There is a trend in Business Process Management towards Lean. If we think of Lean, then we also think about the Toyota Production System, or TPS. The TPS is about production flow – producing with the same tact as the customer buys, eliminating waste, process synchronization, process standardization and reducing the error rate. The TPS has been very successful; therefore there is a temptation to try to utilize it in the area of business processes. I am not against it. But when we come to knowledge work, I am against it. It just won’t work.
Of course, eliminating waste is a good thing. But how do we eliminate waste? Can we eliminate waste by standardizing processes and disallow everything else in knowledge work? No! If this was so, then what would knowledge work be all about? It is about making intelligent and informed decisions.
Toyota obviously produces cars. I once specified a production information system for a car manufacturer for a new car plant in the Far East. It was not Toyota. I’m only saying this, that you believe me that I know how cars are produced.
It is absolutely clear, that the persons, that plan the production process in a car plant and the persons that execute it, are different persons. There are even several levels of planning. For example the production plant layout must be planned. The production flow must be planned – i.e. which tact times will be executed for each production line. The production program must be planned – i.e. which cars are produced when and in which sequence. And the production supply must be planned – i.e. which parts are delivered to which assembly line – in which sequence. All this is planned by persons that are different persons than the person that executes the production.
The challenge for the planning is to make it as predictable as possible. It is using a stopwatch to determine the average duration of a work unit, and the statistical deviation. It is predicting the market demand as good as possible. It is exploding the whole bill of material for a car that is planned to be produced. It is synchronizing processes by imposing tact on the assembly lines.
Now imagine someone using a stopwatch to determine how long you need to read a page of a document. Of course this is an extreme example, but this ridiculous situation makes it clear, why the TPS can’t work for knowledge work. Also there is no bill of material for knowledge work. If we want to produce a car we know which components we need, and which parts for the components. We already know which suppliers will give us which component. That is because the car design is finished before the production planning even starts. In knowledge work, the design decisions are done together with the work. There is no a priori bill of material.
These are fundamental differences between discrete manufacturing, especially line production and knowledge work. We should not use fins for mountain climbing because they have proven successful in the sea.
In the next post I will discuss why tact does contradict irreducible complexity – a law of nature that we often find in knowledge work – and how goal driven and reducing waste relate to each other.