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Double Your Speed

Most People Wonder, How Can We Work Any Faster? 

Everyone is already working as hard as they can. The secret is simple: change your point of view. If you look at a typical process, it looks like this:

Secret: Become the order going through the process. When you want to double your speed, shift your focus away from people and activities. When you do, you'll begin to realize that while the people are busy, the order is idle 90% of the time. From the point of view of the order, the process looks more like this:

Your speed is largely determined by the arrows, not the boxes. When you examine the delay in each of these arrows, you'll often find that one or two arrows account for over half of the delay. Using root cause analysis, you can determine ways to prevent the delay and double your speed without making anyone work any harder.

Another cause of delay is rework. You spend a lot of time fixing things that were broken by an upstream process. Using this filter, the process looks like this:

One or two of the rework loops will account for over half the rework. Find ways to mistake-proof the process that created the defects and you'll be on your way to doubling your speed.

To double your speed, simply shift your focus:

• from activities to arrows
• from the whole process to just the rework loops

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