We are not talking about the Toyota Production System in this note (it is a subset of the overall concept of Lean and has its time and place). We are going to discuss the larger context of ‘Lean’. The principles of lean have existed since the cave days. The heart of lean is just about making processes more efficient and effective, and making products/services more effective and efficient to access and/or use. Tis a very simple concept; but, appears to be hard for many to get their head around in practice. There is a famous quote by Peter Drucker: "there is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all. " (Drucker 1963). Lean and its application are especially hard in domains such as health care and higher education; they are different from the typical repetitive manufacturing situation.

Observations...

• Mature practices such as those practiced by Toyota and others are designed to keep a process and system in control and at the high-performance level. They are not the only methods used to get to the high level, and often the earlier methods bear no resemblance to final practice.
• There is a theme of waste identification and waste elimination in all aspects: waste before, during, and after usage, creation, delivery, etc. The waste can be various things and will depend on the specific system/process being improved. Waste can be related to time, human effort, and physical attributes. For example, the Toyota Production System identifies seven kinds of waste in its manufacturing context: transportation, inventory, motion, waiting, overproduction, overprocess, and defects.
• Waste can be tackled in an ad hoc fashion or within a framework of continuous improvement. If a situation is relatively new (can be decades or longer), the focus on waste starts with the obvious stuff under foot and can be considered irrelevant waste. As the situation matures over time, chaotic waste, then technological and process waste, followed by internal flow waste and then external waste, with cultural and organizational waste bringing up the rear. Tackling the wrong kind of waste at the wrong time takes us back to the quote from Peter Drucker. You need to focus on the right issues at the right time.
• Often Lean has been used to be an agent of change and in reality the initial gains from a Lean initiative have nothing to do with Lean; it is a simple case of time and resources being made available to deal with issues (which would not have been freed up normally). Lean gets the early credit, but actually has nothing do with the easy cherry picking or cherries under foot; and in time the situation goes south because there was no causality relationship and Lean is blamed for not working any more. Lean was not actually working in the first place; it was a mirage.
• Whenever there is a high variety of inputs and processes, there will be waste. In manufacturing, the worst case is a repair shop or an open job shop. These situations will have ‘waste’ that is not seen in flow shops or mass production using standardized products and processes. This is the very nature of such situations and as much as one wishes or hopes, it will not change the nature of the beast. A situation with high variety and variance will never be as effective and as efficient as one that is low mix and high volume. This needs to be thought about in situations such as health care and higher education. The same techniques to make a flow shop lean will not help make a job shop lean. There can be waste taken out of a job shop, but it will be a different type of waste and different methods will be used. There is a lot of variety in higher education and there will be inherent and a baseline level of waste that cannot be eliminated; it is the inherent nature of the beast. The goal is to get rid of the other waste; the waste that is not an underlying characteristic.

• Successful Lean initiatives start with a clear definition of the outcomes and develop a deep understanding of the causal relationships that contribute to the desired outcome. The desired outcomes will have qualities that can be itemized and measured in some way. The KJ method and Ishikawa (fishbone) methods are often useful in sorting this out; see the separate note on continuous improvement. It is best to start with the longer goal for the first exercise, then do a second one on the current situation. Then you know where you are and where you should be going.
• The Lean process works best when the following sequence is followed: figure out the goal or desired end state, figure out what it takes to get there, figure out how to implement this scheme, implement the scheme, be able to repeat the scheme, reduce the variance in the process, and then and only then worry about making it faster or cheaper. This is the best and anything else is likely to result in undesired compromises and unsatisfactory results. This is how the Japanese and others have made consistent and sustained improvements in their products and services over the past century.
• If the situation has inherent variance, you need to identify it, embrace it and figure out what it means to the process and situation. For example, in emergency rooms you have patients and the state of the patient can change during the wait, whereas in the hospital lab, the patient is at arm’s length and more of the traditional lean principles can be applied as-per-the-book. This is the same for institutions of higher learning; down to course design and delivery. There are some things that can be done to make the course more efficient and effective for students and reduce the ‘waste’ on their part. There are some things that can be done to make the course more effective and efficient for instructors.
• It is hard to see waste and see the alternatives. It is a cognitive skill. Many people accept the status quo and do not see anything wrong with what they are doing or how they are doing it. They have become accepting of the inherent waste and do not see it as waste. It is the way it is. Even the most significant advocate of continuous improvement, Shigeo Shingo, had to repeatedly go back to the firms he helped and show them more ‘simple’ things to do; they could not see them for themselves. One author in the mid 1900’s mused about why things were being done the hard way, forgetting the lessons of the past and the rhetorical answer was that the organizations and personnel had forgotten that there were other ways. Many processes and systems are ‘soft’ and are not cast in concrete or steel, and as personnel change and generations come and go, the historical wisdom is lost.

Some specific thoughts…

• Lean can help with the program design and review; setting out clear outcomes, understanding the causality relationships and using the KJ, Ishikawa/Fishbone tools.
• This can help with vertical integration and backward chaining through the program to the first term in the program.
• The spines and factors in a fishbone can help identify common elements and ‘standards’ for courses in a program.
• Students waste time, resources, and effort. As do instructors. Not all perceived waste is bad though as some ideas and some learning take time and effort and this required time and effort might not be perceived in the correct light.
• Repetitive tasks such as marking can be made more efficient and effective with better rubrics and investing in the ‘setup’ before the processing of each item.
• Activities can be arranged and scheduled so that the students are ‘warmed up’ and ready to do a major learning task instead of starting the activity cold.
• Proper documentation can be created that can help others who might teach the same course. Documenting why you did something and your assumptions is important.

• Consider the waste you are creating for yourself and for the students. Do not assume that a meeting has to take place and have everyone involved. Meetings rarely solve problems in real-time. They are appropriate for approving and discussing solutions, but not for problem solving.
• It is possible to design the course delivery and sequence to take the heterogeneity of incoming students, rapidly normalize the base and then proceed with less variance.
• If something does not link to the desired effects, why is it being done? Lean methods are useful for challenging assumptions and for identifying aspects accidentally or unknowingly omitted; for example, under producing, under processing, over producing, over processing.
• It is possible to analyse why things are done twice, why things take longer, why students did not understand it the first time you introduced the topic and why an extra tutorial is needed. These are all forms of waste. Why do you have to handle something twice? Why is it it not one-and-done?
• What can you do to prevent unintended errors from happening in the learning process, mitigate them, or detect them as soon as possible? These are the ways to think about the process. What are the possible ways that something can go wrong. This is similar to the suggestions made in the Bloom report when designing multiple choice questions; you consciously and explicitly design the questions to detect comprehension, applying, analysing, synthesis, and evaluation errors for each key concept, theme, or learning outcome. These errors are ‘defects’ and should be addressed. The lean process assumes that things go awry and deal with them. The process does not assume people do what they are told to do or have been instructed to do. People forget, make mistakes, get tired, and are not perfect. Design the course and assessments assuming these facts.

Further reading

• Drucker, P. (1963). Managing for Business Effectiveness, Harvard Business Review, May 1963.
• https://shingo.org/about-the-shingo-institute/