Lean provides the tools we need to better serve our customers.

• Author: Morrill, Christopher P.
• Position: From the president - Viewpoint essay

State and local governments are still dealing with the impacts of the Great Recession, and many of us will not fully recover for many years. We have cut services or reduced staff or increased taxes and fees, or all of the above. These approaches to balancing our budgets, while necessary, are not sustainable. We need new methods to help our organizations through these challenging times. Lean management techniques provide state and local government with tools to reduce waste by focusing on the customer. I believe it is not just another management fad. Using Lean principles, government leaders can drive an organizational culture of customer service, accountability, and efficiency.

Lean was originally developed to reduce waste in manufacturing, but the Lean tools have proven very effective for improving services or transactional processes. It is relatively new to state and local government, but some jurisdictions have documented millions of dollars in waste reduction by taking a Lean approach to their services. Some may remember when Total Quality Management was the fad and we sent our leadership teams to Deming training. Most of these TQM efforts in government petered out because of the strong focus on statistical analysis and the enormous amount of training and time necessary to sustain the TQM program. Lean, on the other hand, provides simple-to-use tools that identify improvements to services that can be quickly implemented and evaluated. But what I think really...