I take note of Mike Preece’s comments (CM, February, Letters) about time – and, by implication, many other resources – being wasted at the end of a project because of a failure to get things right to start with.
I am employed in local government looking after housing maintenance and half the demand placed upon us is due to failure to do something right the first time, which leads to all kinds of additional costs and effort to fix it afterwards.
At the end of 2005 our housing service, together with our service delivery agent HBS, started to implement ‘Systems Thinking’ – the methodology that has enabled Toyota to produce cars quicker, cheaper and to a higher quality standard than its leading rivals.
In essence, the technique is to ask: what does the customer need and how can we structure our service to provide it? This is in stark contrast to the usual local authority system of providing the service that the politicians and council officers think best and then effectively telling its customers to take it or leave it (in other words, Henry Ford’s ‘any colour as long as it’s black’ rule).
The results so far have been amazing – and we still have much to do. The most important feature is that everyone is working together to drive out waste, reduce costs and improve the service we provide. I find it hard to understand now why anyone would not want to do this.
Derek Beaumont, MSc CEng MICE MCIOB
Source
Construction Manager
