The Financial Controller and CFO's Toolkit, 3rd Edition

Chapter 10Lean and Smarter Work Methods

OVERVIEW

Around the world, teams are challenging old out of date work methods, “other people's thinking” as Steve Jobs called it, and replacing this thinking with twenty-first-century smarter work methods. This chapter covers; how to Post-it reengineer, scrum meetings, Kanban boards, lean management techniques, and Toyota's 14 management principles. This chapter also explores some of the management lessons I have gathered on my journey to writing The Leading-Edge Manager's Guide to Success.¹

In this chapter I have extracted some lean and smart work methods gathered from witnessing a number of amazing teams and my research on the writings of the great paradigm shifters (Drucker, Hope, Collins, Hamel, and Peters and Waterman).

TECHNIQUES TO ADOPT FROM THE LEAN MOVEMENT

As mentioned in Chapter 1, the lean movement, which started in Japan during the rebuild after the Second World War, had an American influence, Edwards Deming.² The lean methods developed by the Japanese multinationals have now spread far and wide and should find a home in the finance team. These include:

• Post-it reengineering of inefficient routines such as: month-end, annual planning, and the annual accounts
• Adopting stand-up scrum meetings everyday during the delivery of a project, report, annual plan
• Having a Kanban board for each key process while it is in play

POST-IT REENGINEERING WORKSHOPS

Re-engineering can be a complex or a relatively easy one—the choice ...