Dan Markovitz on Lean in the Office: Reducing Waste and Improving Information Flow

Podcast Episode #52 is a discussion with a good friend (and sometimes contributor) to the Lean Blog, Dan Markovitz, founder and President of Markovitz Consulting. Markovitz Consulting is a corporate efficiency-training firm specializing in the application of Lean manufacturing principles to business processes. The company's WorkLean program helps knowledge workers reduce the hidden waste in the way they manage information and improves the flow of value to the customer. As such, the WorkLean program supports companies in their Lean journey.

Dan shares how his Lean journey began with The Machine That Changed the World and a deep appreciation for the principle of “respect for people.” He explains how this value often gets lost when Lean is treated as only a set of tools. Today, his firm's WorkLean program helps knowledge workers rethink how they handle everyday processes, with results that go far beyond simple cost-cutting.

The conversation explores how Lean concepts like takt time, cadence, and 5S apply to non-manufacturing work. Dan provides practical examples, including how law firms freed up more time for business development, and how simple changes to email and information management reduced wasted hours. He also contrasts effective office 5S practices with “L.A.M.E.” examples such as taping outlines around phones or staplers.

This episode illustrates that Lean is just as relevant in offices as in factories. By addressing waste in information flow, creating rhythm in knowledge work, and focusing on respect for people, organizations can free up capacity, reduce frustration, and create more value for clients and customers.

For earlier episodes, visit the main Podcast page, which includes information on how to subscribe via RSS or via Apple Podcasts.

Transcript:

Announcer:

Welcome to the Lean Blog Podcast. Visit our website at www.leanblog.org. Now, here's your host, Mark Graban.

Mark Graban:

Hi, this is Mark Graban from the Lean Blog. This is episode number 52 of the Lean Blog Podcast for November 3, 2008. Our guest today is Dan Markovitz. He's the founder and president of Markovitz Consulting, which is a corporate efficiency training firm that specializes in the application of Lean manufacturing principles to business processes. Dan is a regular contributor to the Lean Blog, so many of you may recognize his name. And now you get to hear his voice talking about Lean in office and administrative business process settings. I hope you enjoy the podcast. If you have any feedback or questions, you can communicate with us by going to leanpodcast.org and looking for the blog post for episode 52.

Again, our guest is Dan Markovitz from Markovitz Consulting. Dan, thanks for taking the time to join us on the Lean Blog Podcast.

Dan Markovitz:

Thank you very much for having me. I really appreciate it, Mark.

Mark Graban:

I was wondering if we could start by having you introduce yourself a bit to our listeners. If you could tell us a little bit about your own Lean story and how you first got involved with Lean.

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The Spark of Lean and Respect for People

Dan Markovitz:

Originally, I started with Lean back in 1992 or 1993. I read Jim Womack's book, The Machine That Changed the World, and that pretty much flattened me. I was amazed by it. And it had nothing to do actually with the reduction in waste or the lower cost of producing cars. What really struck me was the “respect for people,” which is, of course, one of the things that people often lose sight of when they are talking about Lean. It's all about getting rid of waste, but really, respect for people is at the core of Lean. It's one of the pillars.

That's what got me. Here's this enormous auto company that viewed its employees as real assets, not just as hands, but as minds, and not just as a cost, but as an asset that could really help the company grow. And that's from the top of the pyramid to the lowest-level employee. I thought, “Wow, this is a radical way of thinking about work and a radical way of thinking about an enterprise.” That really lit the fire and stimulated my interest in this thing called Lean.

Mark Graban:

Sure. So from that initial spark, what was your first opportunity to start putting some of those practices into action?

Dan Markovitz:

Well, it actually gestated for a good many years. It was about three or four years ago that I started doing this current line of work, which is consulting and helping companies eliminate the waste in administrative processes. What I saw over and over again were people who were stressed out at the office, who were forgetting things, who were just wasting time and wasting energy doing things that were adding no value at all to the organization, no value at all to the customer.

I realized that over the years, I had developed my own Lean work habits, whether it was the creation of checklists to make sure that things were done on time or a better form of organization of information so that I wasn't wasting time looking for stuff. I started putting the pieces together and saying, “Hey, wait a minute, this ties into that Lean stuff that I read about.” I recognized that the business process is just like a production line; it's just that the product is usually non-tangible. I realized as well that the work that individuals do in a business process can be improved and waste can be driven out, just the same way that working on an assembly line, attaching a bumper or a side-view mirror to a car, that process can be improved.

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Lean at the Individual Desktop Level

Mark Graban:

In the work that you do through Markovitz Consulting, maybe you can tell us a little bit about the methodology and this specialization of applying Lean to administrative processes.

Dan Markovitz:

There are an awful lot of people who do value stream mapping and business process improvement, and that's obviously very important. But what I look at really is the way individuals work. It's sort of Lean at the individual desktop level. The analogy I use is that if you think about a business process as sort of a relay, people spend an awful lot of time working on the handoffs, making sure that the handoff between departments is as smooth and fast as possible. And that's great. The problem is that if the runners are slow, the relay team is still going to lose. A runner has to be efficient.

So my goal is to make people faster runners by driving out the waste in their own activities. For example, I worked with a law firm with a bunch of partners. The value that they added as a partner was not billable hours, but business development. The firm expected them to spend more time finding new business. In working with them and trying to understand how they individually process their work, we created better work habits, standard work, brought 5S to their individual workspaces, and created a cadence for their high-value work. We were able to increase the time that they were spending on business development by about 25%.

Mark Graban:

And so that time is leading to, I would assume, more sales and revenue impact on the business instead of thinking about Lean as cost-cutting.

Dan Markovitz:

Exactly. It wasn't just about reducing cost. Unless you consider, of course, that they have a salary. So now we're driving down the cost because we're not paying for stuff that's not adding value.

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Creating a Cadence for Knowledge Work

Mark Graban:

I wanted to follow up on one word that you used when you talked about creating a “cadence” in somebody's work. It makes me think of takt time or rhythm in a production operation. Can you give an example? How would that apply for a lawyer or any other individual knowledge worker?

Dan Markovitz:

That's a good question. A knowledge worker, whether it's a lawyer or an accountant, has multiple value streams running through them, which makes this all the more complicated. But let's take these lawyers. They had to do business development activities, and what they would find is at the end of each month, they'd see the number of hours on a report and say, “Oh gosh, I didn't do enough.” And then the next week, they would try to cram in a whole bunch of time, and their current clients would suffer.

So instead, we started saying, “Okay, let's create a cadence. What is an appropriate amount of time? What's the rhythm for doing business development?” Is this something you need to do every day? Twice a week? An hour on or three hours in each week? And building that into their work schedules so that they were able to create some level-loading, some heijunka, of that kind of work. So instead of it being some sort of fire drill at the end of the month, now all of a sudden, “Yes, here's the two-hour block of time or the three hours per week that I'm supposed to be doing.” Although it seems simple, and of course, so much of Lean is simple, it's something that no one really thought about in the crush of phone calls, emails, and all the other crises that would erupt.

Mark Graban:

So it sounds like what you're describing is intentionally having a planned rhythm to your work instead of just being reactive or overreacting.

Dan Markovitz:

Exactly. And so now their production scheduling is all over the place. “Oh, my gosh, we've got to make more Camrys right now. No, now we have to make more Priuses.” The factory can't work that way. They have to have some sort of predictable flow.

There's a fear, I think, when I work with knowledge workers, they say, “You know, there's so much unpredictability, I don't know what kind of fires are going to crop up.” And that's absolutely true. You can't create a cadence for everything because you can't control everything. However, we can create a cadence and standard work for things that we can control. And to not do that leads to an increase in waste and inefficiency. Let's control the things we can. Your sales efforts, for example. Mark, as a consultant, you can schedule that. You can't schedule what your clients are going to need, but some of those things–your bookkeeping, your accounting, your expense reports–you can totally put that into a schedule and create a cadence for it.

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5S and Visual Management in the Office

Mark Graban:

I wanted to go back and touch a little bit on 5S and visual management in an office setting. What examples can you share of that being effective? There was a story a lot of listeners might be aware of, an accounting firm in the UK where government accountants were up in arms that they were having to put tape around their phone on their desk. And stuff like that starts to seem a little trivial or silly.

Dan Markovitz:

Yeah, I think that, to quote you, Mark, the tape around the phone and the keyboard is an example of L.A.M.E. and not Lean. 5S does have a role, and the place in a knowledge worker's world is to help them access the tools of his or her trade. In this case, knowledge workers are always working on information. So how can we deploy 5S so that people are able to access the information they need quickly, efficiently, and without error? Where your stapler goes couldn't matter less, as long as you can actually find your stapler.

But if you are spending five minutes looking for an email… “Well, I've got 14,000 emails in my inbox. First, I'm going to sort by sender, and because my boss sends me an awful lot of emails, I'll have to spend another three or four minutes sifting through the 200 emails from him to find the one I'm looking for.” That's an exercise in frustration. It's wasted time. So applying 5S, bringing organization to one's information, that makes a lot of sense. How are you going to organize your physical files? How are you going to organize your electronic files? How do you organize your email?

The statistics are staggering. This was in 1997. The Wall Street Journal had an article that said that executives are spending six weeks a year looking for information. Not actually doing anything, just looking for information. And that was before email really came on strong. You can only imagine that the situation has gotten worse. Unless you're a savant who really does know where the exact email or piece of paper is, that's just pure muda.

Mark Graban:

And do you have any quick tips? I'm sure everybody listening has to manage and deal with email at work. What are some guidelines you share with people?

Dan Markovitz:

Well, the first thing is that people hold onto emails as though they're some sort of family heirloom. In general, emails are more like a quart of milk, and they go bad after a while. After a week or two, an email tends to be a very transient, very ephemeral kind of communication. Very often, it's garbage. So the strongest suggestion I can make is to throw out email. Just throw it out. I'm perhaps a little to the extreme in tossing stuff, but there are very, very few times that I've actually regretted not having an email. I would argue that even if it has cost me some effort in recreating some information, I've more than made up for that cost by being more productive during all the other hours.

Mark Graban:

If we have a cleaner inbox, I guess there's less time required to search through it.

Dan Markovitz:

Right, exactly. There's also, I should add, a huge cost. I don't know if you remember, in 1999, NASA sent up a spacecraft to Mars called the Mars Climate Orbiter. The spacecraft blew up in orbit. It turns out that there were two engineering teams, one was working in English units and one was working in metric. But here's the kicker: there was an email about this exact problem that was sitting in the flight director's inbox along with, I don't know, 4,000 or 14,000 other messages. But because it got pushed down below the fold, she forgot about it. She couldn't look for something that she didn't know existed. Helping to get rid of the garbage, even if it's only 10 kilobytes of a message, it's still garbage. It takes up space on the screen, and it means we have a lower likelihood of being able to spot the signal amidst the noise.

Mark Graban:

Sure. And hopefully, we can do another discussion. I know there's more we can delve into.

Dan Markovitz:

I would love that.

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Conclusion

Mark Graban:

To wrap up, if people want to follow up with you, if they're interested in applying Lean concepts to their own work or within their organization, how can people contact you? And secondly, what types of services do you provide?

Dan Markovitz:

The best way to contact me is via email, and that's dan@timebackmanagement.com. My website is timebackmanagement.com. The kind of services I provide are generally I work with organizations, whether it's non-profit, governmental, for-profit, and I'll do anything from a one- or two-hour seminar to a full-on multi-day hands-on implementation and deployment of Lean principles, creating consensus within the organization about what kind of standard work is necessary so that people then have ownership of the Lean transformation. I can only provide some ideas and a starting point, but the actual implementation and adaptation to the idiosyncrasies of each organization has to be done by the people who work there.

Mark Graban:

Again, Dan Markovitz is our guest today. I really want to thank you, Dan, for taking some time out. It's good talking to you live after all the interaction and participation that you've done on my blog. Hopefully, we can do this again sometime soon.

Dan Markovitz:

The pleasure is mine, Mark, and thank you very much for having me.

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