Lean Perspectives: Standard Work
In Lean design and construction, standardizing work processes is essential for driving continuous improvement. By implementing standardized procedures across a project or organization, inefficiencies and inconsistencies become easier to identify, ultimately creating a more efficient workflow that maximizes value.
To explore the impact of work standardization in design and construction, we spoke with Virginia Cosgriff and Erica Kegler from McGough Construction. They shared valuable insights into how their company leverages work standardization and why it is a powerful Lean tool.
Standard Work: A Lean Perspective from McGough Construction
1. What makes standardized work so important in design and construction?
Both localized standards and standardizing processes across an organization in design and construction is especially important due to the high stakes and variability of the work. As a result of having standard work available, we can help decrease the time and brainpower spent trying to establish the best way to do something, and instead provide opportunities for our people to utilize their talents most effectively.
2. How does McGough approach work standardization?
Work standardization is included in our annual business planning goals. When a need or opportunity for standard work is identified by any office, sector, or internal department in the company, it is managed dependent upon priority and team availability. From there, we schedule working sessions to create the guideline of the process visually, and then add more detailed and supporting documents such as templates, forms, and standards. It’s exciting to be at a point in our journey where individual teams and departments are seeing value and requesting help to create standards where they are missing.
3. How did you begin the process of standardizing work?
We had been on our Lean journey for about six years prior to really diving into standard work. We feel this helped build a basic understanding and acceptance with employees around lean principles. We started focusing on doing single areas of improvement that didn’t seem to stick. Most of the reason for that was because we didn’t have a standard to be improving from. Standard work is the “current best way” to do the work, which helps us actually see the consistent and sustainable improvement, and not having standards meant that we were not seeing sustained results and people went back to the way they were used to.
From there, our leadership helped identify 15 high-level project operation processes that occur from pursuit to closeout to start documenting first. In order to gain trust in the process, we began mapping the process for each (with those who do the work!) to show that all projects go through these, and you cannot use the “each building is different” excuse. These high-level maps are now known as our “guidelines” that have some non-negotiable steps in them. Over 150 people helped create these initial maps and subsequent documents that are attached to them.
Additionally, we have standards for our standard work system so that we are able to keep up the system much easier, and people can trust that they have the right documents. Each process and document has the following: Owner, Trigger, Purpose, and Update Date. Every document is updated at least once a year, separate from the single-improvement ideas that come in from teams.
4. What are some examples that you can share of how standardized work has improved a process or product?
One of the original reasons we started our standard work journey was after hearing feedback from a client that had three similar projects with McGough but received three different experiences. As a result, our initial overarching work effort focused on standardizing how projects were managed. Over the past five years we have been building behaviors with our project teams to look for and utilize standardized work, which has improved the overall level of consistency in how we deliver projects. Having standards in operations has resulted in decreased major risks on our projects, increased consistency of quality and transparency of warranty issues, and protection of our profit margins.
Another recent example has been the benefit we’ve gained from standardizing our hiring and onboarding process. This has been extremely helpful in streamlining communication and correct information from the Talent Acquisition team to the Hiring Manager and throughout our internal support services. Previously, our IT department often took extra steps correcting and verifying information and ultimately still left their work crunched for time. Through the standardizing process we were able to improve how information was gathered and verified and then more critically identify the trigger and timing for IT’s involvement.
Additionally, this process helps Hiring Managers understand their role in preparing for a new employee’s first day and first few weeks with the company. Since culture is such a huge component for McGough, improving our process to provide a consistent and welcoming experience from day one has been really important to us.
5. What are some challenges you continue to face at McGough with regards to work standardization?
Our largest challenge has been keeping up with our business growth as we’ve incorporated new technology, new offices, and new business sectors. The introduction of new offices and sectors has challenged us to decide how we incorporate new processes within our existing footprint, and how to make our guidelines broad enough to work for all while still providing enough direction when different. As a company, it has also been challenging to support just-in-time training efforts on significant standard work changes or additions.
6. What is your advice for teams and organizations looking to standardize their processes and systems?
Get people engaged with standard work early and often. The people doing the work know the work the best, so they should be the ones creating and owning the standards. Involving people in this work, as opposed to forcing a standard upon them, is the biggest thing you can do to increase engagement.
7. Do you have any other thoughts on standard work that you’d like to share?
Even after you have standards, the hard part is ensuring that they are being used and improved as time goes on. Leaders are the key to supporting and coaching the standards, especially when we want to “focus on the process” as an organization, not “who did what wrong”. People do not choose to do a bad job, the process fails them and we need to figure out how to improve the process when something goes wrong.