Standard work may be defined as the documented current one best way to perform a process. It is the foundation for the Plan-DoCheck-Act cycle of continuous improvement and ensures that we sustain our gains over time. Without a standard, teams have no way to know if they are backsliding. There can be no sustained improvement without adherence to standard work.

Agencies that are deploying the full Arizona Management System have been asked to use the following minimum core standards that the Government Transformation Office developed to guide them in creating their own standard work for creating standard work.

Step 1: Identify the core processes that require standard work. A team’s core processes are defined as the work that consumes most of their time and are most critical to a team’s customers.

Problem tracking and success tracking are vital visual management elements of the Arizona Management System. In agencies that are deploying the full AMS, it's expected that they have standard work for actively tracking problems and successes at every level of the organization.

Problem tracking is posted and actively used to collect and manage problems associated with a team's metrics, daily activities, internal and external customer feedback and cascading/ escalating issues. In turn, success tracking allows teams to see that problems are being solved, and this then feeds the agency's recognition and celebration of positive AMS behaviors.

In our efforts to radically transform the culture of state government as a continuously improving enterprise, uncovering problems and celebrating successes reinforce the consistent outcomes that result from having good default mindsets and habitual behaviors.

Walk into any agency that is deploying the full Arizona Management System and you will see something that just two years could not have been imagined. In these agencies, representing about half of the Governor’s cabinet and more than 75 percent of the state workforce, you will see visual performance management at all levels of the organization, from the unit level all the way up to executive leadership.

Specifically, you will see boards – commonly referred to as “huddle boards” or “performance boards” – where teams routinely gather to discuss progress on their goals and metrics (service, quality, people and cost) and identify roadblocks to achieving success.

Arizona is transforming the way our state government thinks and does business through the deployment of the Arizona Management System (AMS). AMS is an intentional, results-driven approach for doing the work of state government so that every employee, at every level, with discipline, reflects daily on how they did, finds the waste, and decides how to do better going forward with sustainable progress.

The system is based on principles of Lean man-agement and reinforced through the state’s people systems.

Lean creates value for customers by removing waste from business systems and processes. Waste exists in many forms such as excessive inventory, over processing, waiting and defects. To learn more about the types of waste identified by Lean, see the video tutorial on the AMS website entitled TIMWOOD https://ams.az.gov/timwood.

We have already devoted considerable attention to the importance of selecting metrics and  targets that matter (see https://ams.az.gov/about/ams-focus ). But we're going to return to this topic because choosing good metrics may be the most important  element of the Arizona Management System. If you don't measure the right things, the system can't help you deliver better customer value and more vital mission outcomes for Arizona.

Feel free to review the AMS In Focus three-part series on "Choosing Measures that Matter" to learn more about choosing good things to measure. This edition  discusses actual steps in the process for creating metrics, key points that can make or break each step, as well as why the step is important.

Step 1: Create unit metrics -                                         

The Arizona Management System (AMS) is an intentional, results-driven approach for doing the work of state government so that every employee, at every level, with discipline, reflects daily on how they did, finds the waste, and decides how to do better going forward with sustainable progress.

Under AMS, all agencies in the Governor’s cabinet submit monthly scorecards, conduct monthly business reviews, and report progress on breakthroughs.

Each month, agencies submit scorecards to the Governor’s office using a standard bowling chart format for ease of communication. The scorecard is used to track and communicate each agency’s progress on its most important metrics, which are organized on the scorecards as “breakthroughs,” “operational/ sustainment,” or “statewide reporting” metrics.

Henry Ford, the founder of the Ford Motor Company and a pioneer of integrating principles of continuous improvement into his business operations, understood the power of discontent. He once said, “Our own attitude is that we are charged with the discovering the best way of doing everything and we must regard every process … as purely experimental.”

What Ford meant is that we should never get too comfortable with the way things are. When we become attached to the current way of doing things, we get complacent and stop striving to find a better way.

The Arizona Management System challenges us all to continuously improve. To do this effectively, we must first set a standard as a benchmark by which we can measure progress.

Since late May, editions of AMS In Focus have addressed what we as state employees produce (our “widgets”), who we make our products for (our customers), and why we do it (our vital mission outcomes.) Let’s now shift attention to how the work gets done in our agencies – our processes – using the elements and tools of the Arizona Management System (AMS).

AMS is basically about setting targets, tracking performance against those targets, identifying gaps between desired and actual performance, and then closing these gaps by implementing countermeasures. These steps are depicted here:

Agencies are finalizing strategic plans that will be submitted to the Governor by September 1. The annual planning process is always a vital exercise for determining agencies’ priority goals and objectives and setting course for what staff will work on in the months ahead.

With benefit of the Arizona Management System (AMS), this year’s planning cycle is informed by the Governor’s Fundamentals Map, which outlines for agencies what Governor Ducey sees as the state’s most pressing priorities and the mission outcomes he wants state government to achieve. These outcomes are the return on investment made by Arizona taxpayers. The way state employees can best deliver these outcomes is by continuously improving the processes they use to provide customers their products and services.

As public servants, state employees sometimes think of the “public” as the customer but in fact that is not usually the case because they don’t directly use our products or services. A better way to view the public is to see them as investors, i.e., taxpayers who demand a reasonable return on their investment in the form of tangible mission outcomes like good public schools, safe highways and a clean environment.

The way to maximize the long-term benefit for investors – the public, in our case – is by delivering value to the ultimate external end users of our products and services. This is true for any outwardly facing organization, be it a car company like Toyota, a non-profit like the Red Cross, or a state agency.