BookSmarts Podcast (ep. 50): Rebecca Burgoyne on Lean Six Sigma for Knowledge Work in Publishing
Rebecca Burgoyne is the Executive Director of Business Systems Integrations for the United Methodist Publishing House. She joins the BookSmarts Podcast discuss what Lean Six Sigma is and why book publishers should be incorporating this type of knowledge work, along with the importance of understanding workflows, reducing waste, and more!
Rebecca discussed Lean Six Sigma for Knowledge Work at the 2024 Publishing Innovation Forum. To learn more, feel free to reach out to her on LinkedIn or Twitter. You can also look into articles she’s written on medium, including Lean Six Sigma for Knowledge Work!
Transcript
Joshua Tallent
So this month on the BookSmarts Podcast, I’m chatting with one of my best friends, Rebecca Burgoyne. I’ve known Rebecca forever. I don’t even remember where I first met you, but Rebecca is the Executive Director of Business Systems Integration at United Methodist publishing house. I think it was BISG or no ECPA.
Rebecca Burgoyne
I think we met on a message board about Microsoft.Lit books, before the Kindle was even
Joshua Tallent
Oh, wow, we’re really dating ourselves. Now, that’s hilarious. Microsoft.lit. Oh, that brings back memories, very bad memories, not good memories. But well, thanks for coming on the show. I appreciate it.
Rebecca Burgoyne
Sure. I’m happy to be here. I’m excited.
Joshua Tallent
Yeah, so you came to the Publishing Innovation Forum in September 2024 and gave a talk that was highly regarded. Everybody loved it, talking about Lean Six Sigma and and how you can apply that to knowledge work. Now this is a topic. I didn’t actually get to sit through your whole presentation, because I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off. But I’d love to learn more myself, and obviously for the people listening in, what I might call the third chair. So what is Lean Six Sigma?
Rebecca Burgoyne
So Lean Six Sigma is actually the combination of two methodologies. Both are focused on process improvement and reducing waste. One came from Toyota, one came from Motorola, both in the 60s and 70s, and they were sort of independent methodologies for improving processes and reducing waste. But as these things happen, as consultants were working to implement the methodologies, they just saw that they had a good synergy and combined them so Six Sigma has more of a focus on the customer and reducing defects to the customer. Lean has more of a focus on the actual process and improving the process, but you can see they fit together.
Joshua Tallent
Yeah. Okay, that’s interesting. It’s been around for a while, so I guess it’s also been tested in a lot of other ways. So why would you say, you know, we’re not talking about manufacturing phones or cars. Why would you say that knowledge work, those of us who sit at a desk all day and use our brains, you know? Why would you say that those of us in publishing, especially, might be interested in this kind of process improvement?
Rebecca Burgoyne
Someone at a BISG meeting the other day said, we are all looking for ways to reliably and scalably do more with less. She was talking about a different topic, but I thought, oh, I gotta wrote that down. I was, like, that’s what this is about, is looking for ways to do more with less, and we’re all looking to get to the market faster, get the right product out there, and just be the most efficient. So you start to look for ways to help your staff do this, and you’re looking for methodologies, and this one is out there, and so you just say that that one will work. That’ll be good for us. Let’s apply it.
Joshua Tallent
Sure. Are there parts of Lean Six Sigma that you think are most able to work in publishing, things that stand out to you as like, yeah, we obviously want to save money and time, and we’re all very small teams trying to do a whole bunch of things. But what would you say would be like the key elements of these workflows or processes that you think have had the biggest impact in publishing, maybe the way you’ve implemented them?
Rebecca Burgoyne
It’s within the workflows at the handoffs, is really the place where I have found the most opportunity for improving the quality and accuracy of the work and reducing wasted time. The thing about workflows in publishing or in any knowledge work, they’re more; they’re hidden. So you go into a factory floor and you can see the workflow is incredibly visible. Here’s a person turning a wrench, and then goes to the next person, and they turn a screwdriver. You know, you can see what they’re doing. In publishing and other types of knowledge work, it’s just not visible, especially now that a lot of us work at home, and so we’re just doing our jobs, and we don’t see what the other person is doing. So there’s a element where it’s intangible. The workflow is intangible. And then also, compared to the factory, where I was just saying where the car or the phone or whatever goes from one step to the next. In publishing, you often have steps repeated, items go back or it’s not linear. It’s more just non-linear. Not circular, exactly, just not linear, so it’s hard to get a handle on but if you just look at your handoffs, where things are passing from one person to another, there’s real opportunity there to improve the whole workflow.
Joshua Tallent
Yeah, can you talk a little bit about what Lean Six Sigma actually involves? What are kind of the elements of the process improvement?
Rebecca Burgoyne
It’s really about understanding the work, understanding how the work gets done. Start there and everything else can come together. Understand how the work is done. Look for places where there’s waste or variation, and look for ways to improve the overall flow. So one of the things that Six Sigma brings in is a focus on the customer. And that’s fantastic. You want to focus on the customer, but often in publishing, we’re way back from the customer. We’re at some point that is, could be years away from a pub date and from a customer. So we take that internally, and that’s again, where we look at those workflows. So it’s about understanding the work, focusing on the customer, in this case, an internal customer where there’s a handoff. You wanna identify places where things could be improved, and then just make a plan and work that plan about improving the overall workflow.
Joshua Tallent
So it’s really just about understanding the process. If you understand the process well, then the Lean Six Sigma approach is just figure out the process improvements and think about it from the customer perspective, or the, I guess, like you said, the internal customer perspective.
Rebecca Burgoyne
Internal customer. It is. And so since the processes in publishing are not tangible like they are in a factory, one of the things that you want to do when you’re doing this process examination work is to make it visible. You want to use some sort of artifact. Do you create a spreadsheet that people can see the steps? If you do have an office with a shared space, draw on a whiteboard or put post it notes or something that helps people see what the process is. Gets it out of your head, out where people can examine it. You really find out. When you get a group together and you start making these intangible processes more tangible, you can really find out where people didn’t think they were, they will start to point out, oh, I didn’t know you were doing that. I’m doing, you know, that sort of thing. And that’s, oh, there you go. There’s your waste. Two people doing the same thing.
Joshua Tallent
Yeah, I run into that sometimes. So we go to a potential client and do a discovery process, and we ask the client, hey, tell us what it is you do, right? And bring in the expert from that department, and then show us what you’re doing in the editorial process or the, you know, production process, and they’re sitting in the room and they’re having this great conversation among themselves while we’re listening in and, you know, writing copious notes and they’re like, you really, you do that? I didn’t know you did. Oh, you shouldn’t be doing that. That should be Susie, or Susie already did that, all that kind of stuff that is. It’s very interesting. And I could totally see as well in that kind of situation, internally, you’re having this discussion, how do we make things better? Taking post it notes, or even some of those big post it boards or whatever, and just plastering a wall with the process and saying, do we really need this step or are we doing this step the wrong way? Or do we need to break it down into some smaller steps or move it to another part of the process? I could totally see that physicality helping bring together the, you know, the efficiency that you’re talking about,
Rebecca Burgoyne
It really does. So when we went through a process of examining our workflows around our metadata production and maintenance, we did this, and it’s with a tool from the Six Sigma world that’s called the SIPOC (supplier, input, process, output customer). It’s a chart, you just draw it out. And we had some of those “aha” moments. Where you’ll find, well, who’s doing this? Like, you look at a process of best practices and you compare it to what you’re doing, and you can find a gap, just like you can find places where you’re overlapping work or not maybe being as accurate as you need to in a handoff, not giving someone as high of a quality as a piece as you need to in a handoff. You can find places where there’s gaps. Once you have it out there in a way that you can look at it.
Joshua Tallent
Yeah. And I think part of the problem we probably run into more than anything else in this situation, though, in publishing, is we’re so busy. Like, how do you as a manager take the time to do this kind of process improvement when you’ve got so many other things. You’ve got stuff that needs to be done, books that are going to be published next week, and then the week after and then the week after that. You know, how do you find the time to make something like this work?
Rebecca Burgoyne
For me, it’s just, it’s a passion; it’s internal, and it’s who I am, but I know that everyone’s not like that. Yeah, so you do have to be intentional about carving out the time but it doesn’t have to be. So when you’re doing an examination of an entire workflow, you have to set aside some hours, but you can have these conversations on an ongoing basis with your staff, and one on one, just ask, what’s hard about your work? To ask, what what do you do? Just sort of, what do you do during the day? How does it go? And you’ll start to hear, well, when I get this piece of work, it doesn’t have everything I need, but it’s okay. I do it. I take care of it, and you can, as you talk with different members of a team or of your staff, you can start to put the pieces together about where the work should happen or how to improve it. Conversations are really important. There’s a lot of nuance to our work, and a lot of those hidden like we talked about, people are working at home. There’s a lot of hidden things they’re doing. Putting people at ease, and just having a conversation about it can open up ideas. One thing I had, so I used to work for this; she was a great, great manager, but one of the things that she did was put in our performance requirements every year, come up with three process improvements or cost-savings ideas that met a certain criteria, and it really ingrained that. And everyone who worked for her, and even though she’s now retired, it really helped to make the whole team think that way. And these people still think that way, still looking for those ideas. So as a manager, you could go so far as to require it, but you can start with just conversations and just ask people what’s going on in their work.
Joshua Tallent
Yeah, so it’s building that culture of continuous improvement. It’s not just, we had a big meeting in July, and we took, you know, a week to go through the process. But it’s really building in to everything that you’re doing and all the conversations you’re having and all the thoughts that people are putting into their own process, their own workflow, building a culture around that improvement process.
Rebecca Burgoyne
It is and follow up is so important. People, we, all of us, don’t like to have suggested something, and never know what happened with it. Did it go nowhere? Was it implemented? If it’s about the whole workflow, and my part is just a small part of that workflow, but I think I have a suggestion for another part of the workflow, and I come out of my shell, and I make that suggestion in a group setting, and I take that step, and then I never hear about it again? I’m not as likely to take that step again and make those suggestions, even if the follow up is we found out we couldn’t do that, and here’s why, or we can do that next year when we have a new system, whatever the follow up is,. Follow up is so important to encourage that engagement and to really keep people feeling that the trust around making those suggestions about improvements.
Joshua Tallent
Yeah, that’s good. That’s really good. Yeah, you have to build that relationship aspect of things. It’s not just about the process, it’s about the people doing the process and if they feel,
Rebecca Burgoyne
Oh, absolutely. Process, technology, people. You’ve got to do all three.
Joshua Tallent
Yeah. So, looking back at Six Sigma and kind of how it, you know, it’s made for process improvement, especially in the physical kind of spaces we were talking about before. Manufacturing, things like that. Are there any challenges that you’ve run into, or you think publishers run into in trying to apply Six Sigma to the work that they’re doing?
Rebecca Burgoyne
One of the biggest challenges is around standards, because it’s hard to apply standards to creative work. It’s easy to see how you would apply standards to the production portion of the work. It’s just not clear how you would apply standards to the, what you might call the more creative portions of the work. However, we don’t need to let people just, you can hide behind that, hide behind saying, “well, I’m a creative; I can’t be called to a structure”. This is another thing. So, this is something that happened at the conference. Brian O’Leary said that standards can arise from the work. You can impose standards on the work, or standards can arise from the work. In a creative setting, it can be really helpful to let the standards arise from the work, and from the group mutually accepting the standards. So, say you want your designers to name their files a certain way when they put them in the datum. When they check them into the system, they need to be named in a certain way. Well, they’re creative. They can’t follow that. So you could always, you can examine what they’re currently doing. They’ve got to be; we work on computers. You guys don’t have a file with no name. You have a file folder with no name on it, but you can’t have a file on your computer with no name. So what are the names that they’re using? How do they keep track of their work, and how to come to sort of a mutual agreement about this piece from this person, and this piece from this person, and bring it together and then, when you bring the group together, and they’re discussing the standard and how it improves their work, and it arises from the way they’re already doing their work, then it’s much more likely to be accepted. This-I like to talk about, you know, being organized isn’t about putting everything in the right place. It’s putting things in the same place. So we keep our batteries in a shoe box on the third shelf down on the bottom section of our pantry. It’s where our batteries are, you know. So that’s our standard battery storage. It doesn’t matter what it is, so long as everyone knows how to find it and how it helps them do their work. And really, the applying structure to where we can opens up the space for creativity, and if you can do some? Start small. Find some ways to prove this point, find some ways to apply structure that standardizes parts of the work that allow people more time to do the creative part of the work. That’s where your wins are going to be.
Joshua Tallent
Yeah. So when you’re working in that kind of situation, just to summarize what you just said, one thing is to let the structure, let the standards be built essentially by the people, without them even thinking about it. They, you know, the people in that in that process, whether they’re creatives or not, they have some built in structure. So use that to your advantage. Let that structure be built around. Let the standards be built around what they’re already doing. And then, you know, in doing so, you’re basically giving; you’re putting it back into their mind as they came up with it, right? It’s not something that’s being imposed. It’s something that’s natural, and it makes sense. And the benefit they get now is, okay, now I can actually spend more time doing the thing I really want to do, instead of having to do that file management thing that is so annoying.
Rebecca Burgoyne
Exactly. You’re looking for t hose aspects of the work that are routine, that are tedious, and you want to take those away, make those easier. Obviously you can’t be creative and let a standard arise around your ISBN, but there are a lot of ways where you can be creative and let standards arise from the work. And it just makes everything. Like you said. It gets people to own the solution.
Joshua Tallent
And this is where systems and tools come into play as well. Because most publishers that I end up talking to, they’re using 40 Excel spreadsheets, and it’s like, it’s all over the place. And I’ve got this for that, and this other thing over here, and I’m using a tool that I don’t really like, because I had to, because the person who did the job before me was using it. There’s a value as an organization in thinking about, how do we increase the quality of the tools we’re using, expand on the aspects of the tools we’re already using, take advantage of features we haven’t, you know, used already, that kind of thing, and grow into the processes, grow into the tools with the processes you’re working with.
Rebecca Burgoyne
Yes, so it comes down to that to two things. Understand the work, what are you trying to accomplish? And then talk to people about it. Sometimes, it can help to get a group together, especially if they’re all trying to accomplish the same thing and they learn from each other that, oh, I’ve been in that spreadsheet six years ago. I use, you know, this other tool, and whether it works or not, at least you hear some other ideas about it. Really, understanding the work and what you’re trying to accomplish and then, like you said, match the automation to that, match the system to that, make sure you’re getting the most effective use out of it. You’re not just there to key data in, right? You’re not just there to push a button. What are you accomplishing? What’s the work?
Joshua Tallent
Yeah, and that’s important too. You know, we’re humans; we’re not computers. We shouldn’t be doing the work that computers should be doing for us. You know, there’s automation around there. There’s a ton of automation available to us in the modern knowledge work world, so lots of ways to take advantage of the tools we have. And with AI and things like that coming in, that’s even more powerful. So that’s great. Any final thoughts, or anything that we didn’t talk about, about this topic that you want to make sure people know?
Rebecca Burgoyne
One of the most important things is to know that when you’re taking a methodology like a Lean Six Sigma, and you’re trying to apply it to intangible, non linear processes, it’s not about working or trying harder to do that. It’s about adapting the approach to do that. And that’s just really and you can be successful, and you can improve your processes too, just like the manufacturing, just like the factories. Don’t beat your head against the wall. Don’t try to do it like they do it. It’s not about trying harder. It’s about adapting the methodology.
Joshua Tallent
That”s great. Well, thanks, Rebecca. I appreciate you coming on the show today. This is really awesome. It’s great conversation to have, and I think really important for what we’re doing. Tell me, where can people follow you online?Where do you where do you engage with people, and where can people maybe get in touch with you if they’re interested in learning more?
Rebecca Burgoyne
I am probably most active on LinkedIn, so you can hit me up there with a message. I also have put a few articles out on medium, so the summary of the notes from this talk that I did at the conference, and a few other things are out there on medium, and I’m also on Twitter or X, whatever it is. I’m not out there every day, but if you send me a message, I’ll get a notification. So any of those ways.
Joshua Tallent
Great, yeah, we’ll put links in the show notes to those, and especially to the articles on medium. That’s a great refresher, if nothing else, and learn more about what we talked about today. So I appreciate that. Thanks for coming on the show!
Rebecca Burgoyne
You’re welcome. Thanks for having me.
Joshua Tallent
That’s it for this episode of the BookSmarts Podcast. If you like what you heard, you can leave a review or a rating on Apple podcasts or Spotify, or wherever you happen to listen to us, and we would love for you to share the podcast with your colleagues as well and let them know about all the great things they can learn from all the great people that come on the show. If you have topic suggestions or feedback about the show, you can email me at Joshua@firebrandtech.com. Thanks for joining me getting smarter about your books.