Today’s reading pick:

Office Lean - Understanding and Implementing Flow in a Professional and Administrative Environment

As an operations guy Ken Eakin shows how to use lean management techniques to support your employees to meet their targets and fulfill the customer expectations. Lean management therefore relies on two principles:

1. Balance: when everything is balanced the work flows without interruption

2. Continuity: allows employees to finish their tasks with only minor interruptions

Ken recommends a Lean Manager to implement continuity and balance in order to maintain and deliver high value to the customers faster.
This book isn’t a fast read, with its solid information it provides a guide for managers which want to have a solution oriented organization.

We recommend this book to managers that are seeking for a guide to reshape their processes to a value adding work flow.

Key take aways of this book

• Conventional management models don’t work well in an economy dominated by services and information as a product

• You can change the behavior of people with a systematic approach and not by only providing information

• Management has to see their organization as a system that creates results

• Workflow doesn’t mean dividing the organization in work streams, see the workflow as a system that is interlinked

• The value stream is the starting point of all actions, separating Man/Machine/Material/etc. is an outdated point of view

• Efficiency in offices starts with scheduling tasks

• Kanban is a great tool that can be used to steer tasks in offices

• Expose information from experts to the complete organization

• Balance your workflow in the office to avoid bottle necks

• Fulfill your customers expectations and you will get your return on investment

• Lean leaders coach and support their employees - they are the role models who walk the talk

Enjoy reading and improving!