Tag Archives: project management

Continuous Improvement, Project Management

Keeping Your New Year Plan On Track

strategic plan

Continuing with our previous post’s them of implementing strategic or New Year plans, many people struggle to keep those plans on track.

If your organization has experienced this challenge, take heart, because it is much more common than one might think!

In fact, we have also noticed that regardless of the specific methods used for making improvements, strategic plans or longer-term initiatives aimed at gaining greater efficiency, quality, speed, and/or customer delight have two important things in common:

  • They generally produce some improvements
  • Then they peter out

Based on our research and experience, there are some common reasons why these improvement efforts lose steam.

The most common pitfall is unclear or delegated leadership.

improvement projects or plans must be fully embraced by every line manager. Delegating the effort to a Quality Manager, HR leader, strategic planning manager, or other staff person, is very likely to lead the effort to fizzle.

John Kotter, a recognized pioneer in the field of leading change, uses the term ‘guiding coalition’ to describe a powerful and strategic group that works together to bring about the desired changes within an organization. The team must be committed to the achievement of a continuously improving culture. It should include a majority of the most powerful people in the organization and may also include some people who may not be a part of senior management.

The next culprit is insufficient communication. Leadership must continue to communicate at every possible opportunity and every possible way why continuous improvement must become part of the organization’s DNA.

The vision must be clear and simple, and throughout the organization, people in leadership positions should constantly communicate the importance of the plan and the progress to date. Successes must be widely shared, learnings must be plowed back into the organization to accelerate results, and new opportunities to become better at improving should be identified and clearly communicated. New employees must hear the why, the how, the history, and the vision of what’s next.

Finally, neglecting alignment is a sure way to undermine a comprehensive improvement effort.

Every one of us has our own personal goals and objectives in addition to the goals and objectives of our organization as a whole and our job in particular. When these get out of alignment, progress will stop.

For example, a natural and intended outcome of most process improvement is the ability to do more with less — often with less people-time. Instantly, we have a conflict between the organization’s goals for cost saving and people’s need for income retention. And processes cannot be effectively improved or improvements effectively sustained without the support of the people doing the work. Not coincidentally, the company with the longest history of a continuously improving culture, Toyota Motors, promises employees a very high level of job security.

The leadership must think several moves ahead to both maintain alignment and to capture financial gains from productivity improvements. The choice of where to focus improvement efforts is probably the most critical.

Among the best areas on which to focus are:

  • Aim improvement methods to address the constraint to sales.
  • Improve productivity in the parts of the organization with too much work, in order to eliminate the need to hire.
  • Improve productivity in an area where people have the skills that, if freed up, could be transferred to departments with too much work or that have had attrition.
  • Improve non-people costs, such as energy, scrap, paper waste, and work with suppliers to identify ways to reduce costs.
Process Improvement, Project Management, Theory Blindness

what’s your plan for avoiding theory blindness?

plan

Our previous post described the pitfall of “theory blindness,” and explained how, with good intentions, people can fall prey to it.

A sure way to avoid this pitfall is to adhere to a defined improvement methodology — one that goes well beyond the common (most often ineffective) two-step approach of:

  1. Someone in a position of authority comes up with an improvement idea
  2. The idea is immediately implemented

Instead, a more elaborate improvement process or plan will incorporate a systematic search for new knowledge and understanding in order to arrive at a solution that addresses the root cause of whatever problem we are hoping to solve or whatever process we’re hoping to improve.

Take, for example, the first six steps of the 8-step methodology we apply:

  1. First, we identify and quantify what to work on. After gathering a lot of ideas and opinions about opportunities, we prioritize and then quantify. Quantification helps us in two ways: it helps us set aside our pet ideas for improvement (theories) that simply are not supported by the facts, and it helps us proceed with appropriate urgency on the highest impact opportunities.
  2. Next, we put together a team of people who can study the opportunity for improvement from a variety of perspectives. We include input from both customers and suppliers of the process (internal and, when possible, external) which helps us overcome theory-blindness, because people who can see the process from different perspectives can help us spot the flaws in our theory.
  3. Third, we gather facts and data about the current situation. This step can be difficult for those who entered the project with a preconceived solution – but when a sufficient number of relevant facts and data are surfaced, they most often serve as effective treatments for theory blindness.
  4. Fourth, we analyze root causes: thinking expansively and systematically about possible causes and then critically examining each possibility.
  5. The fifth step is to implement, but we’re not finished yet!
  6. Step six is to study the results. Because we started the process with a good baseline measurement, when we study the results, we will either confirm a successful improvement or not. We can then complete the final steps and move on to the next project!
CI Tools, Execution

Implementation!

completed

If you truly want to achieve maximum results from your improvement effort, it’s essential to have an effective implementation and sustainability plan.

Consider that, even when people excel at identifying major opportunities for improvement, if they don’t execute, they don’t make gains. In our work with hundreds of organizations, we have observed that the most successful are outstanding at execution.

These execution plans involve the use CI tools for measurement, applying accepted best business practices such as the “4 Disciplines of Execution” (see related post), as well as a number of key focus areas, including:

  1. Get senior leaders to become actively involved
  2. Identify clear project plans for delivering results, including measures and milestones
  3. Engage team members and stakeholders
  4. Set expectations and consequences — both positive and negative
  5. Develop an organized structure and an activity / accomplishment reporting plan – communication matters!
Continuous Improvement, Project Management

Before Launching an Improvement Project…

preparation

As a final installment to this short series of posts about increasing the likelihood of an improvement project’s success, it’s important to recognize the importance of up-front work.

Effective planning, even before the launch, was emphasized as critical to success during a discussion with our Partners in Improvement. Some of the key components of this planning include defining the right problem statement, scope, timeframe, and team.

One of the Partners explained that, in his organization, all project charters are required to go through a rigorous review by corporate as well as visiting the location and team beforehand to get the specifics and facilitate good communication.

Another emphasized the importance of having a charter, no matter how simple the project, that sets out the timeline. The charter should clearly identify why we are here and what the target date for completion is. This is hard to predict at the outset when the team has much to investigate, but it is important to have a vision of an end point not too far in the future to keep the scope tight. Set near-term milestones.

Similarly, one organization has implemented the practice of having the team leaders circulate problem statements to other experienced leaders before they start and ask the others to take shots at it — identify where the gaps are, where it lacks specificity in a way that will make it more difficult to define a tight scope. Identifying these hazards up front is likely to make the project more expedient and successful.

Most importantly, and as all of our Partners agreed, managing scope is a must for speed and success.

Apply the Pareto mentality (backed up, of course, with Pareto data), to focus on the 20% of the problem that will provide the biggest bang for the buck. One of the most common causes of slow results is failure to decide on a tight scope that can be addressed within 8 to 12 weeks. Often one needs to gather and study some data in order to decide on a narrow scope, and this often should be done before launching an improvement project. Sometimes a small group may be convened to quickly gather and study the data so that an appropriate improvement team can be launched.

The Bottom Line Summary
To sum it up, in order to ensure on-going success an organization must make sure that its measurement systems, rewards, recognitions, and communications systems support CI.

But more than that, one must make sure that management behavior itself supports CI.

Continuous Improvement, Project Management

Why Improvement Initiatives Often Fail

brick wall

During a discussion with several of our improvement partners, it was noted that approximately 80% of the time Continuous Improvement efforts fail or are abandoned prior to achieving their potential.

We also discussed a set of barriers that could lead to failure, which included:

  • Low aim, poor advance planning or scoping
  • Lack of data during the planning stage
  • Lack of buy-in from management
  • Lack of buy-in from participants
  • Lack of management support, which is required to free up the resources to work on improvement
  • Lack of progress due to ineffective or inconsistent execution. The slower the effort moves, the more likely it becomes that priorities will change, new opportunities or problems arise that decrease available resources further.
  • Poor meeting management, causing slower progress.
  • Participants need for skill development

A number of solutions to the above-listed challenges were also discussed, which will be the subject of our next post.

Continuous Improvement, Project Management

Defining & Scoping Improvement Projects

SIPOC

An earlier post referenced one of our founder Bill Conway’s favorite quotes, “The most important business decision people make every day, is deciding what to work on.”

This pearl of wisdom applies to all forms of work, and is certainly critically important when it comes to initiating an improvement project. Various tools have been developed to help people better define improvement initiatives, one of which is SIPOC, an acronym formed in the early days of TQM and one that continues to be used today in Six Sigma, lean manufacturing, and business process management..

SIPOC enables people to effectively define the process, problem, and project early on to ensure they are, in fact, working on the right things. The acronym stands for:

Suppliers
Inputs
Process
Outputs
Customers

Some organizations always start with the SIPOC to get the team on the same page so they can answer six important questions:

  • What is the process?
  • Its purpose (why are we doing this)?
  • Who owns the process (surprisingly sometimes not obvious/known)?
  • Who are the customers/suppliers?
  • Who is the primary customer?
  • What do they get out of the process or provide for the process?

Once the questions above have been answered people can focus on the high level process flow and the process measures for each step by answering five more questions:

  • What’s the ideal?
  • Is the data available?
  • Are we already measuring it?
  • What is the goal?
  • What is the impact?

Once the team members have a shared high-level understanding of the process using the SIPOC, and have gathered the data that enables them to measure the gap between the current situation and the ideal, they can create a good problem statement, objective, scope, and timetable.

These together are key components of a Project Charter, the ‘North Star’ of a project that helps keep the project moving forward to successful completion.

Continuous Improvement, Process Improvement, Project Management

Common Pitfalls to Completing Improvement Projects

pitfall

As I’m sure you are aware, to get and stay ahead of the competition, it is all about how to improve further and faster. But sometimes, despite the best intentions, our continuous improvement efforts can get bogged down.

While there can be a number of reasons for delays and the related under-achievement — such as failing to identify root causes — we have identified common pitfalls that every improvement leader should avoid.

Here’s a list of the top three along with some ideas on how you might avoid them:

  1. Pace: The most common cause of delay in achieving results is the pace. Some teams schedule an hour a week to work on the project, so that under the best of circumstances, two months will pass before the project gets one day’s attention. But far more often it will take three or four months to complete one day’s effort on the project because meetings get cancelled, or start late, and then a portion of each meeting is spent going over the status or covering old ground for a member who missed a meeting. And, of course, the current pandemic has complicated meeting schedules and effectiveness. Regardless of reason, when a project progresses this slowly, priorities may change or resources might be reassigned without ever completing the work and gaining the improvements.

    The secret to avoiding this trap is, to the fullest extent possible, employ the Kaizen approach. Kaizen requires planning and data gathering up front and then all the necessary people are pulled off their jobs for one day or several days to completely solve the problem: designing, testing, stabilizing solutions usually in under a week. The Kaizen approach requires good planning on the part of the leaders and facilitator, but makes good use of the entire team’s time while accelerating the benefits of the improvement effort.
  2. Scope: The second most common trap that slows down progress is a poorly designed project scope. The scope may start out too large — i.e., trying to take on all locations, departments, functions, product lines, etc. all at once. When the scope is too large, you have too many aspects of the problem to track down, analyze, and address, and too many people to consult, inform, an persuade. A team’s progress can also be inhibited if too much of the scope falls beyond their sphere of control. For example, if a receiving team wants to address a Purchasing process or a Manufacturing team wants to address an Order Entry process.

    Sometimes a project begins with the intention of being short and sweet, but gradually the scope keeps growing until the project is in danger of crumbling under its own weight.

    Avoid the scope-trap by explicitly raising and resolving as many questions about scope as possible. Define the scope so that improvement results can be realized as quickly as possible. Decide what locations, functions, departments are in scope by identifying the one or two that will provide the biggest impact (you can do this by stratifying the data you used to quantify the opportunity). Decide what types of problems are out of scope. You may decide that systems design issues should be out-of-scope if the organization already has a multi-year waiting list for systems changes. An area that is slated for major change in the near future often should be deemed out-of-scope. Be clear about the expected project deliverable. Sometimes improvements can be implemented, verified, stabilized. In other situations, the project team may be chartered to merely gather, analyze, and report data about the problem.
  3. Poor communication: Sometimes delays are caused by insufficient communication, especially today when many of us are working remotely. When a team leader does not communicate regularly with the sponsor, many delays can crop up: the team leader misses out on useful information that the sponsor has on the topic; a team struggles with obstacles that the sponsor can move out of the way; a team becomes set on a solution that the sponsor feels is untenable or does not understand well enough to give it full support. Many things can go awry when the team and the sponsor are out of touch.

    This pitfall is easy to avoid by discussing these risks up front with the sponsor and agreeing how frequently to communicate about the project. The frequency really depends on the speed of the projects. If you are executing a Kaizen, you should communicate in advance and update the sponsor at the end of every day. If your improvement team is meeting an hour a week, perhaps too little happens to merit a weekly update, but a team leader should not go more than three weeks without updating the sponsor. Agree on the update schedule and put it in your calendars for the expected duration of the project.
CI Tools, Continuous Improvement, Project Management

Will My Project Succeed?

crystal ball

Every organization has more processes with opportunity to improve than they have organizational capacity and management attention units to execute. That’s why it is so important to identify the best opportunities and to work on the right things.

Over the years we’ve compiled a list of eleven factors that can predict, with a fair degree of accuracy, if a project will be successful. A successful project certainly does not need to score 10’s in all of these, and some of these eleven are more important than others and carry more weight in the prediction:

  1. The potential benefit of the project to the organization is clear, substantial and quantifiable. (10 = very clear, quantifiable, substantial)
  2. The problem to be solved is clearly defined and quantifiable, and the project scope is focused and well-defined. (10 = very clear, focused, and well-defined)
  3. The project has top management’s commitment and support (resources, sponsorship and follow-up); no influential person is actively opposed to the project. (10 = very strong support)
  4. The sponsor and team leader are clear about each one’s role and partner effectively to ensure the success of the project. (10 = very clear)
  5. The team leader and key resources are devoting enough of their time to the project to complete it very quickly. (10= full time)
  6. The team is staffed and led by the right people for the job, and they are determined and capable to quickly achieve results. (10 = very determined and capable)
  7. Meaningful and accurate facts and data about the process are available. (10 = very available)
  8. H. The process to be improved is repeated frequently enough to efficiently study variation in the current process and to and test and measure improvements. Hourly? Monthly? Annually? (10 = very frequently).
  9. The processes to be improved are within the team’s span of control. (10 = under control).
  10. J. The expected time frame for completion of the project or for achieving concrete and measurable milestones. (10 = 4-8 weeks to completion or measurable milestone)
  11. The processes are stable, that is not undergoing very recent or imminent major change (10 = very stable).

Careful consideration of each of these eleven factors will help you focus your capacity on those improvements with the best chance of long term success, moving your organization further faster down that never-ending road of Continuous Improvement.

Continuous Improvement, Execution, Growth Strategies, Process Improvement, Project Management

Bigger CI Gains Can Come With “Bigger” Challenges

We all strive to achieve breakthrough or “bigger” gains when involved in Continuous Improvement, and a basic fact of accomplishing this is to pursue cross-organizational improvements.

However, these efforts typically involve more people, and this size factor alone can make projects more difficult to execute.

Consider that the larger the group, the more effort is required to ensure that good working relationships develop among the team members. Scheduling meetings becomes more difficult, and individuals may take less responsibility because with a large group it is easier to assume someone else will pick up the slack. There is often a limited window in which people are available, and the more people who must participate, the more constraints the project leader must schedule within.

Here are a few recommendations on how team leaders can minimize these “size-related” difficulties :

  • Make sure each participant has a clearly defined role and that everyone is clear about why each participant is needed.
  • Develop (and continue to refer back to) a clear charter and mandate from senior management
  • Develop ground rules about how to handle absences in a way that ensures the project continues forward. Will substitutes be used? Who can substitute and how will the team make sure that a substitute will know what is expected of them?
  • Set up firm meeting times and locations at the start of the project.
  • Publish minutes so that everyone is clear about what was decided and who has what action item.
  • Publish agendas so that everyone knows what is expected to happen at each meeting. Send reminders to make sure that action items are ready when planned.
  • Involve a facilitator to make sure that everyone provides input and that discussions stay on topic. Projects without a good facilitator will lose focus.
  • Develop concrete time lines and scope, and “chunk the work.” Breaking the work into specific deliverables helps to manage the size and complexity of cross-organizational improvements.
Continuous Improvement, Process Improvement, Project Management

The Right Tool for the Job?

It’s been said that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Such is not the challenge we face today! Over the past 50 years, a tremendous number of analysis and problem-solving tools have been developed and are available to deploy in the unending quest for better service to customers, producing greater value with less waste. In today’s world, the efficiency and efficacy of continuous improvement depends on selecting the best analysis and problem-solving tool at the right time.

Perhaps the most important tools for success start in the scoping.

Defining and Scoping Improvement Projects
One of the most valuable tools early on to effectively define the process, problem, and project is the SIPOC:

  • Suppliers
  • Inputs
  • Process
  • Outputs
  • Customers

Some organizations always start with the SIPOC to get the team on the same page so they can answer six important questions:

  1. What is the process?
  2. Its purpose (why are we doing this)?
  3. Who owns the process (surprisingly sometimes not obvious/known)?
  4. Who are the customers/suppliers?
  5. Who is the primary customer?
  6. What do they get out of the process or provide for the process?

And then there is a lot of learning about the high level process flow and the process measures for each step.

What’s the ideal? Is the data available?

Are we already measuring it?

What is the goal? What is the impact?

Once the team members have a shared high-level understanding of the process using the SIPOC, and have gathered the data that enables them to measure the gap between the current situation and the ideal, they can create a good problem statement, objective, scope, and timetable.

These together are key components of a Project Charter, the ‘North Star’ of a project that helps keep the project moving forward to successful completion.