Manage, the Kaizen Way!
Contents
1. focus should not be on the product as such but on the quality delivered to the consumer and you should aim to add to that quality and value through constant improvement Here are some keywords to keep in mind as you start trying kaizen at work adaptability teamwork active feedback and suggestion system attention to details proactive problem solving open sharing of information cross functional orientation and most important the use of intellect rather than money Kaizen in Action Kaizen can be applied to the technical communication function at various levels at the management level team or group level and individual level If you are a freelance writer or an army of one as I like to call it then the activities at all three levels might apply to you because you are the writer and the manager as well For the group activities you could try involving the members of some of the writers groups that you may belong too or peers at the client side Let us have a look at kaizen in action at various levels Management oriented kaizen To managers kaizen would mean two things to improve themselves and to improve the business functional unit that they are managing So if you are a manager handling a technical communication team you will first have to look at kaizen in your own work How can you improve your management skills Read books attend workshops interact with your team have frequent one on ones to find out how the w2. straighten things up Identify and discard all unnecessary items including papers and documents that have been lying untouched on your desk for ages Analyze and eliminate needless tools and procedures Clear up pending workloads Basically get rid of all things that you do not want to have around when you start afresh Seiton Put things in order In other words get organized Put things where they belong so that you can find them quickly when they are needed Also put in a little effort to stock your table with some commonly needed things Just give a thought to how much time we waste every day searching for papers pens and tape Get yourself some stationery and stack it neatly in an accessible area Once you start you are sure to find a lot of areas that need organizing addresses appointments notes and whatnot and various long forgotten gear like the organizer to do list and pen holder will resurface While you are at it organize the folders in your hard drive also I know how often we tend to just dump files in the My Documents folder without a second thought Use this opportunity to organize the files in your computer into meaningfully named folders so that they are findable Seiso Clean up When you were young your mom was at your back needling you to clean your room Now I am telling you the same thing A clean workplace is a pleasure to work in Moreover your workplace reflects on your attitude toward work In fact it is
3. the first thing your clients notice when they search for clues to judge you by It is worth paying attention to cleaning up your workplace If you can beautify it too Add a vase of flowers a nice painting a motivational poster a reminder of the five step framework whatever you like Seiketsu Personal cleanliness Very important Dress well to work You are likely to feel chirpier and more energetic Going deeper I would say personal cleanliness also means coming to work with a clear mind ready to face the challenges of the day ahead Shitsuke Discipline Where there are procedures rules standards or manuals to be followed follow them Do not devise workarounds Standards are meant to be followed otherwise why would they be there in the first place Of course it is also important that the rules standards and procedures are constantly fine tuned to changing times Antiquated rules can only force discipline they cannot earn it Nonetheless even if there is nobody to impose discipline upon you it helps to be self disciplined because it introduces a certain order into your life and helps you cope with certain mundane yet indispensable tasks like mowing the lawn every week It is Kaizen Time Folks That is kaizen as I know it I first read about the concept while in college when writing a course paper on improving management in manufacturing plants Later when I started out freelancing it dawned on me that there was nobody
4. to oversee me I was my own manager I had to fall back on every ounce of management wisdom that I had to organize myself to meet my deadlines and to turn out excellent work Above all this I had to keep improving my work constantly to avoid falling into the devil s snare of doing the same work in the same way again and again till burn out time That is when I experimented with the kaizen concepts that I learned from Masaaki Imai s book It was a simple no fuss technique more like a habit that I could weave into my work culture And it worked like a charm You will believe me only when you try it firsthand so please do Suggested reading Imai Masaaki Kaizen The Key to Japan s Competitive Success Singapore McGraw Hill International Editions Management Series 1991 Janani Gopalakrishnan is a freelance writer columnist and editor She works out of her home office in Chennai India and writes on a variety of subjects ranging from science to philosophy Somewhere in that spectrum lie her favorite subjects technology management cuisine and life She invites readers to send observations about this article or kaizen to her at gjanani gmail com
5. Manage the Kaizen Way By Janani Gopalakrishnan First published in Intercom Society for Technical Communication in June 2006 Be not afraid of growing slowly be afraid only of standing still Chinese Proverb Here is a simple thought If something remains unchanging then it is not alive Think Even with no effort on your part you keep changing You grow older you grow taller you grow fatter Go out of town for a week and when you return the lawn needs mowing You cannot help it change is inevitable In the absence of any effort on your part though the change may not necessarily be good that flab on your tummy is unwanted so is the overgrown grass in your garden What is the way out You can let these things happen and then take drastic measures go for electronic slimming or such fast track options hire a gardener raze the lawn and cement the front yard Or like the Japanese you can opt for continuous improvement jog every morning include more veggies in your diet and constantly weave a few such healthy habits into your lifestyle mow the lawn every week plant a few flowering shrubs paint the fence and keep improving your garden in small ways That is what kaizen is all about The Japanese phrase kaizen means continuous improvement and is based on the belief that every aspect of life deserves to be improved Kaizen as a management philosophy is so deep seated in the thoughts and processes of Japanese managers
6. as Pareto diagrams fishbone diagrams histograms control charts scatter diagrams and check sheets and graphs These are common problem solving tools and you will find loads of material about them on the World Wide Web so I will not go into the details Here let us look at two distinct kaizen tools that I think are extremely relevant to improving our work as technical communicators Three MU checklist of kaizen activities Muda Muri and Muva This checklist urges to you to remove muda waste muri strain and muva discrepancy in various areas such as goals manpower technology methods time facilities tools materials and way of thinking Make posters proclaiming these three keywords in bold letters and put them up all around your workplace so that you are constantly reminded of the tasks Analyze your processes identify any unnecessary tasks that you keep repeating unnecessarily and eliminate them If you re straining to do something that can be done in an easier way simplify Identify areas where discrepancies arise develop standards Avoid muda muri and muva in every aspect of work Five step kaizen movement Seiri Seiton Seiso Seiketsu and Shitsuke I learned these five words only because they sounded nice and musical but today they are an inseparable part of my work culture Check out how to build kaizen into your work with the five step framework Seiri Straighten up The first step toward improvement is to
7. me Try to arrange activities to keep them involved interested and busy Help them build a small library arrange workshops for improving their skills upload some quizzes on your intranet so that they can test their skills when they are free involve them and let them decide how they would want to spend their free time Similarly think of various little ways in which you can improve the working of your team Try to arrange cross functional interactions Your writers would certainly like to interact with the developers and maybe even the end user training team As a manager you can arrange such things easily Also it is important to make relevant information accessible to all team members because informed employees get things right the first time Focus on building a management culture amenable to kaizen emphasize training and education foster creativity support group activities recognize and reward effort and interact with team members without inhibition It is also paramount that you take a humanistic approach to let employees pursue their personal goals and social lives even as you instill discipline On the whole for a manager kaizen would manifest as improving self system and spirits Team or group oriented kaizen Continuous improvement requires putting heads together Small group activities are an indispensable part of kaizen These are basically informal groups within your team or cross functional groups involving peo
8. ple from different teams where the members come together voluntarily to work for a specific purpose or to improve a specific area Their goal may be to identify and solve problems make decisions give suggestions devise techniques for quality improvement brainstorm or simply to learn something together Such activities promote teamwork boost morale act as a bridge between management and the teams help develop new skills and foster talent and encourage team members to solve their own problems thereby freeing managers time Not one but many reasons for top management to support such activities Small group activities go beyond the clich d Quality Control Circles they take many forms Here are some you could try e No error movements Form a group committed to doing away with errors Develop standards and style sheets work out systems for playback of data to their source for validation for example before writing a manual prepare notes based on the information collected from the developers and play it back to them by e mail for a quick fact check prepare memory cards with common abbreviations and symbols for easy reference and so on Basically meet on a regular basis and think of why errors occur and ways to avoid them e Mini think tanks You could form brainstorming groups Put your heads together and think about things that can be improved and ways to improve them solutions to problems faced by the team and so on e St
9. riters feel about your management style and so on Then look at ways to improve your team As a manager you should first understand that your main goal is not improved economics but improved morale Of course your efforts should also go into improving systems processes and productivity but your main task is to keep up your team s morale You will realize that when spirits are high other benefits follow Motivated employees work better best of all they even solve problems on their own proactively without coming to you Naomi Yamaki former president of Mitsubishi Space Software has beautifully explained the manager worker relationship in kaizen culture In the revised manager worker distinction the worker is supposed to plan do and control and management is charged with motivating workers for higher productivity Therefore it is time to ask yourself whether the writers on your team are happy Are they putting in their best efforts How can you motivate them to keep improving How do you keep up their morale Here is an example When you see any of your team members sitting idle they may be taking a break or they may not have any work at the moment let s admit it there are times like that what crosses your mind Do you feel disgusted that anybody would want to while away their time or do you try to look at the situation from their point of view Why have they not been motivated to make better use of their free ti
10. t is simple and inexpensive and aims to use brain rather than financial brawn to make gradual improvements In any organization or business unit it is better to adopt a balanced approach to innovation and kaizen Innovation cannot happen every day mainly because it would involve a considerable investment of effort and money Kaizen on the other hand can happen daily In today s competitive environment an organization cannot remain complacent even for the short time between one innovation and the next It has to keep improving every day which means it needs to go the kaizen way In this article I aim to introduce the fundamental concepts of kaizen and how they can be applied at the management group and individual levels to keep improving the morale and productivity of a team of technical writers Kaizen Fundamentals Let us take a brief look at the basic aspects of kaizen and understand them in the light of writing before we look at kaizen in action First kaizen is a universal concept that involves everybody in an organization from the top management to each employee It holds that for results to be improved the processes should be improved and who can improve the processes better than those who handle them day in and day out Therefore ultimately kaizen becomes a people oriented management concept wherein the team members themselves voluntarily work toward constant improvement Second kaizen is quality oriented It advoca
11. taken in turns by the team members Individual oriented kaizen On the individual level kaizen involves developing a positive attitude toward change and making efforts to improve your own work On a broader level it manifests as the suggestion system where managers welcome feedback and act on it All team members should keep their eyes open and suggest ways to improve work environment quality processes and customer relations and to eliminate errors waste and inefficiency Identifying and solving problems are important kaizen activities Basically instead of shying away from problems you learn to face them Look at all those who receive your work as internal customers and make sure that you do not burden them with carried over problems Resolve never to pass on a problem to the next process In fact kaizen goes a step further than solving problems It recommends warusa kagen where you identify not just problems but even those little anomalies that are not really problems but are imperfect nonetheless Kaizen also requires that you develop pride in what you do because in the absence of pride continuous improvement is not even remotely possible Relate your work to the value delivered to the customer As you write every word think of the end user who will read it And as kaizen recommends ask yourself if you are proud enough to buy what you build Kaizen Tools There are umpteen tools for kaizen including statistical tools such
12. tes continuous improvement of quality at all levels not product quality alone but total quality of work employees training processes standards and so forth Third kaizen is competition oriented In kaizen thought understanding competition is an important factor for improvement When you are concerned only with achieving an end there is hardly any motivation to improve but when you want to excel and do something better than others then positive change becomes a way of life Have you ever tried procuring the user manuals and marketing communications of competing products analyzing them in detail and then writing your own manual with the goal of writing a better one If not you should because healthy competition is an indispensable part of kaizen Fourth kaizen 1s customer oriented In order to make kaizen a habit you first need to understand what your goal is Is it to write fast to use all the latest tools to include amazing graphics in your brochure All these are worthy aims but none of them qualifies as the ultimate goal according to kaizen thought Kaizen believes in Market in Product out That is the user s manual you are writing should not be your focus rather the customer should be While writing every word and designing every page of that manual you should keep the reader in mind You may use exemplary vocabulary will the user understand You may use the latest software to design the cover will the user know The
13. that most of the time they do not even recognize it as a special technique While kaizen has become more popular in the area of manufacturing management I think it applies beautifully to technical communications as well because there is no denying that as writers we are all producing something for our target audience In fact writing is a very complex profession We are offering a service producing a product and creating a work of art all at the same time As technical writers we go through a rigorous cycle of research writing and editing and our work at each of these stages needs to be efficiently managed and constantly improved Whether you are an army of one like me or one of a team of technical communicators it is worth your while to read what kaizen is all about and how it can be applied to improve writing and the writer Introducing Kaizen Managing anything processes resources activities or whatever involves two tasks maintenance and improvement First you try to maintain the status quo and then you try to progress beyond it This progress can happen in two ways through large scale innovation that is giving your system a major makeover e g deploying a Business Process Management solution or through kaizen While large scale innovation would involve huge investments and radical reengineering of existing processes kaizen aims at taking small steps toward improvement Unlike innovation kaizen is not dramatic I
14. udy circles These are pretty common in the writing community Groups meet to learn about and discuss topics on the agenda Often such groups may also arrange formal workshops or training sessions e Peer review groups Such groups are another trend in technical communication departments where colleagues help review each others work e Open house groups People interested in learning can come together and invite experts to every group meeting so that the members of the group can interact with them and learn from their experience e Reading groups A group can discuss and exchange interesting reading materials like books tutorials brochures research papers and links to Web sites Some Japanese plants have a kaizen corner and kaizen men A kaizen corner is an area that is loaded with resources and tools for kaizen You could set up a kaizen room and furnish some books on subjects like effective communication writing marketing and management dictionaries style manuals tutorials on commonly used tools and reading material about the kinds of products you document You could also set up a computer that runs quizzes or short presentations on relevant subjects so that those who are interested can spend a few useful moments now and then Kaizen men are employees who are entrusted with the task of deliberately looking for areas to be improved Their regular workloads are reduced slightly so that they can spend time on kaizen This role can be
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