Hello again everybody, and welcome to the latest blog from Lean FSL. The signs of Spring are all around us now, and it’s a great time to be thinking about improvement – both as individuals and organisations.

More and more of my work these days is with clients in the ‘New World’ of information flows and customer services. It’s been a great new challenge for me personally – to test my abilities in these environments – especially as the ‘product’ is often an intangible piece of electronic data or a phone call. It’s much easier to see barriers to flow, when you have a physical product to follow!

However, there are many of the same barriers and interruptions to flow in these industries as there are in manufacturing. For example, localised ‘batching’ of work is very common, as this is perceived to be a more ‘efficient’ way of doing work. And in many cases, it’s even harder in the information and service world to get people to be able to describe or map out the customer journey through a series of process steps. Silo-thinking is common.

There are some other things that inhibit flow in this new world, that I don’t remember coming across that often in Manufacturing. They are, in a similar way to a Batch-and -Queue mentality, both a barrier to flow and a cause of muda. One such barrier is Multi-tasking, or more accurately the acceptance of multi-tasking as a design principle in a system that provides a customer service. Let me explain.

A colleague and I were mapping a customer journey when it became increasingly clear that individual team members were ‘working’ on up to 60 open customer queries at any given time. Obviously, they aren’t actually working on them all simultaneously, but will spend time each day flicking from case-to-case, to update, check on progress, issue chasing emails etc. I had no idea on the theory behind what this meant for loss of productivity, I just knew that as a design principle, this wasn’t lean! If you added in allowance for the typical email and phone call interruptions that many office-based individuals have to deal with, it was no surprise that the daily throughput of completed cases from the whole team wasn’t very impressive!

So, I started to do a bit of research on Multi-tasking from a lean perspective. There’s a wealth of reading out there regarding the impact of multi-tasking on an individuals time-management and personal effectiveness, and if you dig a bit deeper, there’s quite a bit too on multi-tasking’s impact on the flow of work through a system. I’ve pasted a few links to the bottom of the blog for those interested in a bit more background reading, but here in summary are a few of my discoveries:

  • Switching between multiple tasks can cause productivity to drop between 25 – 40%. That’s more than a week out of every month wasted. And that’s per process step! Imagine the impact on throughput across a multi-stage process?
  • The impact on the throughput of the process step, and the system as a whole, follows the principles of Little’s Law. (Throughput = WIP / Cycle Time). With the multi-tasked items being treated as WIP. Put simply, the more WIP (ie. multi-tasking) in the system, the lower the throughput.
  • However, the impact of the effect in bullet point 1, means that Cycle time also gets longer, due to all of the switching losses. So this makes throughput even worse! This might start to seem ‘geeky’, but this was a ‘light-bulb’ moment for me, because it means that we can now work out what we need to do about it!

The consequences of allowing people to work this way must have a profound impact on the flow of work, not to mention the stress of working in such a system (a clear example of ‘muri’ – overburden – as you are likely to ever see), so it’s remarkable that some organisations still consider ‘the ability to multi-task’ as a key attribute for job applicants!

So, how can Lean thinking be applied to a system which currently allows or even demands multi-tasking. Here are a few of the design principles I would suggest:

  1. Control WIP levels in the system. Limit the ability to multi-task by controlling the number of cases or packets of information in the system. Think about an ultimate goal of one-piece flow, with work ‘pulled’ rather than ‘pushed’ on demand.
  2. Take a Value Stream approach to streaming incoming calls, or flows of information. Reduce the need for individuals to have to constantly switch mentally from one form of problem to another. This needs to be balanced with consideration for job interest and skill maintenance of course.
  3. Introduce an ‘Andon’ system. Limit the ability to be able to ‘park’  a problem case until later. Seek to solve problems at first touch, or be able to escalate the problem to a team leader or a dedicated team who can take on the case and keep it moving.
  4. Keep monitoring both WIP levels and the end-to-end cycle time, to ensure that work isn’t building up in a particular area.

If I didn’t know it before, I now know that we have a new enemy in the pursuit of lean perfection. Maybe its unique enough to be given its own special place in the lean vocabulary? The Japanese word for multi-tasking is apparently, ‘maruchitasuku’. So I propose that the 3M’s of Muda, Muri & Mura are joined by a fourth M……..Maruchitasuku!

But, whatever we call it, remember that multi-tasking is a myth; you are either task-switching or multi-failing!

I’d love to hear your comments and experiences, and I promise to be doing nothing else at the same time as I read your responses!

 

Stay Lean.

Graham

Here are some great links on Multi-tasking from a Lean perspective:

http://www.leanblog.org/2010/10/podcast-100-dave-crenshaw-the-myth-of-multitasking/

http://www.apa.org/research/action/multitask.aspx

http://www.shmula.com/multi-tasking-leads-to-lower-productivity/375/