Meetings

Some folks are going to eight hours of meeting a day. Many of them have meetings to prepare for meetings. If you are serious about solving this problem and interested in getting things done you need to ask some serious questions:

- Why am I here?
- Why there are too many people in the room?
- Why is there a default length?

Perhaps this meeting-meter which calculate the cost of a meeting can give a guilt zone for those folks.

Value Stream Mapping

You are able to see that your process is taking longer than ever and your gut feel says you need new resources to remedy this situation. If application is running slow you think you need new servers or changing the application itself etc.

The question is what tools do we have to map our gut feel to reality? How do you know all the way from start to finish where the waste (waiting) vs. work reside in the process?

Value Stream Mapping - it simply plots the course of the added value vs. non value added (waste) to distinguish where the areas of attacks are. Mary Poppendieck’s presentation on productivity clearly has a great example of this process. You can also watch her presentation here.

When to stop

Toyota assembly line stops when something is wrong. There is a willingness to quit when things are off track - then they are on the path of mastery.

If you fire your worst boss, clients, stop working with the people who have no value, stop working on wasteful activities, then you free up an enormous energy. Direct that energy toward conquering great things and odds of success go way up.