Review – Office Kaizen

Office Kaizen

Office Kaizen: Transforming Office Operations into a Strategic Competitive Advantage, William Lareau. ASQ, 2003.
This book applies lean ideas to office work. Many of its ideas will be familiar to people in agile, but applied in the non-software world: charters, daily work group meetings, visual displays, and so on. Other ideas may feel less comfortable, e.g., numerical assessment. I particularly like that the explanation of waste has a number of categories added to cover intellectual work, and the attention to the challenges of transforming organizations. (Reviewed Jan., ’05)