This week, I had the pleasure to facilitate a Lean Basics class to an audience of brilliant people that work with healthcare organizations every day to help those organizations improve clinical processes through the use of technology.  During the class, they raised some great questions about the basics of Lean that are worth repeating.

We spent time discussing the importance of standard work as an enabler for process improvement. A key teaching point is that the documentation of the steps to perform an activity is the foundation for improving the process.  A common concern is that "standardization" of the steps to perform an activity drives away innovation and is not suitable for the nature of work performed in clinical settings.   I found a great article on Standard Work by Mark Graban that seeks to address this concern.

http://www.leanblog.org/2010/02/my-thoughts-on-standardized-work/

Incidentally, Mark's blog is a worthwhile daily read.

Another topic we discussed was value stream mapping.  For people that want to learn more about value stream mapping, I recommend an excellent video on value stream mapping from Karen Martin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YJYMLaV9Uw

Yet another topic was the concept of daily management - in essence, establishing a cadence for paying attention to the critical few metrics that we can use to make "course corrections".  Here is a nice presentation on daily management:

http://asq.org/conferences/six-sigma/2009/pdf/proceedings/g5.pdf