The Goal by Eli Goldratt tells the story of a manager who is faced with a factory shutdown and elimination unless he can solve the productivity issues. He’s given a short timeline and seeks the counsel of a distant acquaintance named Jonah. Jonah never tells the main character Alex what to do. Instead, he poses questions that stimulate thought and discussion between Alex and his crew.
Faced with the problem of trying to understand bottlenecks Jonah tells Alex the story of a boy scout troop on a hike. The scout troop gets organized and heads out on the hike. Herbie, an overweight, out of shape trooper is placed in the middle of the hiking line as they move up the hill. A short time later the line starts getting long. Why? The kids in front of Herbie are moving at a faster pace. The gap between Herbie and the rest of the group is widening. Everyone following Herbie is being held up and getting more and more distant from the scout leader. Herbie is getting in the way of the groups progress. So, what’s your Herbie?
As managers we all have “Herbies”. We have people or process that hold up the effort or slow down the group. It’s important to find your Herbie and eliminate it (or them) if you want to succeed with your project.
So how do you find “Herbies”? Work can be organized into two categories. Work and waste. If you look at any process you can bucket the tasks into one of these categories. A clue to waste is finding the re word. Rework, reschedule, review, rewrite etc indicate that something wasn’t done correctly the first time. A focus on elimination of “re” related tasks is a good first step.
Recognizing bureaucracy is another key to finding “Herbie”. Project staff members will often go through projects conducting tasks because of the lack of understanding of regulation. Challenging “regulatory understanding” and historical tasking needs to be the role of management. Just because we did something 500 times before doesn’t mean we need to do it again. When you review a project or program list, ask the team members why we need to do “this particular task” and you will often get this answer. “Because we always do it that way” is not a good answer and you are on your way to finding “Herbie”.