Detailed Work Procedure (DWP)
The team’s own written account of what it will do, in what order, with what labour and material. The unit of TACT.
A Detailed Work Procedure specifies what a working team will do, in what sequence, with how many people and for how many days. It is written by the team that will do the work, not by process engineering on the team’s behalf.
Because the team commits to a document it wrote, it holds itself to it. When the day departs from what was written, the next revision records the lesson. Nothing has to travel upward for the loop to close: the document that governs the day is the same one that records what the day taught.
TACT is composed from DWPs. The beat of a line is set from the procedures of the teams that work it, which is why a plan built this way can be kept.
An example: From tacit knowledge to 499 procedures
In the Okpo curved-block shop the foremen’s working knowledge was written down for the first time, and it became the starting line for improvement. At Boustead four planners met more than a hundred foremen in six weeks to assemble the procedures for the SLEP-2 recovery.