One of the quickest and easiest ways to kill an improvement initiative stone dead is to label it as a “cost improvement program” or C.I.P.
Everyone knows that the biggest single contributor to cost is salaries.
So cost reduction means head count reduction which mean people lose their jobs and their livelihood.
Who is going to sign up to that?
It would be like turkeys voting for Xmas.
There must be a better approach?
Yes. There is.
Over the last few weeks, groups of curious skeptics have experienced the immediate impact of systems engineering theory, techniques and tools in a health care context.
They experienced queues, delays and chaos evaporate in front of their eyes … and it cost nothing to achieve. No extra resources. No extra capacity. No extra cash.
Their reaction was “surprise and delight”.
But … it also exposed a problem. An undiscussable problem.
Queues and chaos require expensive resources to manage.
We call them triagers, progress-chasers, and fire-fighters. And when the queues and chaos evaporate then their jobs do too.
The problem is that the very people who are needed to make the change happen are the ones who become surplus-to-requirement as a result of the change.
So change does not happen.
It would like turkeys voting for Xmas.
The way around this impasse is to anticipate the effect and to proactively plan to re-invest the resource that is released. And to re-invest it doing a more interesting and more worthwhile jobs than queue-and-chaos management.
One opportunity for re-investment is called time-buffering which is an effective way to improve resilience to variation, especially in an unscheduled care context.
Another opportunity for re-investment is tail-gunning the chronic backlogs until they are down to a safe and sensible size.
And many complain that they do not have time to learn about improvement because they are too busy managing the current chaos.
So, another opportunity for re-investment is training – oneself first and then others.
R.I.P. C.I.P.