Lean Six Sigma often evokes the image of a war room of sorts: a physical space with whiteboards, sticky notes, and a group of practitioners huddled over a Value Stream Map. There has been a shift of sorts in the workplace, and subsequently these sorts of spaces are falling out of fashion. Our workforces are a mix of home offices, co-working spaces, and asynchronous contributions taking place across different time zones. While our physical locations might differ, the core of Lean, of delivering maximum value with minimum waste, hasn’t changed.

The challenge of the modern era is how we practice our Lean governance. How do we minimize the Eight Wastes and discipline of Lean without the benefit of in-person oversight? Decentralized environments risk process drift, where silos develop their own ways of working. Let’s find out how to minimize that.

The Decentralization Paradox

Decentralization offers some tangible benefits for any organization, like access to a global talent pool and increased employee autonomy. That said, it creates some problems in workflow management. Lean thrives on things like standardization and transparency, which contrasts heavily with the opacity and variance that remote work seems to encourage. Without a physical shop to conduct Gemba walks, the waste being produced becomes invisible.

Waste in remote workplaces can take the form of digital overproduction, with excessive virtual meetings, redundant documentation, and other actions that simply don’t add value to the final deliverable. Given the asynchronous nature of the global workforce, hand-offs can have substantial delays. You’ll also be waiting for approvals, or any sort of communication, depending on how vital certain members of your team are to production.

There is also just the simple fact that doing any sort of work digitally requires a fair amount of cognitive load, with dozens of browser tabs, apps, and production platforms necessary just to complete a single task. As such, the primary means of Lean governance for your organization will not be Command and Control. You’ll want to promote the likes of Standardize and Empower.

Redefining Gemba

In Lean, Gemba is where the work happens. In a decentralized workforce, you will not have a central factory floor to walk. As such, the Gemba is the digital infrastructure in use by your workforce. If you’re wanting to have more effective Lean governance, the digital workspaces need to be transparent so the flow of work is more easily observed.

Gemba walks are replaced by audits. You aren’t micromanaging, but simply looking over the flow of a project and its reflective value throughout the workplace with project management tools. Leaders need to keep an eye out for bottlenecks throughout these digital workspaces. If tasks are piling up at a specific stage or certain phases require more rework, changes are needed.

Leaders need to observe the actual path of work versus the idealized conditions. You can’t identify bottlenecks without inspecting where your employees are working. This is an observation-based approach for any sort of remote status updates and helps identify the Eight Wastes in a digital Gemba.

Asynchronous Standardization and Visual Management

Standardization is the foundation of Lean. For physical spaces, standards are often upheld by proximity and social cues. In decentralized workforces, the Standard Operating Procedure needs to be more than just a static document, but a visual guide meant to guide the work.

Visual management for the decentralized workforce uses digital Kanban boards, tools like Trello if you will, to act as a single source of truth. Lean governance in this context ensures that every decentralized node can see the current state of a process with a glance. When your board is out of balance, like if a department is exceeding its Work-in-Progress limit, you have a visual means of seeing where flow stalls.

By limiting the WIP for any department, organizations focus on finishing rather than starting, which turns out to be one of the most effective means of Lean governance for a decentralized workforce with no constant check-ins.

PDCA Cycle in Governance

Lean governance isn’t a rigid framework, but rather one which iterates upon the institutional knowledge gathered throughout working. By applying the PDCA, or Plan-Do-Check-Act, cycle, leadership remains flexible to remote working conditions.

• Plan: Establish the standard for a decentralized process with expected lead times.
• Do: Execute the work within the decentralized framework.
• Check: Regularly audit the flow. Is your team meeting standards? Where are the bottlenecks?
• Act: Adjust standards based on what you observe from your audits.

Your team is able to take on a higher level of autonomy while upholding the operational standards for process stability. If lead times spike, this triggers a virtual Kaizen, or a brief, focused intervention to discover the root cause and adjust the standard as needed.

Communication as a Value Stream

Communication is the largest source of waste for any decentralized team. Overcommunication leads to information overload, while minimal communication results in defects. As such, you’ll want to apply the 5S principles to your digital communication expectations:

1. Sort: Eliminate unnecessary notification triggers and redundant tools.
2. Set in Order: Designate specific homes for information, like specific channels on a company Teams or Slack.
3. Shine: Regularly prune old files and archived channels to maintain an organized, searchable workspace.
4. Standardize: Establish clear protocols for when to use synchronous (voice or video calls) and asynchronous (text) communications.
5. Sustain: Build a culture where your team enforces these standards on its own.

Building Quality at the Source

Jidoka is the practice of stopping a process the moment is detected to prevent waste entering the downstream. For remote Lean governance, you’ll want to practice Human Jidoka.

Governance is most effective when distributed. By empowering individuals to stop the line when they detect a defect or recognize a lack of clarity, you prevent waste from building up. This requires a culture built around high-trust, with stopping the flow recognized as a service to the team rather than a delay.

You want to provide the tools and permission for employees to fix problems as they occur, instead of waiting around for a central authority to notice the issue.

Kaizen from the Edges

We get the most information on process waste from the front-line employees doing the work. In a decentralized workspace, these insights are often distributed across multiple time zones.

As such, your Lean governance needs to practice decentralized Kaizen. You need to create a simple, digital way for employees to suggest process improvements. When a small change in a remote workflow results in a reduction in lead time, that needs to be standardized across the entire organization. This turns every home office and co-working space into a workshop for efficiency.

Flow Over Friction

Adapting your Lean governance for a decentralized workforce requires a significant shift. You aren’t observing people, but the flow of work from point to point.

As organizations continue to grow more distributed, those who rely on more rigid frameworks for quality control will see their competitive edge erode through Hidden Factories sprouting up in the form of digital waste. Conversely, organizations that embrace digital transparency, visual management, and decentralized accountability will find that the decentralized workspace is an opportunity for unmatched efficiency.

Conclusion

The goal of Lean governance is to create a frictionless, transparent system that functions at high levels of efficiency with minimum intervention, regardless of where your team is located. By focusing on the flow of value and the elimination of waste, you can build a decentralized organization is high-performance and sustainable. You’ll want to do this through keen visual management, digital transparency for bottlenecks, and standardization of digital tools and communication protocols. These aren’t huge shifts in how you work. With the right level of focus, you can get to work implementing these today.