Lean - The Planned Office
Whether you have too much work or not enough, the problem is created by not having the right amount of resource to do the work on hand. You do not have a credible plan to make sure that the right people are at work at the right time.
A Planned Office does something about this by understanding more about the volumes of work arriving and working out how many people are needed to get the work done on time.
The Planned Office has a Resource Plan that attempts to match the amount of work needed to be done to the people at work to get the work done. A Resource Plan tries to balance resource with demand.
Failing to plan means you are planning to fail
Let’s start with the demand put on the office. This is simply the number of tasks expected to be completed multiplied by the time it takes.
Demand = Number of tasks X time to do one task
In the vast majority of offices, resource means people
Resource = Number of hours in office X Normal work rate
And as long as this exactly matches the expected work coming into the office then you don’t have anything to worry about. You can confidently predict that
- the work will be done on time,
- staff will have enough time to do the job properly
- so quality should be good
- and because there is just enough work to keep people occupied, costs will be minimised.
Unfortunately, the real world is not like that. It is extremely rare that the demand on an office exactly matches the resource day after day. You now need to do something to change either demand or resource so that they match as closely as possible
Usually when you try to match resource to demand, you will look at re-organising the resource to match demand. Why? Because you have more control over resource than you do demand
In a planned office:-
- everybody is aware of the amount of work that is expected to be done
- everybody plays a part in making sure that the right number of people turn up for work
- everybody agrees to take holidays to minimise disruption
- everybody knows that unplanned short term absence makes work harder for those who do turn up
- everybody has enough time to get the job done properly
- everybody has enough work to keep them busy, but not too busy
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