Category Archives: Time Management

Process Improvement, Time Management

The Bottom Line Impact of Saving People’s Time: It May Not Be What You Think!

time management

In a few instances, the impact of increasing process productivity or saving people’s time on the bottom line is clear and simple. For example, it may reduce the expenditures on overtime or contract workers.

However, beyond those few cases, productivity improvements for employees do not directly reduce expenditures, but instead increase capacity.

How much these improvements benefit the bottom line depends on how that capacity is put to use. The impacts can be extremely profitable or can amount to nothing — or worse!

For example, an organization has 30 people at an average cost per person per year of $50k. This organization is able to make major process improvements that achieve a 50% reduction in the amount of time required to handle the current workload. In theory, the impact of the productivity improvement would be the same — 30 people, 50% productivity improvement, $50k/year — should be simple math, right?

But in the real world, the impact would vary dramatically. Other factors, such as potential for sales growth, amount of attrition, transferability and scarcity of skills, etc. have a very significant impact on the value of any productivity improvements the organization may achieve.

In this example, it turned out that demand for the work is stable, neither increasing nor decreasing. Consequently, no new value-adding work is brought into the organization and there is neither attrition nor layoffs. People quickly add non-value-adding activity to fill the gap and make themselves look and feel busy.

Therefore, the productivity improvements produced neither revenue growth nor cost reductions; the impact of the improvement in is slightly negative — equivalent to the value of any time and investment expended to achieve the productivity improvement.

A good example of how, in many cases, conventional wisdom isn’t so wise!

Time Management

5 Best Practices for Maintaining Productivity When Working from Home

productivity

Continuing with the theme of time management, and spring-boarding off of our previous post’s tips for avoiding the most common productivity pitfalls, today’s focus shifts to the pandemic-related reality of working more productively from home.

Many have struggled with the shift to remote work, so here are five best practices for maintaining productivity when doing so:

  1. Maintain a designated workspace – this may seem like a minor issue, but by dedicating a “work space” we can more easily shift our thinking from ‘home’ things to ‘work’ things when engaged in work. A designated space often “triggers” productivity as well.
  2. Set regular working hours – maintaining some type of regimen, though it may differ from the established workplace schedule, helps us to shift and maintain focus; it also helps us to avoid the pitfall of over-working and makes it easier for others to reach us because they know when we are in work mode.
  3. Set start-up/shut-down rituals – this helps us develop consistency and makes it easier for our mind to distinguish between “work” and “home” focus; we should also include rituals for periodically stepping back for exercise and/or stretching.
  4. Start each day with a written plan – this is a best practice that should be followed regardless of location, but maintaining it when working remotely is important. Lists should be actionable and time-bound.
  5. Keep workspace organized – simply stated, “mess equals stress!”
Time Management

5 Best Practices for Avoiding Time Management Pitfalls

pitfalls

Our previous post shared six of the most common barriers to productivity and to managing time.

Here are five best practices that can help us avoid some of these pitfalls:

  1. Plan our work – we should spend the 1st 15-30 minutes of each day planning, and then we must “work the plan!” In addition, while many of us use a daily to-do list, we might consider creating a weekly list as well; then we can prioritize on a daily basis and even incorporate “times of day” to ensure deadlines and priorities are met.
  2. Overcome procrastination – some proven ways of doing this include starting the day with the hardest tasks and/or breaking tasks down into small chunks. Forming an “accountability partnership” with a colleague can help as well, or simply making deadlines public, which tends to promote greater levels of self accountability.
  3. Prioritize! “if everything is important, then nothing is!” Consider using prioritizing tools such as the Eisenhower matrix.
  4. Keep a “crises log” and seek root-causes of repetitive crises so they can be anticipated or eliminated. Otherwise we will find ourselves spending too much time in “reactive” mode, which is impossible to manage.
  5. Take a long-term view of our work and keep learning to stay fresh! With this perspective in mind, it often becomes easier to seek the root causes of repetitive time-drains, and to keep an open mind with respect to learning or when faced with adopting change. Set specific goals for fixing root causes or adapting to change, and quantify what we can gain in terms of what’s important – i.e., “I’ll save 2 hours per week, which I can spend with family…”
Time Management

Time Management Barriers

time

Continuing with our previous post’s theme of time management, the Productivity Institute shares some helpful insights into the concept of managing time.

For example, it is important to recognize that while we all have the “same amount of time,” the way we manage it will vary from person to person. In other words, time management is a relative thing.

It is also true that people frequently make decisions about how they manage their time based on feelings or assumptions rather than facts because few of us take the time to actually measure how we use time or where we spend our time.

But, as Productivity Institute founder Dr. Donald Wetmore has said, “If you want to manage it you have to measure it!”

As a starting point to measuring the things that might be preventing us from using time wisely, here are six of the most common barriers to productivity and good time management:

  1. Attitude
  2. Other people
  3. Weather
  4. Fatigue
  5. Belief there is not enough time
  6. Unproductive habits

In our next post we will take a closer look at some of these barriers, and share ideas for how to avoid them.

Time Management

The Best Time Management Plans

time_management

A past post focused on five steps for improving our use of time. In that post it was suggested that using “time” as a measure to find and focus opportunities for improvement has three big advantages:

  • Time drives important business results
  • Time is universally applicable
  • It is very simple to do

Should you decide to launch a time management improvement plan in your organization, it will be important to prepare people by ensuring that the following points are thoroughly understood:

  • The waste in the system is not the fault of the people doing the work; it is there because of the way the process is designed or because of the way that the supplying processes are designed.
  • The people closest to the work can help you find and fix what is wrong with the way the processes are designed.
  • Recognizing non-value-adding work does not mean that you can simply make it go away. It only means it is a candidate for elimination or reduction. An effective solution may not yet be at hand. That’s OK. Recognizing the waste is the first step to searching for a better way.
  • Value-added work is not as plentiful as people might think – on average, only 20% of all work is truly value-added. Keep in mind, every process will contain “necessary” work that is not value-added. The goal is to optimize time spent on value-added work, reduce time spent on other work, and eliminate waste.
  • Someone who has never done this before might find it difficult to identify non-value-added work during their analysis because it is hard to recognize the waste in standard operating procedures. “If we have always had to do something, it usually seems that it surely must add value,” they will likely think. In addition, rework typically compensates for a problem that is so familiar that everyone takes it for granted. Recognize and improve as much as you can, then circle back and look again.
  • With practice and coaching (and amnesty) people can identify more opportunity.
  • Everyone must have amnesty. If people are afraid for their jobs, either because they might be blamed for the waste or be no longer needed if the work is streamlined, there is every disincentive to find and eliminate waste.
  • Successes in reducing cycle time or saving time overall should be measured and celebrated!
Continuous Improvement, Time Management

it’s about time!

time_is_money

When we are faced with the task of evaluating and improving a business, we have many metrics to choose from. We can ‘follow the money’ — study the spending: where does it go, how does it compare to previous periods or to competitors; we may look at market share or wallet share; we might measure revenue per employee or benchmark against the competition; or we might measure customer satisfaction or the customer experience.

But one of the most powerful measurements for helping to make breakthrough improvements is also one of the simplest: following where the time goes.

In fact, many agree that time is the most universal and most valuable component of work and work processes! Consider that by determining how much time it takes to complete a cycle of value (i.e., building a widget, closing the books, making a sale, completing a project, etc.) and how much of that is truly adding value, an organization captures information that provides a motivating vision and road map for making improvements.

Key areas to study are delays, over-processing, rework, transportation, and inspection; and using time as a measure to find and focus opportunities for improvement has three big advantages:

  1. time drives important business results
  2. time is universally applicable
  3. it is very simple to do — i.e., something anyone can do!

Once you’ve decided that managing time is an ideal way to reduce costs and increase customer (internal and external) satisfaction, you might try using the following five steps for effective measurement:

  1. Identify the process to study and improve — where it starts and where it ends.
  2. Confirm with the customer (internal or external) the key element of value the process yields. Sometimes this is obvious, but in some cases not so much. An accurate understanding of what the customer considers of real value is key to any improvement effort.
  3. Determine how long the process actually takes today. This number— in minutes, hours, days, or weeks, whichever is best suited to the process — is the TOTAL component of the ratio we will calculate in step 5. Some questions often arise at this step:
    • Should we collect “person hours” or elapsed time? Measure elapsed time. If you study and improve elapsed time, you increase customer satisfaction and quality as well as costs. Person hours spent on the work almost always decline when an organization focuses on elapsed time.
    • How precise do we need to be? It is valuable to get good data about the total time elapsed from start to finish, if only through a modest sample. Of course, there will be variation — and the variation can be quite substantial for some processes. Keep the raw data and calculate the average TOTAL.
  4. Determine which steps actually add value and how much time is spent on those. For a step to be considered to add value, it must:
    • Be directly related to what the customer values and would pay for (if they knew what we were doing)
    • Actually change something of value — the product, database, approval status, whatever, (inspecting something or moving something does not actually change the thing, so does not ‘add value’)
    • Do so for the first and only time. Fixing or reworking something does NOT add value, because it compensates for not being done completely or correctly the first time.
    • Often these steps must be done today, because they compensate for an imperfection somewhere in the process. Correcting those imperfections is what will yield the improvements.
  5. Study the differences between the total time and the value adding time to identify and eliminate the root causes. Then calculate again. To calculate the ratio: if total time today is 55 hours and value adding time is 2 ½ hours, then the ratio would be either:
    • Total-to-Value: 55 divided by 2.5 = 22, which means that the organization spends 22 hours for every 1 hour of value add, or
    • Value-To-Total: 2.5 divided by 55 = 4.5%, which means that 4.5% of total elapsed time is actually spent adding value.

It doesn’t matter which you use, as long as you are consistent.

Continuous Improvement, Time Management

Time Management V. Pace Management

Why pace is so important…

Several recent posts have focused on the benefits of measuring time, and on the best approach for launching time management improvements.

But a related, often overlooked measure that can significantly accelerate or compromise an improvement effort is “pace.”

In fact, the most common cause of delay in achieving results is the pace.

Some teams schedule an hour a week to work on an improvement project, which might sound like a good approach. But, under the best of circumstances, two months will pass before the project gets one day’s attention. It is also more likely that it will take three or four months to complete one day’s effort on the project because meetings get cancelled, or start late, and then a portion of each meeting is spent going over the status or covering old ground for a member who missed a meeting.

In addition, when a project progresses this slowly, priorities may change or resources might be reassigned without ever completing the work and gaining the improvements. Sometimes these teams feel like they’ve got analysis paralysis, but in fact very little analysis has been completed. The real culprit is really pace paralysis. And while the pace of their project may be slower than they’d like, the overall pace of business continues to accelerate… thus making the life-cycle or “window” of innovation that much shorter.

Bear in mind that the longer the project length, the more project overhead and rework time is expended and the lower the benefit, because every week of delay means a week of benefit is lost.

One proven way to avoid these pitfalls is to employ the Kaizen approach. A Kaizen requires planning and data gathering up front and then all the necessary people are pulled off their jobs for one day or several days to completely solve the problem: designing, testing, stabilizing solutions usually in under a week. The Kaizen approach requires good planning on the part of the leaders and facilitator, but makes good use of the entire team’s time while accelerating the benefits of the improvement effort.

Continuous Improvement, Time Management, Value-added work

Launching a Time Management Improvement Plan

The Value of Time?

A previous post focused on five steps for improving our use of time. In that post it was suggested that using “time” as a measure to find and focus opportunities for improvement has three big advantages:

  • Time drives important business results
  • Time is universally applicable
  • It is very simple to do

Should you decide to launch a time management improvement plan in your organization, it will be important to prepare people by ensuring that the following points are thoroughly understood:

  • The waste in the system is not the fault of the people doing the work; it is there because of the way the process is designed or because of the way that the supplying processes are designed.
  • The people closest to the work can help you find and fix what is wrong with the way the processes are designed.
  • Recognizing non-value-adding work does not mean that you can simply make it go away. It only means it is a candidate for elimination or reduction. An effective solution may not yet be at hand. That’s OK. Recognizing the waste is the first step to searching for a better way.
  • Value-added work is not as plentiful as people might think – on average, only 20% of all work is truly value-added. Keep in mind, every process will contain “necessary” work that is not value-added. The goal is to optimize time spent on value-added work, reduce time spent on other work, and eliminate waste.
  • Someone who has never done this before might find it difficult to identify non-value-added work during their analysis because it is hard to recognize the waste in standard operating procedures. “If we have always had to do something, it usually seems that it surely must add value,” they will likely think. In addition, rework typically compensates for a problem that is so familiar that everyone takes it for granted. Recognize and improve as much as you can, then circle back and look again.
  • With practice and coaching (and amnesty) people can identify more opportunity.
  • Everyone must have amnesty. If people are afraid for their jobs, either because they might be blamed for the waste or be no longer needed if the work is streamlined, there is every disincentive to find and eliminate waste.
  • Successes in reducing cycle time or saving time overall should be measured and celebrated!
CI Tools, Continuous Improvement, Time Management

It’s About Time & 5 Steps to Best Measure It

Our previous post shared several reasons as to why the measurement of time is an effective way to identify and eliminate waste.

This approach has consistently proven successful in our work, and some specific examples include:

  • A finance department used this method to reduce reporting cycle time by over 50% by identifying and eliminating the causes of rework.
  • An organization reduced setup times by measuring the time and addressing the causes of the non-value-adding delays.
  • A sales force measured their total time to value-adding time by identifying huge chunks of non-value adding time which they were able to convert to more sales calls.
  • A retirement community studied total housekeeping time relative to value adding time and reduced costs by over 30%.
  • A financial services company studied the total time versus value-adding time for processing time-sensitive transactions and succeeded in simultaneously eliminating both overtime and late
    penalties.

Once you’ve decided that managing time is an ideal way to reduce costs and increase customer (internal and external) satisfaction, you might try using the following five steps for effective measurement:

    1. Identify the process to study and improve: where it starts and where it ends.
    2. Confirm with the customer (internal or external) the key element of value the process yields. Sometimes this is obvious, but in some cases not so much. An accurate understanding of what the customer considers of real value is key to any improvement effort.
    3. Determine how long the process actually takes today. This number— in minutes, hours, days, or weeks, whichever is best suited to the process — is the TOTAL component of the ratio we will calculate in step 5. Some questions often arise at this step:
      • Should we collect “person hours” or elapsed time? Measure elapsed time. If you study and improve elapsed time, you increase customer satisfaction and quality as well as costs. Person hours spent on the work almost always decline when an organization focuses on elapsed time.
      • How precise do we need to be? It is valuable to get good data about the total time elapsed from start to finish, if only through a modest sample. Of course, there will be
        variation — and the variation can be quite substantial for some processes. Keep the raw data, and calculate the average TOTAL.
    4.  Determine which steps actually add value and how much time is spent on those. For a step to be considered to add value, it must:
      • Be directly related to what the customer values and would pay for (if they knew what we were doing)
      • Actually change something of value — the product, database, approval status, whatever, (inspecting something or moving something does not actually change the thing, so does not ‘add value’)
      • Do so for the first and only time. Fixing or reworking something does NOT add value, because it compensates for not being done completely or correctly the first time.
        Often these steps must be done today, because they compensate for an imperfection somewhere in the process. Correcting those imperfections is what will yield the improvements.

      What if we disagree about what is truly adding value? When categorizing work, aim to be as rigorous as possible about applying the criteria for value-added. If you mis-classify a non-value step as adding value, you will lose out on the opportunity to study and possibly eliminate all or part of it. But it is not a fatal mistake; you can always circle back. Once a group has eliminated a first round of waste, they are able to scrutinize what is left more rigorously and find a whole new round of opportunities that may well exceed the first round.

      How precise must we be about the amount of time the specific steps take? Knowledgeable approximations of the individual components that consume time are usually sufficient to
      produce really great improvements.

    5. Study the differences between the total time and the value adding time to identify and eliminate the root causes. Then calculate again. To calculate the ratio: if total time today is 55 hours and value adding time is 2 ½ hours, then the ratio would be either:
      • Total-to-Value: 55 divided by 2.5 = 22, which means that the organization spends 22
        hours for every 1 hour of value add, or
      • Value-To-Total: 2.5 divided by 55 = 4.5%, which means that 4.5% of total elapsed time
        is actually spent adding value.

      It doesn’t matter which you use, as long as you are consistent.

 

Continuous Improvement, Time Management

It’s About Time!

Our previous post focused on the value and importance of achieving “quick wins” when engaged in Continuous Improvement. Continuing with the theme of time, today’s post takes the concept of working on the right things to a different level,  and focuses on studying and more effectively using the most universal and, arguably, most valuable component of work and work processes: time.

When we are faced with the challenge of evaluating and improving a business, we have many metrics to choose from. We can ‘follow the money’ — study the spending: where does it go, how does it compare to previous periods or to competitors; we may look at market share or wallet share; we might measure revenue per employee or benchmark against the competition; or we might measure customer satisfaction or the customer experience.

But one of the most powerful measurements for helping to make breakthrough improvements is also one of the simplest: following where the time goes.

By determining how much time it takes to complete a cycle of value (i.e., building a widget, closing the books, making a sale, completing a project, etc.) and how much of that is truly adding value, an organization captures information that provides a motivating vision and road map for making improvements.

Key areas to study are: delays, over-processing, rework, transportation, and inspection; and using time as a measure to find and focus opportunities for improvement has three big advantages:

  1. time drives important business results
  2. time is universally applicable
  3. it is very simple to do — measuring time is something anyone can do!

Our next post will take a deeper-dive into the concept of measuring time, and will share some specific and proven methods for making improvements by studying the use of time.