2.3.3. Practicality and Improvement Principles

💡 First Principle: Sustainable success is achieved by grounding solutions in practicality, ruthlessly eliminating complexity, and embedding a continuous cycle of optimization and automation.

Scenario: A team designs a complex, 20-step approval process for a minor change. Applying the "Keep It Simple and Practical" principle, they realize only 4 steps are truly necessary. They then "Optimize and Automate" those 4 steps, resulting in a process that is both faster and more reliable.

The final set of principles focuses on maintaining simplicity, being practical, and continually optimizing and automating. 6. Keep It Simple and Practical * Rationale: Reduces waste, complexity, risk of error. * Exam Application: Questions favour straightforward, efficient solutions. * Professional Application: Design and improve processes and services to be as simple as possible while still achieving the desired outcome. Critically evaluate if activities add value and eliminate those that don't. Avoid unnecessary complexity. Start uncomplicated and only add complexity if absolutely necessary. Don't design for every single exception; focus on the general cases first. 7. Optimize and Automate * Rationale: Improves efficiency, frees up human resources for more valuable work. * Exam Application: Questions relate to improving efficiency and using technology appropriately. * Professional Application: Look for opportunities to improve efficiency and effectiveness. Optimize processes before you automate. Automating a broken process just means you have a faster, broken process. Use technology and automation only when they provide a clear benefit and support value creation. Ensure optimization efforts align with the overall vision and objectives.

⚠️ Common Pitfall: For "Optimize and Automate," automating a process before it has been simplified and optimized. This often results in automating waste and making a bad process run faster, which doesn't deliver true value.

Key Trade-Offs:

• Manual Flexibility vs. Automated Consistency: Automation provides consistency and speed but can be less flexible than a human performing a task. The trade-off is deciding where the value of consistency outweighs the need for manual flexibility.

Reflection Question: Think of a complex process at your work. How could you apply "Keep It Simple and Practical" to remove unnecessary steps? What would be the first thing you would optimize before you even considered automation?