Comments on: Lastest Discussion of 8th Waste

By: Jim Young

Jim Young — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 14:34:07 +0000

I’m late to this conversation, but our project work (hospital facility creation) has led us to understand that the 8th waste is more than re-creation of knowledge, it is the pure wasted opportunity to harvest all the IQ points around the table by enagaging all the brains on every project issue they’d like to weigh in on. Real-time conversational process…

By: Animesh Mehra

Animesh Mehra — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 08:45:30 +0000

Couldn’t agree more. Our management model in fact would prevent “reinventing the wheel” wastes to accumulate over time. Re-use is the key that we are going to follow in future.

By: David Green

David Green — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 03:39:09 +0000

I think one of the sources of these great wastes, and not only in construction, is the way ‘project’ has been traditionally defined. As I compare what is typically written about project management, and compare it with what is being written about management in general, I find that PM seems often to be about 5 decades behind! It often adopts a mechanistic command and control approach, with ‘management by objectives’ limitations that disparage the contributions of ‘doers’ to find improvement opportunities and adopt them and can disinvolve those with either actual or operational expertise.

So, how to define a ‘project’ to perhaps avoid this? Here’s my attempt:

A project occurs when people act together (make commitments) to invest their effort to produce a benefit or value in response to environmental flux (that is, changes in the relationships within the organisation’s network) or emergent opportunities.

This separates projects from ‘normal operations’ which occur with the general presumtion of environmental constancy, as in a production line, for intance, and locates a project in the interactions of an organisation and its business context; for instance, where a client sees a development opporutnity and ask for an effort to realise that opportunity.

By: Joe Ely

Joe Ely — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 19:57:05 +0000

Hal, you connect two very important dots here.

One is the Great Wastes. It captures much, this tendency to not speak, this proclivity to not listen.

The second dot are the countermeasures to this waste: attention, consensus. I would add use of Socratic Method to involve others in learning.

Seeing the Waste and applying the countermeasures, relentlessly, is what us Lean Leaders need to do.

Thanks for the post.

By: Lech

Lech — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 06:20:20 +0000

Convincing! “Recreating knowledge” definitely deserves a place on the list. It’s more general than “not listening” and “not speaking”. Both of them seem to boil down to communication issues (risk) or lack of efficient communication altogether. However, there is more to it than sharing information. After all, process improvement is about learning and using that knowledge once and for all, isn’t it?