Cherry Picking

Cherry picking is the practice of taking on the easiest work first. It generally has a reputation as being a bad practice.

In continuous improvement, though, there are times that cherry picking is a desired practice.

As a rule of thumb, if a process is intended to flow, you should not cherry pick. Most flow processes are intended to be first in, first out. This holds true in both assembly operations and in office work where multiple people draw from a single pile of work. Most of the work in this category is customer facing.

But in cases where the work is internally facing, cherry picking can be a desired practice.

Customer Facing Work

In external, customer facing work, especially in processes that are being improved to move towards one-piece flow, you should discourage cherry picking.

The first of the two most common situations where people might want to cherry pick is to put all the easiest work at the front of a schedule. That means the team can produce more and ship more right away.

There are two problems with this. The first is that eventually it will catch up with you. At some point, all that harder work that you have been avoiding, will be all that is left. Things get unpleasant in a hurry in that situation. More errors happen, and more delays occur. There are often not enough support personnel to handle the spike in problems.

The second problem is that it means that some customers orders start at a handicap in getting out on time. If your operation is streamlined, you may not have much leeway. Lose a day off the front end while working on easy stuff, and the chance of missing targets rises by a lot.

The other situation where cherry picking occurs is when there is a community pile of incoming work, and multiple people pull from that pile. This is common in office environments. For example, a loan processor might sift through several applications to find the easiest files.

Obviously, the challenge here is that doing this means some files get delayed if the practice is common. Challenging work will continually get bypassed.

There is also a high potential of having conflict between people if one or two employees are particularly prone to cherry picking to make their performance seem better.

There is an exception to this general rule. When a person is not as well trained as others, they may need to be given cherry picked work to build up their expertise. This should be short term, though. If it takes too long to get a person properly trained to handle all the work the team faces, it is an indicator that you may have a poor process. Good processes are much easier to train people on and are much easier to follow.

Internally Facing Work

For internally facing work, cherry picking can be a good practice.

A HR rep might have to choose between devoting time to 5 or 6 easy-to-fill positions, or 1 difficult one. The hard one can’t be put off indefinitely, but if working on that will delay all the open positions, you should not be doing things first come, first serve. You will need to decide what is in the best interest of the company to work on first.

Similarly, in regard to kaizen activity, you want to get the most bang for the buck. That means that you might want, and in fact, will likely want, to choose the easiest projects with the biggest returns. Unlike when customers are waiting, there is no downside to pushing a harder, more time-consuming project down the road, provided you are actually accomplishing the little things. And, this is assuming that both are related to your policy deployment. Non-PD items should not even be in the mix to cherry pick from.

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