The word “standard” gets tossed out a bunch when talking with Lean experts. And it can be confusing because while the strict definition of standard does apply, the implementation of Lean allows for some leeway on how standards are dealt with.
Let’s take a deeper dive.
The online definition of Standard:
Excerpt from Meriam-Webster online
3: something established by authority, custom, or general consent as a model or example : CRITERION “quite slow by today’s standards”
4: something set up and established by authority as a rule for the measure of quantity, weight, extent, value, or quality
This implies that a standard is something to compare to. The goal to achieve.
- Standard of Excellence.
- Gold Standard.
- or at least the most expected (the average or nominal requirement).
The thing is, in business, you don’t know if you’re achieving success, unless you set some guidelines or goals. And in Lean, these are called standards.
“Something set up and established by authority as a rule for the measure of quantity, weight, extent, value or quality”.
A standard is measurable.
This is great, because you can’t improve what you don’t measure.
“something established by authority, custom, or general consent as a model or example”.
And a standard is something to which things are compared.
But are standards set in stone? Unmovable, never changing?
No, absolutely not!
In fact, if you are just starting out in business, it is highly likely that your standards are pretty arbitrary. You’ll need to get some data before you can make decisions on that data.
Here’s an example. Let’s say you plan to build an audience on TikTok. And you know that the best way to get traction on TikTok is to post consistently. But, how much should you post?
Well, when you are starting out, you might decide that 1 post a day is your standard.
After about 2 weeks, you might realize that it is perfectly doable to do one post a day, 7 days a week.
But it might not be getting you the traction you want. So, you RAISE your standard to 3 TikToks a day 7 days a week.
That’s quite a jump.
And your follower activity starts to climb.
And a month down the road you hate life and resent having to post so much.
It’s still just an arbitrary standard.
You could lower it. Maybe you decide you’re going to set your standard of 2 a day 5 days a week, with the hope that you can do 3 a couple times here or there. So, in stead of a daily requirement you have a 2 part standard, 2 a day 5 days a week, (You deserve a TikTok weekend). But your monthly standard is 48 TikToks. So, you essentially have to get 8 extra TikToks out there in 4-ish weeks. That’s only two times a week that you have to post 3 times.
Now, that’s your new standard, and you can measure your results accordingly.
When shouldn’t you regress a standard? (Worsen instead of Improve)
When the customer is defining the standard, and won’t buy it if it’s a lower standard (even if you charge less).
When it comes to your internal business practices, there are some industry “standards”. But many things will be unique to your business processes.
Here’s another example:
Let’s say as part of your business, you’re running a blog. So, posting content is important, and doing so consistently is also important. But it does take time to create a blog post.
The time it takes to create and publish a blog post will depend on how good you are at writing, whether your posts need a bunch of images, what kinds of images are needed and the length of your posts (and probably some other things.
Creating a blog post is a repeatable process.
After you write several, you can figure out how much time it takes to create a blog post from start to finish. And you can set that time as a standard. You can also choose to try to streamline the process and improve the standard by reducing the time it takes to create a blog post.
But, in the end, your blog post creation time standard is unique to you and your business.
Should you track standards for every process or output of your business?
No.
Honestly, you should ONLY do the work to measure, set and track the standards for outcomes, products and processes that are critical to the operation of your business.
This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t document the repeatable processes in your business. But a process like reconciling your financials or updating your wordpress plugins once a month aren’t actually critical. They should be documented. But, if you take 30 extra minutes one month with some particularly large plugins, it’s not going to fail your business.
However, if you consistently take 30 min longer to write a blog post several times a week, and your business relies on your ability to consistently publish in a timely manner, eventually you may fall behind and your business will suffer.
And it isn’t to say that you won’t want to make improvements on some aspects of your business that you aren’t tracking full-time. There’s nothing wrong with a temporary tracking to measure before and after improvement.
But, in that case, you need to standardize the new standard. So that you can make sure it doesn’t regress and you lose all your improvements if you aren’t tracking the outcome.
Here’s an example.
Let’s say you make bracelets for sale online. And you want to improve (reduce) the time it takes you to make them. Well, maybe you aren’t tracking how long it takes you to make one right now. So, for some time, you gather data to learn how long it takes. Then you set a goal and evaluate your process, make changes and try the new process. You’ll still need to capture data for some time after you’ve changed your process to prove that you have, in fact, improved the time.
However, after some time you can probably stop tracking. But, if you haven’t somehow made your new process “the standard way of doing it”, it could slip back to the longer time and you wouldn’t necessarily know if you weren’t tracking the time still.
I’ll dive deeper into standardizing work procedures in a different article. In Lean, it’s called “Standard Work”.