Have you ever had that feeling that your office environment is somehow working against you instead of for you? Where people perhaps are devided by physical barriers such as many small offices, making it a tedious task to get an answer for a question or a signature for a document?
Or maybe you have had that feeling that some departments or teams in your company are just working supersmooth while others never seem to be able to reach the same level of progress - and you find it hard to figure out what exactly the problem is and how to express it?
Maybe you have also experienced that tasks have a tendency to be appointed to the same busy and maybe even stressed co-workers over and over, even though co-workers with less to do might seem like a better choice?
I first heard about Lean some years ago, however, I never got to sit down and learn about it until now. Physical office environment, takt and pitch, work balancing and kaizen are just some of the many Lean subjects and terms explained in "Value Stream Management for the Lean Office" by Tapping and Shuker, a hands-on book about using Toyota's Lean methodology in the office environment. It is 171 pages, fairly paced, written in an easy language, and covers the basics of Lean in an office context.
Although benchmarking, working in well-defined roles and processes in the value stream might have a negative sound to it, I would not hesitate to recommend to experiment with optimization through Lean Value Stream Management. It seems to me that many people in "creative" jobs have a tendency to see workflow analysis and the introduction of best practices as a threat to the way they work.
But working structured is by no means incompatible with working creatively. The prime motivator for Lean optimization is identification and elimination of waste. It's a big opportunity to eliminate tediuos and maybe even unnecessary tasks and ineffective processes that take up time that could be spent being creative. Tapping and Shuker introduces the Seven Deadly Wastes and their toxic effects. From my own experience, I totally agree to the effects, and that they can have a very negative effect on a company. Too much of it, and you'll end up with an underperforming company with customers taking their business elsewhere and / or employees leaving the company. So just get started! :-)
I think that Lean thinking could be a natural extension to existing project models and software development methologies. I searched the Internet and even found a white paper dicussing it in the context of software development.
Note: If you're using Microsoft Office Visio 2007 you'll find that is supports Lean State Map diagrams.