When I first started to do organizational change management for service industry using continual or continuous improvement (A Deming based method), I was often asked if the principles and concepts applied that were used in manufacturing could be used in service.  The answer was (of course) . . . yes.  I still believe this, where I got in trouble was applying the tools at face value.  

From those using “lean” manufacturing, I learned that the first place to start was with 5S and finding the “standard work.”  This seemed plausible until John Seddon (Vanguard Consulting Ltd.) wrote a book called Freedom from Command and Control that pointed out this was wholly the wrong place to start.  He learned from Ohno that the place to start was studying demand and that the standardization of service is more likely to lead to institutionalizing waste because of the variety of demand.  By standardizing service processes we can not absorb the variety that customers give us leading to more failure demand (rework, chase calls, etc.).  Only after studying demand do we potentially find possibilities for standardization. 

John Seddon references people that blindlessly apply tools as “toolheads.”  That must make me a “reformed toolhead” . . . but my Deming background usually gave me an early warning system.  Most “toolheads” only know the tools and not the underlying concepts and principles from which they were derived.  I have seen this phenomenon in “Lean” and Six Sigma, where people know all the tools, but when asked “why they are applying them?” . . . the reply is often “that was what I was taught.”  Complicating this thinking is the markets demand for quick fixes and tools are a sure path to doing the wrong thing righter.

Technology organizations continue to perpetuate this thinking.  It is much easier to code to a standard than to have to account for variety in the demand customers want.  If you add to this that command and control thinkers want standardization to achieve corporate cost reductions, you have guaranteed locking in higher costs and poor service.  This creates a management paradox that command and control thinkers can not see.

Systems thinking requires an organization to understand current performance.  This means an accounting for the variety of demand customers present and the nature of the demand (value and failure), improving and than pulling IT or standardizing comes last.