Updates to Original TWI Job Instruction Materials

In response to a previous post about the TWI Archive materials, Anonymous asks:

"Do you know if anyone has edited the old material and updated it to be more relevant for use today?"

Answer: Yes. Almost everyone I know, that delivers JI, has updated it to meet modern criteria. The most common edits are:

Job Instruction

1) PC'ing the materials so that it isn't so male dominated.

Personal rant: I personally think this is not necessary, as you wouldn't use the word "she" or "her" to mean "he" or "him". That doesn't make any sense. The counter-argument then: what is the difference? It is simply confusing for me. Anyway, my understanding is that the word "he" is considered to be gender-neutral in writing, much like the word "mankind" is - a shortcut to writing out the full phrase "human-kind". But, most managers today will give you the hairy eyeball if the material is not PC'd. This is probably the most tedious, yet easiest, of updates.

2) Change "war on axis" language to "war on waste". This is true for all of the materials.

3) Almost all trainers that I know have updated the material so that in the first JI session, a discussion on four objectives of any organization is included. The four objectives are of course - Quality, Cost, Delivery and Safety. It is arguable to include others, such as Morale, but how many modern objectives we can include isn't the point of the discussion. The point is to ensure that people see these four objectives first because they are built into every single JBS sheet they will ever write - the JI keypoints are composed of all of these objectives. One can then argue successfully that other objectives, such as morale will naturally be met as a result of meeting the four primary objectives.

4) A big change in my delivery is a discussion on standard work. I also change the methods used in how to achieve standard work. However, as other trainers are screaming heresy!, I have to say that I do not deliver this change until the participants and management have been through the original sessions as intended. It is only then that we change how we create JBS to support standard work.

With that said, save for the war era and non-pc language, the original materials can more or less be used as is today.