that cannot be traced back to incompetence and/or corruption.
All waste flows from one well;
the lack of accountability to meaningful standards
of conduct and competence, in public service.
You are challenged to suggest even one other source.
Monday, January 07, 2008
There Is No Waste In Any Level of Government
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This is from wikipedia, from the definition for Muda, a Japanese Continuous Improvement term. So Educators should be intimately knowledgeable of this stuff.
"A process consumes resources and waste occurs when more resources are consumed than are necessary to produce the goods or provide the service that the customer actually wants"
From this, i might derive that if the product was "Every APS kid graduating with college worthy diplomas by the time they are 19", we have serious Muda in the APS edumacating process..
However, we must not forget Mura and Muri, lack of equity and overburdened employees. the Wiki article says it well: "whilst they are focused on getting their process under control they do not give enough time to process improvement by redesign"
So I will add Resistance to Inevitable Change by Stakeholders as waste. Does that fit into either incompetence or corruption, Ched?
Resistance to change, imho, is a weakness that makes some people incompetent to hold certain responsibilities; like being able to enable productive and positive change.
"whilst they are focused on getting their process under control they do not give enough time to process improvement by redesign"
or, "When you're up to your ass in alligators, it is difficult to focus on the goal of draining the swamp." unk
Types of Waste
Henry Ford had a "Lean" philosophy that is popular among continuous improvement circles, apparently. Here is the Lean list of Waste:
1) Overproduction
2) Waiting, time in queue
3) Transportation
4) Non-value-adding processes
5) Inventory
6) Motion
7) Costs of quality: scrap, rework and inspection
APs has waste in almost all of these areas. Overproduction would be educating people from other counties, and we did help with Katrina refugees, was that overproduction? Or if we serve an illegal immigrant kid who is here becasue their parents are here, is that overproduction of diploma-having kids?
This is a problem throughout APS - waiting for someone to make a decision and free up some funding so you can fix the problem you identified.
APS is cleverly helped by state Law - Bus Contractors are covered by New Mexico Public Schools Insurance Authority, even though APS itself does not participate in NMPSIA and is self-insured. They don't pay for auto insurance, they get indemnified by NMPSIA. This may be good or bad, depending on how the contractors are being paid.
Non-valuw added processes - a hard concept to get your head around, but think of every screwup you ever carried in a work situation, and that is the human personification of a non-value added process. A good for nothing process. In this case, whatever APS spends money on that is not helping to make graduate widgets, who each has their individualised widget education plan.
Anyone who is 19 and never got thier diploma is excess inventory that never got finished. Perfectly good humans who never got the shiny seal and the high school diploma it should have been attached to.
Motion in education is omnipresent, we are continuously improving, hence the motion, nes ce pas? But seriously, excess movement by staff like wrong-minded initiatives and infighting is rampant, and could be considered the unwanted vibration of the educational factory. I would classify Gil Lovato's inane screwball activities as "uneeded motion" that set APS back a while.
Scrap and rework of what were supposed to be productive, well informed, graduates, hm? Look inside a prison. Look inside loony bins and morgues. That is the cost of human scrap.
APS could be way leaner.
I still don't think I found a way to defeat your premise that all waste is from either incompetence or corruption, though.
This is Total Quality Management's Fourteen Points, more focused on increasing quality than reducing waste per se, but very related to what we have been discussing here.
-----------(American Society for Quality Definition)
A core concept in implementing TQM is Deming’s 14 points, a set of management practices to help companies increase their quality and productivity:
Create constancy of purpose for improving products and services.
Adopt the new philosophy.
Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality.
End the practice of awarding business on price alone; instead, minimize total cost by working with a single supplier.
Improve constantly and forever every process for planning, production and service.
Institute training on the job.
Adopt and institute leadership.
Drive out fear.
Break down barriers between staff areas.
Eliminate slogans, exhortations and targets for the workforce.
Eliminate numerical quotas for the workforce and numerical goals for management.
Remove barriers that rob people of pride of workmanship, and eliminate the annual rating or merit system.
Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement for everyone.
Put everybody in the company to work accomplishing the transformation.
---------------end of definition
I'll expand these points on my blog, but I see some major room for, well, continuous improvement just by glancing at this list. As it should be, the philosophy itself says the game of improving never ends. I find that comforting, and similar to the APS "Lifetime Learner" and "Character Pillar" concepts I was taught as an APS student and employee.
I wish they would just follow the philosophies that they preach and fund. If they are going to have an administrator in charge of continuous improvement, we should be seeing incremental change for the better. I am not seeing that.
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