mentor, knowledge, etc. This could take minutes, hours or even days or weeks. Why does this matter? First, this time is unproductive. Instead of make better products or happier customers, an employee is searching the maze that is SharePoint trying to find what she needs to know.
Second, eventually people give up and either guess or use the wrong asset. Both of these cause errors that cost time and money.
Lots of time spent searching fruitlessly and then committing errors. Doubly bad.
One of the Maverick 'Lean Knowledge Transfer' Principles is 'Instant Gratification'. The right asset must be available instantaneously. If people know they can find what they need right away, they're more likely to go to that source and not guess. Less time wasted. Fewer errors.
Download (free!) our latest white paper, 'Lean Knowledge Transfer' from our website, www.maverickinstitute.com.
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2 comments:
I like the concept of lean knowledge transfer. In my experience too many people see continuous improvement and Kaizen as "shop floor" initiatives rather than fully applicable to administrative and support functions. I also find this post interesting because I have thought of wasted motion as being more physical - interesting concept that you can waste motion while sitting at your computer.
Thanks for the insights
Mark,
Thanks for your comment. Continuous improvement methods are spreading from the shop floor to areas like software development and accounting. There's even someone starting to promote 'Lean Sales' if you're interested.
Training has gotten left out somehow and the opportunities for improvement are enormous. Our newsletter covers a topic every month in more detail. Let me know if you're interested and I'll subscribe you (just need your email address).
Regarding wasted motion at the computer, while the motions are small (clicking, dragging, typing) it's the wasted time that's big. Navigating intranets to find what you need can be a nightmare. And using 'Search' is a frustrating joke when you get back 200 results for your key words.
What starts out as useful becomes useless as it grows in size.
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