Improve Something Today

Describing highly variable processes with Work Unit Routing Analysis (WURA)

Closeup of a beach in Saw, Washington covered in these little tiny snails. — Photo by Brian Kerr.

A method for documenting & understanding processes when people say there isn’t a process.

WURA WTF

An easy way to understand Work Unit Routing Analysis (WURA) is to start with its predecessor, Product-Quantity-Routing (PQR) analysis.

You’ll find PQR analysis used in settings where there are a lot of small-batch custom orders. Take a print shop, paint shop, or light manufacturer that has to set up and configure workspaces and equipment for a specific run of work, ship those off, and then re-set and re-configure things for the next, different, run. This is an environment where some things are always different, and other things are always the same. Knowing which materials—supplies, stable intermediate forms, scrap/junk, and final products (P)—are being produced and in what quantities (Q) as they’re routed (R) across the shop becomes the basis for various insights.

WURA was the extension of this analytical approach to clinical settings, and from there into other types of work—including the hopelessly computer-addled work I get involved in. To call the products of labor ‘work units’ (WU) upon which one could perform a similar routing analysis (RA) is a meandering walk but it eventually gets us to the WURA acronym.

My experience has been that some people have heard of PQR and others WURA. The happiest people have heard of neither.

When you might use WURA

WURA is a great fit for low-volume, moderate complexity, highly variable work. When I hear something like “we don’t have a process” or “every <instance> is different” I consider whether WURA might be an appropriate format to use.

I’ve personally used WURA:

To document various ways projects got approved inside a corporation while bypassing the official, mandatory approvals mechanism.
To discern how a real estate company prepares distressed properties for sale at auction across various geographies, property conditions, and the like.
To understand billing procedures for a professional services firm across its various lines of business and combinations of customers, industries, and project types.

How to run WURA

Note: click or tap an image to see it full-width.

Describe a single scenario

First, document a single scenario in a single row in a data table. In this example, there are six major process steps, numbered 1-6 and each given a short but descriptive name.

The easiest way to get this down is to follow a single ‘work unit’ around and see what people do. This initial scenario doesn’t have to be a typical or even common case; it’s merely the first one you’re writing down. Don’t worry about exceptions handling or alternate scenarios yet. These will get their own rows later.

Any methods you’ve used elsewhere for identifying and distinguishing process steps will work here. (For example: look for transitions, hand-offs, or notifications.)

A single scenario is documented. It has six process steps.

Document additional scenarios

Next, document as many additional scenarios as you encounter, using the same format. Number process steps in sequence. Add new process steps as you see them. This list is totally unordered at this point. Keep adding exhaustively.

Exceptions, special cases, rush jobs, undisussables—each get their own row.

Seek to keep process steps at approximately the same level of detail. Split, combine, and rearrange in order to match what is actually happening.

Various scenarios are documented. The initial scenario is now about halfway down the list.

Annotate with frequency & quality data

At some point you will exhaust scenarios people can show you or that you can observe. Someone might say that “every <instance> is different” but the finite length of this scenarios list indicates otherwise—at least when viewed from a this level of abstraction.

Once you’ve gotten here, annotate the list with a few data points for each scenario. What’s important to measure? Use your best judgement, tempered by availability of data. Two good starting points are those shown in our example:

Frequency: # of ‘work units’ produced via this scenario over a certain time (a month, a quarter, a year).
%C/A: percent complete & accurate; this is a percentage of work items that are both complete (nothing missing or broken) and accurate (correct) as they exit each scenario.

Not shown here, but much more powerful, is to also measure %C/A for each process step. In this case, you’d want to measure how often work items enter the given process step without quality issues.
This can also be a good moment for a conversation about accuracy and how it is or should be determined.

Frequency & quality data for scenarios (right columns); scenarios count for process steps (bottom row).

Initial analysis—what do scenarios have in common?

Sort and slice. In this example, about half of the scenarios, and a majority of the overall volume, begin with the same process step (‘Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet’, seen in the second column of the table). Ask yourself what these have in common.

What about scenarios that start with some other process step? Extend this initial analysis to also include the ‘Sed vehicula audio sed rutrum imperdiet’ process step and you’ve identified where most work starts, even though “we don’t have a process.”

You might also notice a little set of three process steps, highlighted below, that are a feature of several scenarios. What might these have in common? What’s the case for scenarios relying on one or two, but not all three, of these process steps?

Lines of questioning like this can help you notice possibilities for simplifying or standardizing work in beneficial ways.

Highlighting the initial process step for most scenario and an interesting cluster of three.

Initial analysis—clean up outliers

Another very quick analysis is to look for the true outliers. The highlighted process steps below appear only in a handful of scenarios, and only one of those scenarios (‘Sed non erat gravida/tellus’) arises at a decent frequency. These process steps might be eliminated entirely, possibly even by adjusting or removing the scenarios they are a part of.

Anything that can be removed entirely is a treasure.

Highlighting the bigger ticket scenarios.

Possibilities for further analysis

Determine which process steps contribute most to overall volume. This is an area where WURA can get you in trouble, because the most visually busy process steps might not be the ones you’re looking for.
Isolate process steps where errors are produced and build in quality along the way.
Measure worker sentiment/happiness with each scenario.
Group scenarios into scenario families based on their similarities. Organize continuous improvement at this scenario family level if working on individual scenarios one at a time doesn’t seem like it’s enough.

Learning

Our favorites (so far)

A mountain as seen in the distance, across a body of water. — Photo by Brian Kerr.

Now that Improve Something Today is a decade old, here are some of your favorite—and my favorite—of the things I’ve offered to date.

Reader favorites

Based on the extremely limited data I get and the emails I receive, the most enduringly popular posts here are the procedural items or how-tos. For me, these are marked by the curse of knowledge: I forget that they’re useful to people, even as I refer to them or use them myself.

My favorite posts

I can tell you my favorite things to share are those where I’ve gone into some asinine rabbit hole.

(I guess I also denote these with a photo of a sunset over the sound. My favorite view for my favorite topics?)

My favorite page

My favorite reader

is you.

Meditation

Tilopa’s six words of advice

A purple six-petaled flower is peeking out of a bed of dead leaves and other garden bits. — Photo by Brian Kerr.

A six-word poem to be appreciated, for today, as a poem.

These are Tilopa’s ‘six words of advice’ in their entirety. A thousand years old, jostled about in layers of translation and interpretation. Would’ve originally been six words, but it’s hard to pull that off in English. They are:

Don’t recall.
Don’t imagine.
Don’t think.
Don’t examine.
Don’t control.
Rest.

This translation by Ken McLeod.

Although these words are the basis for various practices, you might want to further explore them as a poem in translation, a beautiful and simple thing. The linked document gives the Tibetan source (itself a translation from the original, now lost), a transliteration, and both of McLeod’s English translations.

Consulting

Five contributions to a project: money, effort, attention, memory & wisdom

A line of trees alongside a lake shore on an overcast day. — Photo by Brian Kerr.

Following on Jerry Weinberg’s point that ‘the money is usually the smallest part of the price,’ what other prices are to be paid, and how should a consultant approach these contributions?

In a recent discussion amongst independents and consultants on pricing, I was reminded of this quote from Jerry Weinberg, one of his ‘laws of pricing’ for consultants:

The money is usually the smallest part of the price.

I see five contributions to successful consulting projects: money, effort, attention, memory, and wisdom. You’re going to need each of these to pull any nontrivial project off.

Knowing this, you are equipped to notice that a broad set of people might end up making these contributions. Not all of them will know or care about your work in advance. They may not even be associated with the organization that is hiring you.

Your direct client will put in a lot of effort and attention. But they may have a boss or sponsor who directly or indirectly approves the budget, and someone else might actually pay the money. Effort will come from many other people too: everybody you bring into a meeting or workshop, for starters. Spending time, paying attention. See these words we use?

Memory and wisdom are squishier. Some people know what’s what, what has happened, and how things got into the mess they’re in today. If you can find these people and learn from them, that is their contribution. Wisdom is sometimes embodied in memory, sometimes not. However you find it (hint: listen for the undiscussables), wisdom is the greatest gift of all.

My suggestion is this: consultants should attend to each of these contributions with the same level of care as they would pricing. I think a lot of us do this instinctively. But it’s good to do it deliberately, and to draw a picture as we go. In the same way we’d justify a monetary price by showing what we’ll give in return and why that’s important, we can justify each of these other contributions to the individuals and groups making them, and receive them with gratitude.

Meditation

Open space technology, principle 4: “When it is over, it is over”

In the woods: the base of a fallen tree, from which various mosses and smaller plants are growing. — Photo by Brian Kerr.

Appreciating circles that have been opened but not closed.

My favorite gatherings are all alike in a certain way: when they’re over, they’re over. Open space technology makes this an explicit part of the format, which I’ve experienced as permission to linger or leave early, to stick around or wander off, individually or in a group, as needed. Or to realize that even if an event has ended, it’s not over.

I was at a 4-day retreat last month with about 55 people, 10 of which I knew previously, and the rest I was meeting for the first time. On the last morning, I felt a familiar impulse: to rush around, collect contact information, get people signed in and signed up in various ways so that we could keep in touch. The twice-monthly beat of an e-mail newsletter. But for this particular gathering, of local and regional sanghas, that wasn’t the move. Instead, we were all part of a larger, looser network within which I might expect to encounter certain people again, down the road, for our next communication. Let the timing and context and contents be a surprise. Do you ever feel that? I certainly do with dharma friends. Something about sitting with people over any span of time makes for a durable connection, and I am always happy to re-encounter such people months or years down the road, in a different setting, perhaps at the farmers’ market or library, out and about, saying sometimes nothing more profound than ‘hello.’ And if our paths don’t cross, and that next conversation is not forthcoming, we are still contained within the same circle of having been there, being there, enacting the same projects and intentions. Some circles open at a certain time, and only close when we are done. Which is to say: when it’s over, it’s over.

This concludes the open space technology series, started in 2022:

Whoever comes is the right people.
Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.
Whenever it starts is the right time.
When it is over, it is over. → now reading

Consulting

Three ways people respond to a problem (other than solving it)

A mountain with two peaks is seen in in the distance. In the foreground, a muddy tideland at low tide with a large rock on the beach. — Photo by Brian Kerr.

Noticing responses to problems; there’s a whole set. The consultant’s reaction to each of these as they arise.

When people learn I’m a consultant, conversation often proceeds to problems and problem-solving. It’s true that I only get hired well after there is a problem. Typically a problem that has gotten so lousy that nobody wants to deal with it and it has therefore become worth the trouble—of spending time, money, effort, and reputation—to bring in somebody to sort it out.

That said, I like completeness. What other responses do I notice to problems? (Other than solving them.) I don’t know that any of these are universally good or bad. But I do see people having three additional responses, and acting based on them. These are:

Solving problems (the first response we think of)
Pushing problems around
Preserving problems
Promoting new problems

Let’s look at each of these three ‘P’s in turn.

No. 0001. Pushing problems around

When I was facilitating staff-led continuous improvement projects, this was the common outcome. Making things better here by making them worse there. This is what most problem-solving in medium and large organizations look like, because this is what local optimization looks like. This is fine, in a certain sense, and a huge waste of time, in another. A key point is to not blame people for pushing problems around. They’re playing the game in front of them, and playing to win. Instead, when you see this happening, look for their boss’s boss and fix the incentives and system view there.

No. 0002. Preserving problems

Clay Shirky wrote, in part of a 2010 blog post that is no longer online:

Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.

Kevin Kelly named it ‘The Shirky Principle’ and wrote, also in 2010:

The Shirky Principle declares that complex solutions (like a company, or an industry) can become so dedicated to the problem they are the solution to, that often they inadvertently perpetuate the problem. … Because of the Shirky Principle, […] progress sometimes demands that we let go of problems.

A very easy thing to look for when there’s a problem are the people who depend on it. Who’d lose out if the problem were solved? You don’t have to agree with these people—the ones who preserve the very problems you’re working to eliminate. But you had better know who they are and include them in your plan.

No. 0003. Promoting new problems

Always ask this. It’s one of Neil Postman’s six questions about technology (from a 1998 lecture):

What problems do we create by solving this problem?

Jerry Weinberg wrote in one of his books:

Once you eliminate your number one problem, you promote number two.

The ability to find the problem in any situation is the consultant’s best asset. It’s also the consultant’s occupational disease. To be a consultant, you must detest problems, but if you can’t live with problems, consulting will kill you.

Does this mean you must give up trying to solve problems? Not at all. It means that you must give up the illusion that you’ll ever finish solving problems. Once you give up that illusion, you’ll be able to relax now and then and let the problems take care of themselves.

People who can solve problems do lead better lives. But people who can ignore problems, when they choose to, live the best lives. If you can’t do both, stay out of consulting.

In my own practice, the primary way of dispelling this illusion is to get a good diagram going so that everybody can see their problems, agree on what they are, and pick a few that are actually worth fixing. More on that soon.

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