Job Instruction, Art or Science?

Recently I watched an interview about the Art vs. Science of writing Job Breakdown sheets. I am highly suspect of the Art vs. Science pitch when it comes to leadership consulting. Why? Because even the greatest artists practiced and perfected their brushstrokes before they painted their masterpiece. This tells me that with practice, perseverance and opportunity - anyone can learn.

What I learned from this interview is that writing Job Breakdown sheets is not necessarily a technically precise exercise, but is about combining words and concepts rearranging them into sequences that work for the learner, so that it is easy for the learner to capture and remember all of the important steps and key points of the job. That it doesn't really matter if it is a key point or an important step, but what is important is that we are figuring out a way to make the job digestible for the learner.

While this sounds nice, I couldn't disagree more.

It's funny, pretty much every interaction I've had with people on the shop floor evolves into a discussion around things like sequence of work, subtleties of the job, the nuances and history of the work which that person takes pride in. If I were to suggest that those subtleties are not subtle, or the sequence is out of order, or their history is fiction, I can guarantee a somewhat visceral reaction. After all, they have the experience of the value-add work, whereas I do not. All I can do is help them learn new skills, show them where we need to go and encourage them to make their value-add better.

I was recently trained by somebody on how to assemble a component of a product we make. After watching the person do the job, I tried it myself. When I started the job out of sequence, the person immediately corrected me, "Don't forget to grease your part first!" Clearly, this person wanted me to remember something important before I moved on. In this case, I can probably say that the Important Step is, "Grease Part".

Now let's use our experts example: what would happen if I arbitrarily decided to put the greasing step as a keypoint, and I put it as 3rd on the list because I think it may be easier for the person to remember the 3rd keypoint because there is a #3 on the grease tube? If I write that as a key point, what is the Important Step?
Is it the same? I probably don't need to explain to you how this example alone invalidates the argument that keypoints and important steps are interchangeable.

But that may not be enough...now lets go one step further: how would I know that they can't remember it as the first step? I must have had the experience of observing the person fumble through the steps in order to realize this problem and then subsequently rearrange the steps in order to move the 1st to the 3rd, or was it the 2nd? What is the likelihood that this unpreparedness would undermine the training effectiveness, if effective at all?

Oh, you test the breakdown sheet first. O.k., let's say it was tested first, but we can go deeper with the flaws of this approach. Now, three weeks later, a different trainer must train a new person using the same breakdown sheet with the 1st keypoint located in the 3rd, or may be the keypoint is now the Important Step. What is the likelihood that they will be confused when they see me grease the parts on the 1st step and then skip over it on the 3rd? What is the likelihood that I will even use the breakdown sheet since it really isn't accurate in the first place?

And further still...what happens when the two trainees talk to each other? How well will they communicate about this job? What problems can you imagine, in the context of your workplace? Now imagine how many key points you may have in your workplace? Is it 100? 1,000? 10,000? 100,000? More? How many people work with these keypoints? It doesn't take much math effort to explain how this turns into a nightmare probability problem  - which is the primary purpose for putting standards in place to begin with.

I was somewhat surprised to see Important Steps and Key Points treated this way. It is my contention that this muddled thinking is the primary reason why people have difficulty in training to begin with and subsequently, problem solving at higher levels.

I think what he was trying to say is that you want to give people the right amount of information, in the right sequence so that they remember the job easily. That I can agree with.

So, let me kindly remind everybody here about the anatomy of a Job Breakdown Sheet:

WHAT - Important Steps - Advance the work - this is the sequence of the steps. The sequence of work can be rearranged for kaizen, but not for training, that would sort of defeat the purpose of standard work.

HOW - Key points - things that could hurt a person, make or break the job, or make the work easier, a trick, or a knack for something. I suppose you could make a key point an important step, but an important step it does not make. Example: Safety - you can do any job in an unsafe manner, and still advance the work. Key points are HOW you advance the work.

WHY - Reasons for the key points. Don't you want to know why we do things this way? Don't you want to communicate these things to people so they do not take shortcuts? You may better understand how your work relates to individual progress, team goals and business growth objectives if you include this info on your breakdown sheet.

When it comes to art vs. science, Job Breakdown Sheets are mostly science and little art. Yes, you need to know how to approach people. Yes, you need to know how to work with people. These are artful skills needed in dealing with people, but those skills alone will not make you successful at building a continuous improvement culture and they are not to be confused with technical skills.

Lean Startup Machine Weekend - Mark's Turn

Here are some notes and thoughts from Mark Warren on our experience at the Lean Startup Machine Weekend in Boston:

This would be a good experience for people to try. I went as observer to LSM in California earlier in the year and thought this type of venue would be good for Bryan and I to try out our ideas on. Incidentally, other Lean Startup platforms, such as The Hoffman Foundation, are slightly different than LSM, but both Lean Startup formats push you to test your assumptions and pivot. As a an observer, I watched a lot of eager young people try the process: pitch your idea and watch it get shredded! Now we got to try our hand at it!

Most people will see the connection to the JM program…the biggest difference is pushing you to define your guesses in the early stages. The Startup team members encourage you to define your riskiest assumption and (in)validate it.  We found that our riskiest assumption was not necessarily easy to prove. Tom Eisenmann, one of the speakers at the weekend event proposed an improvement: rather than go after the riskiest assumption that must be true for your idea to work, you can rank them by weakest assumption and simplest to test. Often the best approach is to test the simplest assumptions first and save yourself time if it is disproved. 

The other biggest difference between the Startup method and what most people do for a JM or Kaizen project is the weekend project takes a more scientific process of testing one piece at a time, the trap of the Kaizen approach is to change the whole process…you don’t know which change was good or bad, just the sum of the outcomes. This aligns very well with the Teian style of improvement where big problems are broken down in to very small problems and tackled one need at a time.

The next piece was the experience bias…this can be linked to both JI and JR…we think we know so our investigation is skewed by our experience. We really had difficulty in stepping back far enough to get into discovery mode. On the JR side, developing the question sets to "get the facts" was more difficult than we realized, as in the first rounds we created leading questions to validate our assumptions. In the JR ‘getting the facts’, this may be exceptionally difficult if the person doing the fact finding has any involvement with the people in question…personal bias is often hidden.

Overall, the experience was good in the sense that we learned some approaches to prove or disprove our ideas and how to step away from our ideas and not see what we want to believe. It seems there are still some approaches to consider for the format to work really well, but it also has some strong features that make you step out of your comfort zone as well - which is a key point to learning.

Job Breakdown Sheets CardHacks - NZ Coaching Guide

More TWI CardHacks...the link takes you to the NZ Coaching Guide for Job Breakdown Sheets. The purpose of this Coaching Guide is to coach a supervisor in preparing a job breakdown sheet and in using the JBS. The guide is useful during the Job Instruction program deployment or as a follow-up guide.

One of the things that I'm not known for in my blog post is brevity. I like to think that is because I'm smart, but I'm pretty sure it has more to do with me learning how to write.

A curious thing about this Coaching Guide, the word "brevity" is used twice. Brevity means: "concise and exact use of words in writing or speech." I find it difficult to write about lean and TWI because there is so much content that spans management, technology, culture, etc. that I don't know how one can write about such a complicated topic with brevity.

Interestingly enough, the NZ coaching guides, appreciation programs and materials are several hundred pages in content - that is a lot to say about 4 step programs!

But what the TWI skill programs really address is human behavior, not 4 step cards. The cards are simply reminders of ways we can behave to get good results.

Coaching Guide #3

TWI CardHacks - Break down the Job

This week we dig into the next Get Ready point: Break Down the Job. Writing a job breakdown sheet (JBS) may seem simple and it is, after a few tries you get  better with pratice. Last week we posted CardHacks for creating timetables. Timetables, when done correctly, list the Job Breakdown Sheets along the top of the form. Once you see the workflow on the timetable it is time to get to work.

A few tips:

Stop thinking admin. Don't go into this thinking that the purpose is to replace your work instruction documents. Writing a document, or replacing one, is not the goal of the organization. The end result is that you dilute the effectiveness and purpose of Job Breakdown Sheets,

Don't write your JBS from behind a desk, go the genba with the person that knows the job better than anybody else. Better yet, write it with a team and compare notes,

Keep it simple. Important steps are best when they are verbs and nouns, or action+object. Don't get wordy, you already have work instructions.

Be open and ready to deal with people. If you have strong interpersonal skills, perhaps you are o.k. If not, it might help to familiarize yourself with the Job Relations skill. When you write Job Breakdown Sheets, you are likely going to find safety and quality problems that involve people. Writing a JBS, a ten minute step, is a small discovery phase in your lifetime lean journey. Discovery leads to commitment to improve. Be ready to take action!

Later this week, we will post some additional materials that support this important skill.

Job Breakdown Sheets vs. Work Instructions Part III

See Part I of this blog post series here and Part II here...

A common question I get at the TWI Blog is if Job Breakdown Sheets can replace Work Instructions in an audit.

Caveat: I can only speak to ISO 9001:2008 audit standards, not TS or AS standards. However, I can't imagine how the following reasoning would not apply there as well.

Essentially, the ISO standard is still one where you are obligated to "do what you say and say what you do." There is nothing in the standard in which format or content is pre-determined or mandated. Your documents are simply subject to other elements of the standard such as Control of Documents and Control of Records.

It is interesting to me when people get wrapped around the axle with this question. The problem has nothing to do with the standard and is born from the anxiety that comes with the notion that your current documentation probably stinks, is burdensome and avoided by the masses.

First of all, I find that a Job Breakdown Sheet is far easier to audit and people are more likely to be following the important steps, key points and elaborate on reasons why then they are with a long winded, convoluted work instruction. Plus, despite an organization's best effort to update every document two weeks prior to an audit, the work instructions are usually not 100% accurate. That is not to say that a JBS is ALWAYS accurate. In both cases, the problem of accuracy, completeness and timeliness is a people problem that is management's to solve. One other thing, you may need multiple JBS to cover a twenty-eight page work instruction. That's o.k. to do. Don't try to squeeze twenty-eight pages into seven steps. Also, don't create twenty-eight pages into forty-seven steps on an eleven page JBS. That's what we like to call, "reformatting".

Because of this transition anxiety, I used to think that having both documents is o.k., since most organizations are usually in a state of partial implementation when it comes to adopting JBS and JI. Unfortunately, with this approach, inertia can set in and stalling will occur all too often. Nowadays, I'm inclined to say that all new "how-to's" are done on a JBS and work instructions are to be replaced by the supervisors and experts of their respective processes - as soon as time allows.

The reasons for this are pretty straightforward and it will help you and your teams be successful on both audits and continuous improvement efforts: ownership and probabilities.

Teams that own their documentation are far more likely to use them as roadmaps, training aids, guiding lights, problem solving aids, etc., then if they do not own the documents. And because work instructions are normally begotten from the nether regions of an office - they stand little chance of being utilized in any useful manner. Usually, work instructions find themselves basking in the glory of sunlight only days ahead of the audit.

Job Breakdown Sheets, on the other hand, tend to be posted in an area, are dragged out during genba observations, easily used during refresh training on repeat orders, etc. And since they tend to more accurately represent the actual work done on a product or service, can be used in an audit.

The matter really comes down to one of practical use and the probability of said use. Work instructions, due to their often low accuracy, unwieldy nature, foreign terminology and origin, tend to have a low probability of creating confidence in users, supervisors and auditors.

Job Breakdown Sheets in the hands of the expert who knows the work better than anybody else - and under the guidance of a coach, then to have a higher probability of being accurate, timely, simple in nature (i.e., easy to use) and due to the local ownership - can be front and center in how work is done.

My stance has changed: get rid of your work instructions! (but make sure you have JBS in place first!)

Hidden Benefits of Job Instruction - Part 2

There are several basic things you do when practicing the skill of instruction:

1) Creating Timetables

2) Writing Job Breakdown Sheets

3) Readying the workplace with correct tools, materials, equipment, etc.

4) Organizing the workplace as it will be used,

5) Training using the 4 step method

6) Following up with people and adjusting plans

In Part II of Hidden Benefits, we ask the question: what is the primary purpose of Writing Job Breakdown Sheets? The primary reason is to organize our thoughts around training. Consider that Job Breakdown Sheets are for the trainer. Job Breakdown Sheets (or JBS) illustrate this in a simple way:

• The materials, tools and information needed to do the job,
• Important Steps, or, the orderly sequence of the job, 
• Keypoints of each Important Steps, or, the quality, safety and special knowledge about the step,
• Reasons for the Keypoints, or, the reason and logic behind why we do things a certain way,

But there are more benefits than organizing your thoughts. When used with a bias towards continuous improvement, questions asked when writing a Job Breakdown Sheets can lead us to habits and behaviors that are sometimes lacking in Lean implementations.

First Benefit to using JBS: What do you see?

JBS are very different than Work Instructions (or WI). See my post on JBS vs. WI for more details. For today, we will focus on one of the key differences: writing a good JBS forces you to go to the shop floor and observe the actual job. This sharpens your observation, questioning and coaching skills. In a past life, I wrote WI's behind an engineer's desk. I quickly discovered that going to the source and pulling information from the production system created a better WI. But even then, the effectiveness of the WI was diluted because of the length and depth of unnecessary details, flowery language and technical jargon. A JBS is concise, short and represents the actual work on the floor. When I learned about Job Instruction and started writing JBS, this alone enhanced my observation, questioning and coaching skills - without those objectives even being my intent...which leads me to the next hidden benefit:

Second Benefit to using JBS: Discovery and Connectivity Support the Business Strategy

A JBS can concisely and accurately represent safety, quality and productivity keypoints - or HOW things are done. In recent years, I've added a small check box column along the right side of the Reasons for the Keypoints:

✔ = Quality
$ = Cost
+ = Safety
↑ = Productivity

In this way, we can concretely illustrate how a keypoint contributes to (Q)uality, (C)ost, (S)afety, (P)roductivity. In lean transformations that focus on tool use, we struggle with linking the activities of people with meeting customer and company objectives related to QCSP. As a result, we create new tools such as Hoshin plans, X-chart Strategic Project Deployment, Leader Standard Work, etc. These management tools are designed to force lean tool use in the workplace. Unfortunately, the success rate of this push style lean transformation is quite low, and the degrees of separation between reconciling the improvement efforts of individuals and customer related goals and objectives is many.

When two people can see how work is directly connected to QCSP objectives we immediately clear the fog around what we are doing and what we should be working on. The pathways to improvement immediately shorten and degrees of separation to success are reduced to one.

I've sat through many, many hours of Hoshin planning realizing that the primary difficulty in doing so is trying to connect the dots between what people do to get results and what the expected results are to be. A JBS helps us make the connection within minutes: by directly observing the work, we are able to see how our work affects business objectives.

Third Benefit to writing JBS: Demonstrate a commitment to development of your people.

When you stop telling people to improve and starting working together with them, people see that there is a plan for them. JBS' are a great approach to deliberately practice working together. When they see that you are thinking about them and taking action, what do you suppose is going through their mind? For some they may feel uneasy. For others, they may be excited. A few may mutter, "It's about time!" If you follow through on your plan, in the long run the team will realize that we are in this together and for each other.

Summary: If you write JBS with others, you are modeling one of the high quality leadership behavior traits: mentoring and teaching. And doing this with others increases each person's emotional intelligence, working with others, resolving differences, testing assumptions, organizing actions, reflecting on results. We need tools to help us do what is required of us for the benefit of our team. A JBS is another deliberate method we can use to maximize the potential of our people.

In Part 3 of Hidden Benefits, we'll stress the importance of readying the workplace for instruction.