Though I generally find the Quality Digest articles to be well written and often entertaining, I found this article to be exceptionally well crafted and of immediate use to me.  I am engaged in crafting my own argument to release budget for process improvement tasks to take to my senior managers, and was able to refine many of my own statements by reflecting the vision presented here.  Thank you!!!

I work in a service oriented company that processes a large volume of data from multiple sources each day. In many ways it is similar to a manufacturing environment. The interesting part is I have seen many of the things and learned many of the lessons discussed in this article.

For example, we have faced downsizing the last few years and workers were indeed reluctant to tell managment they couldn't handle extra work. This made improvement efforts difficult as the workers continued to focus on "production" type tasks. When improvement implementations began to occur, the extra workload led to corners being cut in activities like organizing and monitoring. As a result, some problems were not detected for several weeks and the cleanup was cumbersome.