For many years, lean initiatives have generated staggering improvements on the shop floor. Currently, however, many managers and business leaders want these lean benefits incorporated into non-traditional environments such as service and transactions. This bookshows you how to efficiently translate and transition lean manufacturing principles into the office. In Flow in the Office, Carlos Venegas confirms that the competitive advantage will go to those who manage information and knowledge most effectively and efficiently. It is not enough to be a lean manufacturer - you need to be a lean business, and that includes your back office, your front office, and your corner office. The author translates the language of Lean Manufacturing into the language of Lean Office Flow, bringing bits, bytes, and conversations into the concrete world of process improvement.

For many years, lean initiatives have generated staggering improvements on the shop floor. Currently, however, many managers and business leaders want these lean benefits incorporated into non-traditional environments such as service and transactions. This bookshows you how to efficiently translate and transition lean manufacturing principles into the office. In Flow in the Office, Carlos Venegas confirms that the competitive advantage will go to those who manage information and knowledge most effectively and efficiently. It is not enough to be a lean manufacturer - you need to be a lean business, and that includes your back office, your front office, and your corner office. The author translates the language of Lean Manufacturing into the language of Lean Office Flow, bringing bits, bytes, and conversations into the concrete world of process improvement.

Struggling to apply Lean effectively in your office environment? Office Lean is a book for anyone who wants to apply Lean better in contexts where the work is both intangible and complex. it explains in simple terms, what Lean is -- and what Lean isn’t -- enabling office professionals to understand how it can be successfully applied to their complex office-based work environments. Contrary to popular opinion, Lean is not only for mass manufacturing or healthcare. It applies just as much to the digital world of "knowledge work" industries such as banking and financial services, software development, and government. But the fundamental concepts, straight from the factory floor, need a fair amount of translation to be effectively applied in cube farms. Overturning the common perception that Lean is about imposing rigid rules, or simply eliminating waste in the name of "efficiency", Eakin presents Lean as a dynamic, flexible, people-centric philosophy that delivers outstanding business results by improving employee engagement and customer experience. Office Lean helps Lean practitioners (leaders/managers and coaches/consultants) working in professional office environments access the amazing, transformative results Lean can bring to their specific domains. It combines clear explanations of the core concepts of the Lean philosophy with relevant, practical examples from the fields of accounting, finance, insurance, IT and government.

Operational Excellence is achieved when all employees in your organization can see the flow of value to your customers and can make adjustments to that flow before it breaks down. Operational Excellence in Your Office: A Guide to Achieving Autonomous Value Stream Flow with Lean Techniques presents nine time-tested guidelines for designing business process flow that enable Operational Excellence in the office. Each chapter describes one guideline by using text, illustrations, and practical examples to provide a comprehensive understanding of why creating flow in the office is essential and how to achieve it. Accounting for the reality that most office employees are required to work on many different projects throughout the day, this book details a step-by-step methodology for leveraging traditional value stream flow to establish Operational Excellence in an office environment. In addition, it describes a more advanced form of flow called "self-healing" flow—in which employees are capable of identifying and fixing problems with the flow without requiring management intervention. Explaining how to achieve Operational Excellence and self-healing flow with the nine guidelines, the book also introduces new concepts such as part-time continuous flow processing cells, workflow cycles, takt capability, integration events, pitch in the office, and ways to tell whether your office is on time. With this book, you will be able to take the knowledge provided and immediately apply it by following the step-by-step checklists included at the end of each chapter. In addition to the lists of action items for implementing each guideline, the book includes "acid tests" you can use to determine if you have implemented each guideline correctly. When finished, you will have designed an end-to-end flow for the services in your office as well as visual systems to help employees distinguish normal flow from abnormal flow so they can fix flow problems on their own, before they negatively impact your customers.

Software development today is embracing events and streaming data, which optimizes not only how technology interacts but also how businesses integrate with one another to meet customer needs. This phenomenon, called flow, consists of patterns and standards that determine which activity and related data is communicated between parties over the internet. This book explores critical implications of that evolution: What happens when events and data streams help you discover new activity sources to enhance existing businesses or drive new markets? What technologies and architectural patterns can position your company for opportunities enabled by flow? James Urquhart, global field CTO at VMware, guides enterprise architects, software developers, and product managers through the process. Learn the benefits of flow dynamics when businesses, governments, and other institutions integrate via events and data streams Understand the value chain for flow integration through Wardley mapping visualization and promise theory modeling Walk through basic concepts behind today's event-driven systems marketplace Learn how today's integration patterns will influence the real-time events flow in the future Explore why companies should architect and build software today to take advantage of flow in coming years

Information Technology time management expert Dominica DeGrandis, the reveals the real crime of the century--time theft, one of the most costly factors impacting enterprises in their day-to-day operations. The solution to preventing these value stream delays? Make the work visible. In this timely book (title not final), solutions and preventative measures are illustrated and methodologies outlined for immediate application into daily work.

Flow can be defined as the experience of being fully engaged with the task at hand, unburdened by outside concerns or worries. Flow is an enjoyable state of effortless attention, complete absorption, and focussed energy. The pivotal role of flow in fostering good performance and high productivity led psychologists to study the features and outcomes of this experience in the workplace, in order to ascertain the impact of flow on individual and organizational well-being, and to identify strategies to increase the workers’ opportunities for flow in job tasks. This ground-breaking new collection is the first book to provide a comprehensive understanding of flow in the workplace that includes a contribution from the founding father of flow research, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. On a conceptual level, this book clarifies the features and structure of flow experience; and provides research-based evidence of how flow can be measured in the workplace on an empirical level, as well as exploring how it impacts on motivation, productivity, and well-being. By virtue of its rigorous but also practical approach, the book represents a useful tool for both scientists and practitioners. The collection addresses a number of key issues, including: Core components of how the idea of flow differs from experience in the work context Organizational and task-related conditions fostering flow at work How flow can be measured in the workplace The organizational and personal implications of flow The relationship between task features and flow opportunities at work Featuring contributions from some of the most active researchers in the field, Flow at Work: Measurement and Implications is an important book in an emerging field of study. The concept of flow has enormous implications for organizations as well as the individual, and this volume will be of interest to all students and researchers in organizational/occupational psychology and positive psychology, as well as practitioners and consultants with an interest in employee motivation and well-being.