You’ll notice a theme beginning to appear in these blogs – we like to keep things simple.

Our view is that there are only three type of role in an organisation (though someone’s job may actually be made up of one or more of these).

The primary role, and interestingly in a conventional hierarchy these roles are often at the ‘bottom’, is the performing of value adding processes.  In a previous posting we’ve defined value adding as something the customer will pay for, something that converts inputs to outputs and something that is done right first time, every time.  Typically, in a manufacturing business these will include material conversion operations.

In a properly lean organisation at least 70% of all activity should be in this category.  In most organisations it’s often less than 40%.

The next role is to directly support someone who is adding value.  These roles must be performed in a way than enables value adding to be done in the most effective way – never stopping waiting to be supplied or because equipment is not available.  The key word here is ‘directly’ – you can’t cheat here.  For a role to count in this classification there must be an obvious connection between the supporting activities and the way it helps the value adding processes to perform effectively.

In a world class lean organisation around 20 – 25% of activity should be in this category.

So what’s left – well in a conventional organisation a heck of a lot!  In a lean organisation there is room for a small number of roles in a third category – that of creating the environment for the rest of the organisation to excel.  There job is to work to make everyone else great.

Typically, this shouldn’t need more than 5 – 10% of the collective effort.  In many conventional organisations this is often one of the least productive set of activities and often accounts for 50% or more of the current effort.

Must management time and attention is spent on how to get every last drop out of the value adding activities.  A much more productive route is to organise management to create a world class environment and then organise those not directly involved in adding value in ways that enable the value adding roles to fly.