The language of lean production comes from the famous Toyota Production System.
Henry Ford created assembly lines. Before Fordism cars were hand built. Metalwork, engines, woodwork, leatherwork done by one person. After Ford, cars were made to systems.
At Ford the line had to keep rolling. Only senior executives could stop it. Damaged cars were taken off the line to be fixed up.
When Toyota started building cars after WWII they adopted and then adapted Fordist production lines.
UK car manufactures used to order components as 1000/6 - meaning 1,000 widgets with an error rate of 6 - ie 994 working. Apocryphally this so threw Japanese component salesman, that the first Japanese deliveries would have 1,000 working widgets on a pallet and 6 defective ones in a special box. To the Japanese all defects mattered.
At Toyota damage to a car was a defect not in the car, but the assembly line. Anyone could stop the line and fixing the line was the priority.
In government and the private sector few professions can 'stop the line'.
Workers divide into I's and Y's. I's - like techies - work to the boss only. Y's like lawyers and accountants work to the boss and also to someone external - the courts, their professional bodies.
If members of these 19th century professions, the Y's, say No it means No. For engineers, No means Maybe.
New 20th century professions, like the various GDPR officers, can stop the line. Risk Managers have statutory responsibilities to their Board alongside their CEO.
After the first 2 disastrous rounds of Universal Credit, Francis Maude took control.
He used his political muscle to hold an umbrella over it and the new and flowering Government Digital Service. GDS and UC both blossomed and blossomed, until Maude was out and the hard rain fell.
He also changed the UK Ministerial Code. Senior Responsible Owners (civil servants) would be responsible to parliament for delivery dates, not Ministers. He Y'd them.
Who else in the civil service should we Y? and for what responsibility?
The Ministerial code remains government-marks-its-own-homework. (The Scottish one doesn't include SROs for instance).
I take stop the line powers seriously because I know the frustrations of a line unstopped.
British Telecom won part of the contract on NHS Spine in England. From its launch in 2002 it was shambles. By 2005 BT technical specialists (including me) knew it was dead. It was 'killed' in 2011, but lurched on undead until 2013-2014.
The 2013 Public Accounts Committee report The Dismantled National Programme For IT In The NHS estimates the governments losses at just under £10bn - BT and Fujitsu had lost a couple of billion each - other players brought it up to £15bn.
Over a thousand experts could have stopped that up to a decade before its final pharaonic funeral.
As a former Prime Minister recently said the herd instinct is powerful and when the herd moves, it moves. Zombie projects stampede like herds, and the madness dies rapidly when they stop moving, all the discontents just boil over suddenly. It just takes one to stop the line.
How do we institutionalise the Maude umbrella?
There are two different philosophies for catch’n’kill on zombie digital projects.
You can set up external review bodies to beat project teams with hammers and studded clubs (the Treasury Model?).
Or you can trust that civil servants want to do a good job and systematically identify I's that should be Y's and empower them to stop the line that they are working on. This involves changing parliament from a blunt overseer to a more fine grained one - taking a lead from the Audit Commission approach.
To do that we must professionalise (ie make of them formal professions) and train-in the various technical trades in the civil service.