Posts Tagged: Lean

What We Can Learn about Process Improvement from Two Old White Guys

Last weekend, I was thinking about my undergraduate days when I took a lot of philosophy courses at a small Catholic liberal arts college. I remember the classical Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle approaching reality from two different yet complementary angles. At the risk of overgeneralizing, Plato believed that reality existed in ideas from whichRead… Read more »

Refactoring Success

“I don’t know how much more emphasized step 1 of refactoring could be: don’t touch anything that doesn’t have coverage. Otherwise, you’re not refactoring; you’re just changing shit.” – Hamlet D’Arcy It’s no secret that Agile and Lean methodologies have a lot in common. At Code for America we try to apply them both: inRead… Read more »

Utilize Lean Principles To Improve Government

As a certified yellow belt in Six Sigma, I believe that Six Sigma methods can have a positive impact on improving government. However, Six Sigma with its heavy emphasis on statistical analysis is not the best fit for measuring and improving government performance. A better fit for government is to utilize the concept of Lean.Read… Read more »

Why Government Should Not Go Lean

Just after I posted “Business Process Management As If People Mattered: Adaptive Case Management” the latest issue of the Harvard Business Review downloaded to my Color Nook. This was a special issue devoted to talent management and so I flipped through it pretty quickly until I came across “Lean Knowledge Work” (Staats and Upton, OctoberRead… Read more »

Top Five Government Lean Six Sigma Challenges

Workplaces in the private sector and the public sector have many similarities. After all, objectives need to be met and daily work needs to get accomplished. Through our experience with business process management we have identified five major differences between sectors: The Election Cycle Term Limits Legislative Controls Human Resources Structures Revenue is usually notRead… Read more »

Lean Six Sigma in Government is an Effective Strategy

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) has provided government agencies with great opportunities to spend money on their local projects. The President’s new initiatives also require accountability. With these new expectations in place, it would not be prudent to spend the funds wildly. However, as is often the case, the funds will only existRead… Read more »