Improvement has two measures: cost and value. It is common for
'managers' to see improvement in terms of reduced costs and for
'professionals' to see improvement in terms of increased value, ie
Improvement means
- reduced
financial costs
for bureaucrats & politicians, and
- reduced
operating costs easier -> better -> less rework,
intervention, supervision
- reduced
losses (knowledge, skills, identity, arrangements...
retained)
- better
value (quality & quantity of outcomes)
for
the professionals & recipients.
It would is easy to assume these
are mutually exclusive. However, given the prevailing models of
schooling, this assumption is patently false!! Quality (based
on the work of Deming et al) provides a proven framework for resolving
this apparent contradiction.
Implications
- With 'fixed incomes'
schools need to achieve cost savings in order to make needed improvements
elsewhere
- Unless a process is
working perfectly at no effort it will be possible to make it easier
and better
- People want to do a good
job so they will reinvest much of any resources they have available
- Change is disruptive and
competes with what is already happening
- For all all the above
reasons it is wise to make things easier first and to minimise changes to
(new) processes
For schools (and many other organizations that operate on
relatively fixed costs) the top priority in any change and
improvement process must be to make it easier
for people to do well and have fun. Making it easier reduces costs
(particularly time and effort) and releases resources for further
improvement in the same or other processes so that increased value will
be achieved. Thus improvement means any contribution to
- making it easier for the right tasks (actions) to be done
well
- by the right people at the right time
(early may be
better than late but on-time is best of all)
- and that the doing will be fun
Very significant reductions in direct and indirect costs and
increases in value can be achieved by making things easier first with almost
no sense of change.
Learning from problems and failures in order to make things
easier & better next time is a key (see cost of
quality). Reducing variation in the way things are done (attention to
processes) and making it easier for people to know what is happening are two
simple ways of getting big improvement with little change.
Warning !!!
Being helpful is quite often the opposite to
improvement. Tampering
adds to the variation by changing the process
itself which can be fatal to the outcomes.
Improvement is achieved
through attention to existing processes (cf
Change)
Implications
-
Minimise
the
cultural tendency to Change
-
Apply
Deming's
Imperatives
-
Avoid
Deming's
Obstacles
-
Do
not contract any of Deming's Deadly Diseases
-
Assign
responsibility
for the process to a real team
-
Be
clear about the purposes of the
process: establish criteria
-
Establish
the capacity of the process to
deliver the the outcomes required
-
Change
the process (who does what, when) only if
necessary
-
Monitor
the
process in action
-
Carry
out post mortems and learn from them - prevent future
failures
-
Continue
to improve the process through PDSA
-
Go
to 1
The scales used on the graphs are more
spectacular than is usually valid: although we, at RPS, have achieved gains of this order.
Example 1. At RPS we have almost eliminated
litter on the Oval (down by approx 98%) and
playground duty is no effort. We reduced the
work for the Groundsman. We now have several
fewer bins to empty & maintain, …
The strategy was more improvement than change.
What is the difference? We involved the
children; we made it easy for them to do what
needed to be done. We didn't require them to do
anything new. Just a small adjustment to where
they can have food clearly indicated by 'yellow lines'. Change to something new
comes from outside. Improvement involves the
people in the system. It is easy to forget the
children. In end of year reviews the children reported that they valued the
improvement (including the yellow lines).
Example 2. We prepare for midyear
reporting in a matter of minutes each
year. The process is well specified. It is updated
for the following year as soon as each year's
midyear reporting is completed. Because of our
culture, staff and families closely monitor the
process in action. and so the post mortems are
comprehensive and well supported. Indeed the
process includes a comprehensive post mortem
agenda. The tools (including data gathering
devices, report forms, student communication
books, ... ) all aim to make the tasks easier so
that reporting is less disruptive to the
school's main purposes, viz, teaching and
learning.
Example 3. Early in each teaching/reporting period the
school provides each teacher with their class lists which have the
reporting criteria across the top, in report order. This makes
the collection of data easier: teachers don't have to create their
own sheets. The only difference is who produces these sheets. The
big improvements are
- the many hours saved by the teachers it would all the teachers
to produce their own sheets
- less errors since they are made only once
- the ease with which additional record sheets can be acquire
(just ask or click and print)
- More confident teachers: they know they have the correct
criteria..
- the sheets are available earlier than most teachers would have
prepared them
- all teachers have the same information and working
arrangements thus all are equally responsible, less errors and
fewer oversights and excuses (information makes people
responsible)
- it is easy to translate the final data to the reports because
of the order of items
- this support makes it explicit that the school holds the
teacher's work with children to be more important than creating
record sheets
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