Timeboxed Lean

Timeboxed Lean is the name for one of our preferred approaches to business improvement. It brings together some of our key techniques, namely:

• • facilitated workshops;
  • quantified business improvements;
  • the use of short periods (timeboxes) in which to deliver business improvements;
  • an iterative approach; and
  • knowledge transfer, enabling continuous improvement.

“Lean”, or “Lean Manufacturing”, is a management methodology that is dedicated to improving business processes by reducing the amount of non-value-added (or “waste”) activity within them. It originated at Toyota in the 1950s and recently it has been modified successfully for use in service and administrative businesses.

Lean emphasises the need to document the current state in order to establish a baseline against which improvements can be measured. This process highlights the scope of potential improvement by of the business and to identifying waste activities – i.e. those that reduce competitive advantage. Once a baseline view of the business has been obtained, the Lean approach directs the improvement to reduce the amount of waste. The process is re-designed and a new set of measures agreed. The new process is adopted within the organisation and the measures tracked, ensuring the process improvements can be quantified.

Agilier builds upon the Lean methodology by using tried-and-tested techniques from other disciplines.

We use facilitated workshops at the start of the engagement to allow the stakeholders to map the current and proposed future state of the business. By comparing the current and future states, the stakeholders are able to produce a list of actions, which, when prioritised, lead to a series of activities. We run the largest of these as projects in their own right. The smaller-scale activities we run as Timeboxed Events (TBEs).

These TBEs are seven-week activities, during which we mentor the stakeholders to allow them to perform the following:

• establishing KPI in the current process;
• improving the process by reducing waste;
• delivering the new process through the organisation;
• ensuring the new process is sustained; and
• substantiation of the improvement.

At Agilier, we have the knowledge to make your business process improvement programme work – we have recently demonstrated savings of over £180,000 at one of our clients during one seven-week TBE.

Contact us to learn more about how we have helped our clients increase efficiency by reducing costs or to identify spare capacity.