This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Sarah’s Story
Most people go into work every day and are confronted with a long list of crises that require immediate attention. Consider the story of Sarah who is an administrative assistant in a department in a large, urban, private university. Please note that Sarah has not read this book—yet. So she comes to work every day only to be greeted by a long to-do list of mini crises that are boring and repetitive. Sound familiar?
The mini crises include answering the same old questions from faculty and students, week after week after week:
- What room is my class in?
- Does the computer in room 312 work?
- What are my professor’s office hours?
- Are the copies I need for class (and requested only 5 minutes ago) ready? Blah, blah, blah.
These crises prevent Sarah from doing her “real” work, which keeps piling up. It is frustrating and depressing. If you ask Sarah what her job is, she will say: “I do whatever has to be done to get through the day without a major disaster.”
No one is telling Sarah she cannot improve her processes so that she doesn’t have to answer the same questions over and over again. In fact, her bosses would rather her not focus on answering the same old questions and instead prefer her to work on projects that actually add value. The problem is not that she doesn’t want to improve her processes; the problem is that she doesn’t know how.
Then one day somehow the stars align and Sarah finds a copy of our book on her desk, so she reads it. She starts to apply some of the principles of the book to her job and to her life, and guess what? Things begin to change for the better.
For example, instead of having people call her to see what room their class is in she employs something that she learns in the book called change concepts, which are approaches to change that have been found to be useful in developing solutions that lead to improvements in processes. In this case, she uses a change concept related to automation and sends out a daily autogenerated email to all students and staff to let them know what room their classes are located in. Utilizing the change concept eliminates the annoying calls she used to receive to see what room classes are in.
Can you identify with Sarah? Do you want to learn tools and methods that will help you transform your job, your organization, and your life? The upcoming chapters take you on that journey, the journey of process improvement.
Before we go through the structure of the book, it is important for you to understand some key fundamental principles. These are principles that you need to understand as a prerequisite to reading this book and are principles you need to keep referring back to if you want to transform your job (to the extent management allows you to do it), your organization (if it is under your control), and your life through process improvement.
A young violinist in New York City asks a stranger on the street how to get to Carnegie Hall; the stranger’s reply is, “Practice, practice, practice.” The same thing applies to process improvement. The only way you get better at it is through practice, practice, practice, and it starts with the nine principles outlined in this chapter.