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stressed engineering's response time due to the time it took to hire and train
new people and the need to stretch experienced personnel beyond normal
expected limits.
This discussion in turn led to questions as to why people were leaving the
company. Analysis of the data from exit interviews found that the most com-
mon reason given was they didn't know what management's expectations of
them were in doing their job. The common phrase used was “thrown into the
fire, don't know what to do.” They had been hired to do a job, but then felt
they had received very little relevant training.
What is interesting is that this company did have a comprehensive formal
training program, but the people in the organization were indicating that
there was a disconnect between the training that was formally being given
and what they were being asked to do on real projects.
As a result, the company took a very innovative approach to increase their
process agility and align the processes and training with the real work peo-
ple were doing. One specific part of this effort became known as
pruning
the
processes.
2.8 Two Specific Examples to Increase Agility: Pruning
and Leaning
Pruning Overweight Processes to Improve Response Time
Because they had received the feedback from those leaving the company
indicating people had difficulty understanding management's expectations
of them on the job, the company initiated an effort to build flow diagrams of
what people really did to complete the real work they were being asked to
do. Then they annotated these diagrams with the process assets
6
the people
said they really used to do their job. These were not theoretical diagrams;
they were built based on what people said they did every day to get their job
done. Anything that didn't end up on a flow diagram was a candidate for
elimination. These diagrams were followed up with further questions:
• If no one used something, why was it there?
• Were we wasting time training people on the use of certain process assets?
6. By “process asset” I mean any artifact that supports people in carrying out their jobs, such as a template
or guide.
