It is a fantastic feeling when a piece of the jigsaw falls into place and suddenly an important part of the bigger picture emerges. Feelings of confusion, anxiety and threat dissipate and are replaced by a sense of insight, calm and opportunitity.
Improvement Science is about 80% subjective and 20% objective: more cultural than technical – but the technical parts are necessary. Processes obey the Laws of Physics – and unlike the Laws of People these not open to appeal or repeal. So when an essential piece of process physics is missing the picture is incomplete and confusion reigns.
One piece of the process physics jigsaw is JIT (Just-In-Time) and process improvement zealots rant on about JIT as if it were some sort of Holy Grail of Improvement Science. JIT means what you need arrives just when you need it – which implies that there is no waiting of it-for-you or you-for-it. JIT is an important output of an improved process; it is not an input! The danger of confusing output with input is that we may then try to use delivery time as a mangement metric rather than a performance metric – and if we do that we get ourselves into a lot of trouble. Delivery time targets are often set and enforced and to a large extent fail to achieve their intention because of this confusion. To understand how to achieve JIT requires more pieces of the process physics jigsaw. The piece that goes next to JIT is labelled WIP (Work In Progress) which is the number of jobs that are somewhere between starting and finishing. JIT is achieved when WIP is low enough to provide the process with just the right amount of resilience to absorb inevitable variation; and WIP is a more useful management metric than JIT for many reasons (which for brevity I will not explain here). Monitoring WIP enables a process manager to become more proactive because changes in WIP can signal a future problem with JIT – giving enough warning to do something. However, although JIT and WIP are necessary they are not sufficient – we need a third piece of the jigsaw to allow us to design our process to deliver the JIT performance we want. This third piece is called LIP (Load-In-Progress) and is the parameter needed to plan and schedule the right capacity at the right place and the right time to achieve the required WIP and JIT. Together these three pieces provide the stepping stones on the path to Productivity Improvement Planning (PIP) that is the combination of QI (Quality Improvement) and CI (Cost Improvement).
So if we want our PIP then we need to know our LIP and WIP to get the JIT. Reddit? Geddit?