Lean - The Focused Office

In a Focused Office, we want to make sure that everybody who works in the office or visits the office is absolutely clear what the office is there to do. Once everybody knows what they are really at work to do, it becomes much easier to decide what needs to happen to do that job well and to do that job better.

We can then look at everything that happens in the office and ask ourselves the question

“Is this what I am really here to do?”

If the answer is “yes” and what you are doing is actually directly useful for your customer then do more of it.

If the answer is “no” and you are not actually doing anything useful for your customer, then you should either stop doing it or devote less time to it.

If you stop doing useless things you can spend more time doing useful things. If you spend more time doing useful things, you will please your customer and the office will improve. This is a “good thing”.

The purpose of the Focused Office is to do something for your customer

No matter what type of organisation you work for, there are only three things that matter to a customer.

1. Is it what I wanted …… or is the QUALITY right?
   
   
2. Did it happen when I expected …… or was the DELIVERY right?
   
   
3. Have I paid a fair price …… or was the COST right?

A Focused Office cares deeply about the Quality, Delivery & Cost of what it does.

Because the Focused Office cares so much about these three factors, it never improves one of them at the expense of either of the remaining two.

In a Focused Office

• it is obvious what the office does; it does something that a customer wants
• it is obvious how well the office is doing; you monitor Quality Delivery and Cost
• it is obvious who is doing useful work; let’s do more of this
• it is obvious who is doing useless work; let’s do less of this