Eliminating Non Value Added Work

Non value-added work comes in two types. The first type of non value-added work is work that is created when something doesn’t occur in the way we intended it to. It is unintentional work but it is still work.

Because “process” is a convenient and popular way to talk about the work an organization does we can approach this problem by identifying the causes of work that exist by process (from the IPAPI perspective any form of process definition works).

But how do we do that?

It turns out that there are three things we can identify in a process that will enable us to uncover the causes of work existing within it. These three things are Moments of Truth, Break Points and Business Rules.

Moments of Truth exist any time a customer touches a process or a process touches a customer. Break Points occur anywhere a hand-off of any kind occurs in a process and Business Rules are the explicit and implied rules of the process that form or influence the behavior of the process. We call moments of truth, break points and business rules Process Diagnostics.

Each and every one of these Process Diagnostics is a cause of work. Why? Because at every Moment of Truth, Break Point and Business Rule there will be things that go wrong – what we call a deviation from the intended or designed process state. And no matter how many times we engineer and reengineer these causes of work they still have deviations. That’s because we can’t engineer flawless processes: the very act of trying to do so (fixing affects) makes our processes more and more complicated...

And it also introduces more causes of work!