Birds do it. Bees do it. You do it almost everyday, especially in the office! I’m referring, of course, to handoffs – the act of turning over tasks, information, data, documents, forms, material goods, etc. to a colleague, group, department, etc. Unfortunately, for something that is such an embedded part of our process, the simple fact is that handoffs are a source of immense waste.
If you read this title and were immediately reminded of that ONE miserable project with a bad team (or team member), then you will probably be responding to this post. But, this post isn’t about bad team members or how to avoid them. Instead, it is about how to select a group of people that can fill the roles required by a project’s scope (be sure you read the post: Kaizen is not Japanese for Free Lunch) effectively and increase the probability of success.
Lean is the constant pursuit of identifying and eliminating waste and there are many different tools that Lean practitioners use to accomplish this goal, but they all align with the one guiding principle of identifying and eliminating waste. We will discuss many types of waste in upcoming posts, but we should lay some ground rules and agree on some basic principles before going too deep.
No matter which office environment and industry I have encountered, this type of waste is always prevalent and always a source of massive inefficiencies. Redundant input and output of data occurs when the same data is entered or reported more than once without adding any customer value.