Lessons from Assembly Lines to Enhance Productivity in the World of Knowledge Work

Lean manufacturing was a revolution in production and knowledge work has a lot to learn from these principles. For instance, when someone works on an assembly line they are required to focus on their primary task. They don’t have to waste time figuring out how to accomplish their task and they don’t have others constantly sending them emails with additional obligations; though this is the primary responsibility of many knowledge workers. We don’t want to make knowledge work into an assembly line but we could borrow concepts.

Here are some related quotes from an article on knowledge work:

• Before the lean revolution, it was not unusual for plants to dedicate staff to hand-carry “special” jobs through the production line. But expediting is like a narcotic — the more you use it, the more you need it. When a piece of work is expedited, all the other WIP tasks are deprioritized. Eventually, those tasks will be so late that they also will require expediting, creating a vicious cycle.
• talented employees — particularly those in innovation-focused environments — have a knack for continually pushing more new ideas into an organization than it’s equipped to process.
• there was an obvious lack of common prioritization: Nobody was aware of every project, there was little consensus about which ones mattered most, and many projects overlapped or competed with others

To implement Lean processes in knowledge work we first need to define the workflow path for all key processes. For your work, there are likely many primary processes that are defined and followed but there are a lot of other processes that are not defined. You can identify many of these in your inbox or IM system. If there are tasks that are important for the business and they need to be done often then this is a process worth defining. There may also be processes that are vaguely defined that would benefit from being defined more.

Once you define the processes, make a process flow diagram. Focus your attention on the ones that are not defined or there is variability in the flow.

Next week we will refine the processes by reviewing the connection of the individuals in the process.

Here is a video that shows an example of the assembly line work I used to do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1okF4VP4vNc