Improvement processes needed for delivering continuous improvement and transformation programs
Introduction
You may have multiple Continuous Improvement and Transformation programs running, with a 100 or a 1000+ initiatives running at different speeds, with widely varying objectives, in different areas of the business. How do you tie all this together and ensure successful completion and delivery of the promised results ?
It’s a common issue faced by all organizations hoping to deliver improvement and it often lands at the door of the Improvement team to fix…
Here’s a critical list of the processes that you need when running your improvement programs:
Organisation wide idea generation/ contribution & prioritization
Well defined and consistent stage gating process
Effective implementation planning
Detailed target setting to drive improvement at pace
Accurate, timely progress tracking and reporting
Structured progress reviews driving execution at pace
Sustained improvement
Let’s run through them in detail – essentially in order of program lifecycle starting with generating the initial improvement ideas all the way through to delivering sustainable results.
1. Organisation wide idea generation/contribution/prioritisation
Does your organization give everyone the capability to contribute improvement ideas ?
Without being able to contribute ideas, employees feel unable to improve their working conditions or the business – their ideas are not listened or acted on.
What you want and need is an idea contribution system available to everyone and feedback to employees is systematically provided.
Ideas should be seen as a valuable asset, shared and replicated across the organization and the database easily searched.
The Improvement team should be treasuring this stockpile of improvement ideas as a key starting point of any Improvement program.
2. Well defined and consistent stage gating process
Is your stage gating process working well ?
In the early stages of an initiative, is it clear if the initiative has actually been agreed on and who the owner is ? in the later stages of an initiative is it widely known if it’s been successfully completed or is the initiative in a zombie undead state (i.e., included on reports but no-one working on it!)
Poor stage gating results in the organization working on ideas/initiatives that are low priority. Precious resources are being consumed on private ‘projects’ with no transparency on how many resources are being allocated and what the business benefits will be.
Ideally, stage gating is used consistently for all initiatives across the whole organisation.
Once you have an agreed stage gating process across the entire organization, then benefits quickly follow:
The exact status of all initiatives is known at all times and progress reporting can reflect this
The right stakeholders are consulted prior to each stage
Resources only work on agreed priorities
You’ll finally heave a sigh of relief at managing to get some control back into your improvement system…
3. Effective implementation planning
Is your implementation planning setting up each initiative for success ?
‘Poor planning results in poor performance’ with the initiative being late on delivery and not delivering the expected impact.
If you recognise any of the following traits in your implementation planning – then you’re likely seeing poor performance as a result.
Limited time given to implementation planning
Implementation plan not reviewed as part of stage gating process
Implementation plan often incomplete - current situation, expected future state, measures of success (process / impact KPI) not explicitly defined
Work plan not fully defined or unrealistic and missing What/Who/When
Major implementation risks and potential mitigating actions are not considered
Once you have control of the stage gating process, you can then instill the right requirements for a good implementation plan.
So, ideally, make sure you have control of your stage gating process before you try to get your implementation planning process working well.
4. Detailed target setting to drive improvement at pace
How does your organization treat improvement targets? Do you have them? Are they used? Are they realistic?
At the outset of your improvement program, you should be thinking about what target you’re trying to achieve. These targets need to align with your strategic objectives for the next 1-3 years (a result of your business planning processes) and used as a guide (a ‘North star’) to determine if the improvement program is ultimately on track.
All your reports, charts and dashboards should reflect progress against the targets enabling everyone reviewing progress to have some context on progress and to understand if progress is ‘good’ (ahead of target) or ‘bad’ (behind target).
To drive improvement pace, these targets should also be time-bound; targets should be phrased in terms of ‘target x needs to be reached by date y’.
Good target setting involves some element of ‘stretch’. In other words, the target is doable but will require significant effort – it’s not a ‘gimme’.
Lastly, targets should be both top down at the outset of the program during the diagnostic and bottom-up once the detail of the initiatives is known.
5. Accurate, timely progress tracking and reporting
Can you instantly and accurately report on your progress against targets ?
Does your organization have a ‘single source of truth’? Some organizations have a single spreadsheet – so that would be a yes on this basis – but a big fail on the following two challenges
Can everyone easily access this reporting in a timely manner? Is reporting transparent? Can you split out results by area?
Is the reporting visual and simple to understand? Are progress issues easily identified? Is it obvious if the initiative or area is behind target either in terms of impact or time?
If you don’t have good stage gating, implementation planning and target setting processes working – then good progress tracking and reporting will be challenging …
6. Structured progress reviews driving execution at pace
Do you have effective progress reviews?
To drive execution at pace, you need to maintain structured progress reviews at all levels on a regular basis with strong involvement from senior management.
If you’re not reviewing progress in a structured regular manner, then you’re not providing the guidance needed with the likely outcomes of:
Implementation issues not systematically escalated or resolved; no cross-functional support
provided…
…leading to change happening slowly
Progress reviews should be regular, effective and well structured:
Progress against expected outcomes (targets, plans, impact, KPIs, risks) should be reviewed
and deviations understood
Escalated issues need to be resolved and help provided when requested
Priorities/direction should be provided as needed
Naturally, good reporting and target setting processes need to be in place for the progress reviews to work.
7. Process to lock-in and sustain improvement
Are you able to secure your initial impact or does your early success fade away?
The final ‘lock-in’ gate in the initiative life cycle should lock-in the delivered improvement. Unfortunately, most organizations get this process wrong - you need to ensure that the process or behaviour sticks – otherwise, any initial success fades away as old processes or behaviours resurface.
What can you do to prevent losing the benefit (and the entire point of the improvement program)?
Two suggested key sustainability strategies:
Ensure that your initiative lock-in process checks if sustainability steps have been completed and KPI results are consistently delivering
Ensure that process confirmations actually happen post lock-in
Your stage gating process needs to working well to have any chance at successfully implementing these sustainability strategies.
Conclusion
In summary, once you have all these improvement processes under control, your organization should be able to manage and deliver both Continuous Improvement and Transformations like the well-oiled machine it should be – smoothly, efficiently and effectively!
If you want to find out how you could instantly have an improvement system that includes all the best features of idea generation and can also help you plan, implement and sustain improvement then read more about Lypta’s improvement app.
Author: Mark Bowman – CEO | Founder Lypta
Mark has deep experience supporting organisations implement both Continuous Improvement and major Transformations.
Lypta is proudly partnering with Yuwan Consulting