LEAN in Education

Recently I was asked to provide some training with reference to the Lean Methodology devised by Toyota.

As part of the exercise I contextualised Lean's Seven Wastes or Muda for the post-16 education sector and thought it may be useful to include that here.

Waste 1
Transportation

Overview
Inappropriate transportation

Example
Overuse of peripatetic equipment, Legacy systems requiring paper transfer

Waste 2
Motion of People

Overview
Unnecessary movement of staff / students

Example
Lessons timetabled to require movement between buildings / campuses, F2F meetings off-site or at one end of campus, specialist resources away from main teaching areas.

Waste 3
Overproduction

Overview
Unnecessary use of paper, materials, striving for perfection over fit-for-purpose

Example
prospectus, course materials, minutes of meetings, production of presentations, figures, data and information

Waste 4
Irregular Processes

Overview
Misalignment of steps in processes

Example
Retesting due to misplaced results. Use of expensive consumables when cheaper alternatives are available. Expensive local Vs central reprographics. Misallocation of valuable and scarce resources i.e. not spending the money where it is needed

Waste 5
Inventory/stock

Overview
Uncontrolled inventory (too much/too little/in the wrong place) and/or excessive Work in Progress (WIP)

Example
Paper and materials stocks, printed materials, production of course materials too early - particularly in areas where current state of industry includes rapid developments and change

Waste 6
Defects/Errors

Overview
Procedural errors, missing data, lost items requiring duplication

Example
Lost assignments, rooms or equipment double booked, inappropriate access rights, innacurate data

Waste 7
Waiting and other time-related waste

Overview
Delays, Misaligned requirements/delivery

Example
Long process cycles, over-dependence on committees when speedy decisions needed, Bottlenecks

JISC Regional Support Centres

The last couple of weeks I've been doing the rounds of a few JISC Regional Support Centre "eFairs".

The RSCs, as they have come to be known, are a conduit between the JISC Advisory Services and learning providers, particularly in the FE, Adult and Work-Based Learning sectors.

They field queries and signpost providers to the appropriate service and they also host and administer a number of workshop activities that we deliver on their behalf.

Within each of the RSCs are a number of knowledgeable and skilled advisers who support use of technology in colleges and other providers in their region.

Many of them host an annual event where practitioners from the sector can meet, network, listen to experts amongst their peers, demonstrate what they have done, and learn what other support and resources might exist from the somewhat complex range of services that make up JISC.

This week I've been in Ipswich at Suffolk New College for the RSC Eastern region's eFair.

Together with colleagues from JISC Legal and JISC Digital Media, who together with my own service, JISC infoNet, come under the umbrella of JISC Advance, I ran a "Show and Tell" session throughout the day, talking to delegates and showing them some of the resources we have to offer the Sector.

It was good to talk to some of the other services and agencies working within the Sector as well, it being particularly nice to hear about our resources being used and promoted by others.

If you work in the UK post-16 education world and haven't come across your regional JISC RSC or other JISC Advance services then you can find out about them on this page from the JISC Advance website.

Business Impact Analysis

I had a query from a college friend the other day who said 'We have been advised by our IT Auditor that we need to complete a Business Impact Analysis to establish the criticality recovery priority of systems, the nature of risk to which they are exposed and the contingency measures to be implemented. We do have a Risk registers where we have been documented all IT Risks and its calculated control.'

I've commented before ("What is the Real Risk?" May 2009) that whilst we tend to be good at identifying risks we can easily look at them from a personal rather than an organisational point of view. If you identify the risk of tripping over a wire you think of the impact as injury rather than thinking of it as the amount of work not done and the consequences of that because someone is off on sick leave with a broken leg.

My answer was, 'It sounds as if they are wanting evidence that you have identified what impact the loss of individual systems would have on the organisation as a whole – which would then allow you to prioritise systems against each other so that if you lost more than one you would know which to bring back on line first.

'We tend to think of risk in terms of things like “email system goes down” but they are asking what would the impact of that be – what would be impossible and what delays would alternatives bring?

'E.g. – loss of all email communications sent from external contacts until situation resolved or external contacts advised to send via alternative methods leading to delays from known regular contacts and total loss from unknown, new or occasional sources. Internal communications needing to be routed through other means – telephone, internal post, introducing delays up to one day.'

To register these details can be time consuming and involve careful thought. The JISC infoNet Risk Management infoKit recommends describing risks with a sentence construction such as: "There is a risk that A, caused by B, will lead to C". "C" may be more than one consequence and may involve writing quite a bit of text!

Gaining the Trust of the SMT as an IT Manager

Yesterday I went to Manchester, having been called in at the last moment to substitute for a speaker who couldn't make it. The event was about Shared Services in Post-16 Education.

One of the comments made at the event was that senior management in colleges don't always make decisions based on sound knowledge of what technology is available and what it can do. But I had to wonder whether that was because senior managers simply didn't care (I don't think so!!!) or did they not trust the level or span of knowledge of their IT manager?

So it led me to follow that train of thought for a while and to start to identify how an IT manager should build that necesary trust if he or she wanted to be consulted as part of senior management decision making.

My own background contains several years as a Head of IT in a college and many more as manager of Management Information Systems. I was probably not the easiest of managers to handle as I constantly strove to improve systems for both SMT and users and that costs money and involves bending ears a lot. But I had the trust of the College Principals that I worked for.

Why? Because I demonstrated that I was keeping on top of new developments and had the good of the college close to my heart. Because I included within my remit (my decison - no one gave this to me) a responsibility to assess the background business processes of the college and I raised issues where I thought they could be improved.

Had I just sat and got on with running the IT team, making sure that systems were working and not trying to understand what others who used the systems were trying to do and how and why, I wouldn't have had the knowledge necessary to gain the trust of anyone outside my own team. And therefore, why should they ask my opinion on anything other than "We want this done, how long will it take?"

The job of an IT Manager should include the assessment of new technologies and I'm sure that 99% of IT Managers do this. But I wonder what percentage go to their senior management team and say "This technology is becoming available. These are the benefits it could bring us, here's what it would cost, here are the risks we would face and here's how we would have to change in order to exploit it."

Now if I was a senior manager in any organisation, that's the IT bod I'd want managing my IT department.

Evidence of Continued Impact of JISC infoNet Resources and Workshops

Shrewsbury College of Art & Technology have already provided a case study of evidence of impact following the training of their Senior Management Team and Middle Managers, on a series of workshops from JISC infoNet.

The workshops included Project Management, Process Review, Risk Management, Change Management, Information and email Management and Managing Multiple Projects in a Complex Environment. Donna Lucas, Head of Human Resources at Shrewsbury, has recently provided an update to this.

She says, “The management of projects here at the college has improved no end. For example we now employ a project management facilitator who works with teams to ensure that they are managing their projects within the disciplines and that individual projects are coordinated from a cross college point of view. We have recently committed to a re build of our engineering block, a 3 million pound project and that will be the first big test of our new approach. Add to this new disciplines for risk management and a range of identified change programmes and the sense of progress is really tangible.”

Details of the events available can be accessed from http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/events/workshops with the related online resources available from http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/infoKits.

Please note that workshops are only available to the Post-16 Education Sector in the UK.

To Plan B or Not To Plan B...

'I can't put a plan together, I wouldn't know where to start - I'm far happier just getting on with it...'

'It would be out of date as soon as we started working on it.'

'No one takes any notice of the plan anyway, they are all doing their own thing.'

Just some of the phrases I've heard as reasons for not producing a project plan. Of course plans change and of course this means producing another but let's put a few arguments forward for why you should.

I suppose the (almost) obvious one is that if you don't know how to plan, how can you 'get on with it'? Where do you start to get on with it? What do you do first? Isn't that the first thing that would go in a plan, then?

Plans fill a number of functions and are not necessarily just for the benefit of the project manager. They help others assess how well the project is doing against its targets, goals and objectives. Assuming it has any. I'm aware of a project recently that hadn't specified what the outputs would be other than that something would be 'better'. Of course the project manager claimed a success at the end of the project, but was it? There had been no plan so it was impossible to check whether tasks had been done. There were no stated tangible outcomes so it was impossible to check whether they had been achieved. The only outcome was that the process involved had to be 'better' but was that so because one or ten people thought it so? Had anyone checked to see whether anyone thought it wasn't better? Or worse?

If plans start out by listing all the things that must be done they can then be scheduled. Put in order. This can be essential if several or many people are involved and some tasks require other tasks to be completed before they can start.

Yes things will change and when they do everyone involved in delivering the project needs to know how it will affect them. So the plan has to be rehashed and the next version produced, circulated and the previous plan discarded.

The discarding of the previous plan needs to be formally dealt with. There has to be a way of knowing which version of the plan is current. Writing the words current or final version is stupid and meaningless because there is bound to come a time when they aren't. But the words will still be written on them!

So plans need version control. There will be draft plans being produced whilst previous versions are still current, so there needs to be a way of identifying a draft plan and an issed plan. There may be several iterations of a draft before it becomes an issue.

At JISC infoNet we use the following system. Each document has a suffix as the last part of the filename. d1a is a draft copy working towards issue 1 and is the first iteration. If I produce d1a and send it to someone else who changes it, they save it as d1b. Once agreed and issued it becomes version i1. If whilst everyone is working to version i1 another version becomes necessary, someone will produce draft copy d2a. That may go through iterations and amendments d2b, d2c etc. Until it becomes version i2 everyone still works to version i1.

If it is necessary to replan, then having the current working plan in front of us helps us to do that, because there is a list of all the things that need to be done and we can add new ones in the knowledge of where they are best placed and can predict how they will affect other tasks that still remain to be done. We can reschedule everyone's work (this being a draft copy until they have all agreed they are available at those times).

I had a long train journey yesterday and my second train was a little late into Birmingham meaning I missed my third train. Now if you were the train controller and your train was ten minutes late, how could you replan your journey without knowing when other trains were going to be crossing your track? In other words...from the current plan!

Self-Evaluating at Organisation Level

There are many reasons for undertaking a self-evaluation and many different ways to do it. Let's start with an evaluation undertaken by the organisation with a view to improving it, making it more effective or more efficient.

Evaluating or reviewing a process would usually call for some investigation at different levels within an organisation. How well does the process involved meet strategic objectives? Is it catered for in written strategy and thus adequately resourced, or does it meet a more localised need, being resourced internally by a team or department? Even so, does it then feature in that department's strategy and do senior management accept it as a necessary process so that the department receives adequate funding to include it?

Who are the end-users and participants in the process? How is the process governed, resourced, managed, delivered and monitored? Do people within the process understand why it exists, how it meets strategic drivers, have access to written guidelines, have a process for giving feedback, raising concerns, suggesting improvements and are these things adequately monitored and actioned?

A while ago I managed a project called Embedding Business & Community Engagement Through Business Process Improvement and Internal Engagement. The Embedding BCE project was only concerned with one (albeit wide-ranging) type of activity within FE and HE institutions. Yet the process of managing and delivering services under the umbrella of BCE meant that we had to engage with senior management, central co-ordinating units, core business process delivery teams such as HR, Finance, IT, Libraries, Estates/Facilities, Information Systems and Marketing and with practitioners from academic departments, research institutes and business units from all over the institution.

No one person could hope to know everything necessary to conduct a self-evaluation on their own.

The interview process in the Embedding BCE project gathered perceptions. The views put forward did not necessarily reflect the truth of the situation - as we got conflicting views and assertions from different people within the same process. But the point is that each interviewee thought it was the truth, or more properly the true situation, that they were giving us.

So a self-evaluation should aim to bring these different viewpoints together. After our interview process we staged a half-day workshop using a workbook that is downloadable from the link at the end of this entry.

The workbook contained around 25 questions. The workshop took around 5 hours. The intention was to stimulate some discussion by allowing these different perceptions to surface and be challenged by a small group of around 10-12 people representing all levels from SMT to Practitioner and from a range of teams and departments.

It identified quick wins where one department was doing something really well, where this could 'easily' now be communicated and replicated across the organisation. Although the workbook asked for scores against questions, this was again aimed at showing that some departments would score differently to others. Improved internal communications would benefit just about every organisation of 5+ staff!

In several cases the workshop discussions involved raised voices at some stage. But the managed conflict sparked ideas and suggestions that were quickly turned into a list of potential improvements or developments. It identified both strengths and weaknesses. It stimulated and inspired many participants. It bored a few.

It made me wary of results of surveys where a single person had completed the questions, or where perhaps several people have completed different sections from their own perception without any interaction. And it made me think that any system that attempts to score an organisation as a whole is going to both short-change good practice and perhaps paper over cracks at the same time. Even with a scoring system of only 1-4 we had arguments over whether a question should be scored 2.3 or 2.6 as the department who would have scored a 3 were reluctant to accept a score of 2! In most cases where these surveys are made public, there is no option to split scores.

Self-evaluating and then acting on the findings are essential to ensure widespread uptake of good practice and that external evaluations find consistency

The methodology and findings of the Embedding BCE project are published in the Embedding BCE infoKit on the JISC infoNet website. I can be contacted through JISC infoNet to help facilitate reviews or self-evaluation workshops of BCE in UK Further and Higher Education institutions if required.