Chapter 4. Sustaining Process Improvement
GIVEN SOME GOOD PEOPLE, THE RIGHT RESOURCES, AND TIME, YOU CAN PROBABLY BUILD A PRETTY good quality program. If you follow some of the recommendations and guidelines discussed in the last chapter, chances are you’ll create a program built to add real value to your business, and one that fits well with your business to boot.
But in the field of process improvement, it’s important to understand that building the program is just the beginning. When the program is complete, you’ve achieved a major milestone. And by all rights you should be proud. But the real work is not finished. It’s only about to begin. If you’ve designed your process program the right way, then you’ve designed it to successfully improve your business. And as is true with most significant factors in the business world, the measure of that improvement—its degree of success—takes time. The term continuous process improvement holds the key. The trick to the success of your program will not come from merely building something good, it will come from using it: using it over time, refining it, making it better and better, and allowing it to become a permanent part of your organization’s business approach.
The key to successful process improvement is sustaining process improvement.
Most quality programs get through their design and construction phases pretty well. Where they begin to falter is typically in the first six months of implementation. There are some general reasons why this is so.
Sometimes those first months of implementation are seen as anticlimactic. The building phase may have been full of enthusiasm and anticipation. A lot of creative energy was probably energetically spent. Then when it comes to rolling out the program—to broadly disseminating it—the daily rhythm of the business routine may take over, dulling the shine of the new initiative and perhaps weighting it down under long-standing day-to-day concerns.
Sometimes the program suffers because of a simple yet all-too-common oversight: the people in the organization were not properly prepped to use it. Training (as discussed in the last chapter) is a critical ingredient in establishing your process program. It’s an equally important ingredient in sustaining the effectiveness of your program. Perhaps it’s often overlooked because training can easily be perceived as an add-on or extra (supplemental) activity: something nice to have but maybe not essential. But when this is skipped, for whatever reason, you run the risk of alienating your people from the process. If the process appears dense or intense, cumbersome or confusing, irrelevant or irrational, people will not adopt it. They’ll ignore it as best they can. They’ll implement it in the lightest way possible. That being the situation, even the best of programs will evaporate over time.
Sometimes process programs fall short because the commitment to their success wanes. This is usually a management issue. During the design phase, management may not have truly realized—despite all the floating wisdom—that a process program is primarily a management program. Only in a secondary sense is it a worker tool. And so for it to be successful, management must back the program as an essential business practice.
But what often happens is that program adoption and use is viewed as a down-line responsibility, something that should rightly filter up from the organization, or that once implemented should naturally take hold across work teams. This laissez-faire approach is rarely successful. It communicates an air of indifference. In that kind of atmosphere, no process program can prosper, much less realize its benefits.
And then there are other common problems, all the result either of weak interpretation, misdirection, or speculative inaction. For example, once the program is in place, management might decide that the resources that brought it into the organization can now be directed elsewhere. Or if resistance is encountered (as it always will be to some extent), no official effort is made to mitigate it. And then, as tends to happen in immature organizations, once the heat gets turned up on a project or on a business initiative, the first thing that gets jettisoned over the side is the process program.
In this chapter, I’ll discuss some tips and techniques for sustaining process improvement in your organization to avoid the kinds of situations described above. But when it comes to success, there are really no formulas for process program management. And as far as rules go, there are only two:
Use the program.
Follow rule #1.
But the following series of considerations should be helpful to those starting out on a process improvement initiative, and they are points that I have used successfully and have seen used successfully to help root a process program in place so that it stands the best chance of growing to its potential.
In brief, these 12 considerations are as follows:
Remember what you do (and do it well).
Weld business success to program success.
Participate in the life of your program.
Train your people.
Encourage compliance.
Seek feedback.
Provide performance incentives.
Measure, measure.
Celebrate success.
Publish progress.
Reassess periodically.
Appreciate the journey.
1. Remember What You Do
One of the first things I do when I’m asked to evaluate an organization’s process position is to ask the group for its mission statement. Lots of times I get a blank stare. No one really knows what I’m trying to get at. Sometimes I get a suspicious stare. Those people do know what I’m trying to get at, and they know they haven’t got it.
What I’m after when I ask for a mission statement is this group’s official take on what it is they do, what they are about, what they’re here to achieve. That’s what you hope to see in a mission statement.[*] And I always look to see if this statement is prominently displayed around the organization.
I recognize the possibility that these kinds of corporate communiqués may be little more than high-touch management mantras, but even so, even when that’s all they really are, I do get one thing out of them: the sense that the members of the organization know who they are (or think they know, or at least want to know). And in cases where the mission statements are genuine, when they have been carefully thought out and committed to, I get a whole lot more.
When I am brought in for a process consulting engagement, I always recommend that we begin with a mission statement. If one already exists, we revisit it, even if only to confirm that it is solid. If one does not exist, I recommend that we put one—even a light one—officially into place. The reason is, I think, clear. Your process program, in order to be effective, in order to be sustained over the course of business life, needs to be intricately tied to what your business is all about. And this link needs to be continuously reinforced across your working groups. And the only way to forge this link is to begin by understanding the mission of the organization, by knowing what its purpose is and what contributions it is equipped to make to the larger business mission. Once this is understood, a process program can be forged that will help sustain this mission.
But for every IT shop that has a firm grasp on who it is, I bet there are 10 that have only the vaguest of ideas. It might be something like, “Serve the IT needs of the organization.” Or “Deliver high value to customers.” But as missions go, those don’t go very far. For sustained process improvement, an organization must know what it does. And I don’t think that this is a question of “Do what you do best.” It’s, “Do what you do the best you can.” And that’s what I want to see established in an IT shop: the understanding of what is required of the group and a commitment to doing it the best they can.
A good place to begin is to focus on the customer-product relationship.
Focus on the Customer-Product Relationship
Chapter 3 looked at techniques for establishing a process program in the organization. One of the first considerations we looked at was the importance of planning the shape of the program around the company’s overall business objectives. That’s important, maybe preeminently important, for a single reason. For any company in any business, the only real path leads to one certain outcome: providing customers with a product or service. If your customers find value in what you bring them, you can be successful. If they don’t, success will be hard to find.
That’s a basic business principle. But what’s often forgotten is the process end of it. Or, rather, the process beginning.
Think of the fact that there’s no such thing as a disorganized organization. There are poorly organized organizations, and there are well-organized organizations. And there are many in between. But all operate according to some guiding principle, even if it’s only the uncertainty principle. And that shows itself in the production process, in the steps a group takes to move from idea to deliverable. And so process, like it or not—know it or not—ultimately leads to the customer. By experiencing your product, they experience the processes you work by.
Because business will change, customers will change, and products must change, sustained process improvement means evolving process improvement.
The sharpened critical viewpoint, then, appreciates the link between customer satisfaction and process. And so you should periodically reexamine who your customers are. Reach out to them, talk to them. Try to get the feel of what they might be looking for from you.
In the IT world, there is often a wall set up between the shop and the customer. But go through that wall. The keys to how you should evolve your program are ready to be given to you by your customers. There’s a real benefit to be gained here: synergy between your shop and your customer base. This is a proactive focus IT managers should be happy to take. It is not complacency that delivers sustained process performance. It’s energy.
Knowing your customers, appreciating what they want, and working to ensure they get it may be the best expenditure of energy you can make to keep your process program on track and delivering the kinds of benefits you designed it to deliver.
Shape Your Process Program to the Voice of the Customer
You’ll see later on that the term voice of the customer is big in Six Sigma. The members of ISO have introduced a similar concept into ISO 9001. This focus on the customer is not really a new thing, but it’s refreshing that the idea has moved to center stage in the field of process improvement. All too often it’s easy to forget about the customer in the routine of daily business. Many times the people who work in technology environments may even feel that the customer is pretty far removed from them. They might feel that what they do has a preordained customer tie, and they have little influence over what those ties might be. Or they may even feel that what they do won’t even touch the customer, that it provides only some other tangential function.
But in reality, everything we do should be somehow traceable to satisfying the customer.
That’s why it’s so important for an IT shop to know who its customers are and what the customers hold to be valuable. If you can string this philosophy through your processes, you’ll strengthen the link between your shop and the customer. Just as important, you’ll provide an avenue to help your people appreciate their impact on the client. And when people know this—whether the impact be big or small—you’ll find that their job direction becomes clearer. And when they can link what they do to what the customer wants, they can link what they do to business success. And when they have a process that they trust to take them both ways, you’ll find that the people use the process more, take advantage of its full attributes, and work to improve it.
By knowing what you do, doing it the best way you can, and shaping it to meet the needs of your customer, you’ll be able to shape the kind of process program that will deliver sustained benefits over time, one that can grow with your company as it grows.
2. Weld Business Success to Program Success
Jim Ditmore is Chief Technology Officer for Wachovia Banks, one of the nation’s largest financial institutions. His offices in Charlotte, North Carolina, overlook a series of rooftops, all from fellow bank corporations. He has led strategic initiatives at a host of major companies and is one of the most experienced and knowledgeable process professionals I have ever worked with. Jim understands the discipline from the floor of implementation to the walls of strategic design. And one of the fundamentals he stresses when it comes to sustained process improvement is the importance of welding the performance of the business to the use of the program.
He tells one story about implementing a process program for one of the very first online banks. His process manager was having a hard time enforcing the program she had built. She had built a good program. It was not too heavy. It fit the culture well. The issue was simply one of motivation. There was no real active resistance, but the various groups within the bank that should have been adopting the program were slow to do so. Other priorities always seemed to take precedence. The line managers did not seem too concerned about this as long as the regular work was getting done in a reasonable amount of time. And no one was complaining too loudly.
Jim’s architect—I’ll call her Kate—was frustrated because she was in many ways accountable for the success of the program. But she felt that her powers as a lateral enforcer were not enough to make people notice. She wanted Jim to step in with a bigger stick.
But Jim took a different approach. I have since borrowed it from him, and it seems to work pretty well wherever I am able to employ it. Jim told Kate not to worry. She shouldn’t feel frustrated at the slow pace of adoption. He would soon drive the demand to her.
Jim used his position as a C-level executive to reshape the organization’s view of process and its role within the business. He met with the various representatives of IT management and instituted a new series of performance reports, reports that were based on measures of general IT performance. The reports would be assembled every week and presented to the CEO. The trends in the reports would be discussed with the CEO and with the board of directors when needed.
What Jim knew (because he had helped position it) was that Kate’s process program directly addressed the performance of the organization along the exact lines that were being measured. From that point on, when IT management got together and the reports were distributed, here is what people began to see. Some of the groups were doing well. Their numbers looked good. Some other groups were not doing so well. Their numbers were not impressive. Everyone knew this data was going to the top of the company and that the top was paying attention to it. Jim made sure of that. And so what happened in a relatively short span of time were three things in pretty quick succession.
First, management became motivated to find out what they had to do to get off the Bad list and onto the Good list. Kate was able to assure them that she had some new procedures and practices that were designed to do just that. Management went to their people and told them to work with Kate to get this new stuff in place. To them it wasn’t about process improvement at all; it was about the perception of performance. Jim had in fact driven demand to Kate.
Next, when the weaker groups began to appear stronger on the numbers reports, the stronger groups wanted a way to get back out front. And so they began to go to Kate to add some extra capabilities into their toolkits. Within a span of time, adoption was not the issue. A sense of competitive accomplishment had been introduced among the groups, and because of the measures, the group had a way to regularly look at who was taking the lead and who might be falling behind.
The last thing that happened in this stream was that executive management—the CEO and the board—began to appreciate in their own way the process program Jim and Kate were supporting. The simple fact that they were able to see in a single metrics report a picture of performance over time (and in this case it was a very positive performance trend) caused them to want more. They began to not only rely on the program and on the data it helped generate, but they began to query about new ways it could help the organization, new ways it could reveal opportunities for improvement and at the same time work to document success.
Jim’s strategy here was very astute. He knew the benefits of linking business success to process success. If you can do that for your management as well as your work force, you’ll find that they will back the program once they begin to see the benefits it brings.
3. Participate
You’ll see a theme repeated throughout this book. It’s valuable to those just starting down the path of process improvement. That is the theme of executive commitment: dedicated and focused executive commitment is essential to the success of any process initiative—in fact, to any business initiative.
When you create a process program, you are not creating an end product. You are setting down the first stone in what will eventually (hopefully) stretch into a well-worn path. But, of course, the stone is not the path, and all the good work of your process team has not laid the brush aside. It has delivered a direction and a map. Now the real test comes.
There’s always a strong leadership presence in successful process programs: the champions, the visionaries, the true believers. Maybe those labels are too strong to apply to many process initiatives. But you probably understand the directive behind them: make executive commitment a visible thing. To do that, it is essential to participate in the life of the program. Management must lead the way.
Appear in the Valley
It’s no doubt easy sometimes to look down on company operations from high up. The view from there can often appear placid, orderly. And there’s an argument to be made that heavy executive management across all layers of an organization might not be a good thing. After all, if you hire competent people, you should probably get out of their way and let them do their jobs. That’s my philosophy, too. But it’s a general philosophy, good for routines that have stabilized
But for new or emerging process programs, the stability is usually not there, at least not in most companies. In these situations, visible executive commitment and support become especially important.
By the term “appear in the valley,” I mean to suggest that management appear as a guide. They are not there to audit, or to check up on people, or to peer over shoulders; they show up to show your people that they are interested, that they want to see results, that the company will be patient, as long as progress is being made. And also that the company will be tolerant when missteps are made, that those kinds of trials will no doubt arise, but that they are OK as long as they are indicators that people are moving into the program.
Be Content with Commitment Equal to Yours
The last thought here on the subject of participation is the level of commitment you should expect from your people as your program becomes a part of the way you do business. The level of commitment you show—openly and visibly in the organization—is the level of commitment you can predict will permeate through your process program.
You probably know this already. Think of your management partners: will they share this commitment with you? This form of on-floor encouragement does not require an inordinate amount of attention. If you’ve designed the process program so that it fits the organization well, then it shouldn’t be a struggle to fit it into daily and routine business activities. But especially at the outset, the program will be new to people, maybe a little strange or a little daunting. If senior management can be seen as imminently interested in how people are adjusting to it and strongly committed to seeing it succeed for the organization, then that attitude will go a long way to ensuring adoption, attenuation, and integration into work group cultures.
4. Training
If I were asked to pinpoint two of the most critical factors in achieving a successful process program, I’d cite executive commitment and training Not one after another, but both together. I see them as being equally crucial.
Chapter 3 looked at the importance of training when it comes to establishing your process program. There it is essential, because it preps your people to begin using the program effectively. But training should become an ongoing and permanent part of your program, just as improvement is.
Naturally your program is going to evolve over time. So the best way to have a better program is to have better people. Such an ongoing commitment to training works best when it takes on a two-dimensional shape.
The first is focused on growth. This includes the growth of your program, the growth of your people, and the growth of your business. Training addresses all of these. As a manager, in addition to all your other duties, you are the caretaker of your people. Like a football coach, you should want to turn them into the best players they can be. And so it’s good practice to seek and support their personal career goals in ways that line up with the mission of the business.
This area can include professional training and often includes training that is not directly relevant to the process program. For example, you may have some network people in your group who would like to obtain Cisco CCNA certification. You might have programmers on staff who want to obtain MCSD certification. These paths are designed to help produce better network analysts and better programmers.
If parts of your business objectives are to improve network efficiency or to program .NET more effectively, then this form of growth training will bring advanced knowledge, skills, and practices into the organization. And this will provide a foundation of fresh knowledge and new perspectives that can be directly applied to improving the process program.
The second facet of this two-dimensional shape is process training. Your organization should establish some form of training program to support the use and evolution of the process program across the organization. There are some sound reasons for this.
First, you’ll no doubt be bringing new people into the organization on something of a regular basis. And you should have some sort of mechanism in place for training these people in their jobs. Part of their job will be to follow the processes established to carry out the work. You can facilitate this with formal classroom-style training, with coaching and mentoring, maybe even with computer-based instruction.
At the same time, you’ll want to remember that your process program will be evolving over time: changing to become better and changing to keep up with shifting business environments. This will require process refresh training at certain intervals. Depending on the size and reach of your program, you may set up some type of fixed training regimen or curriculum that requires attendance by certain job roles for mini sessions once a quarter, twice a year, or even annually.
The issue of training, once your program is moving under its own steam, can easily lose its focus. But it’s wise to keep a steady handle on it. If you appreciate the fact that your program will change—that you actually want it to change—and that your people’s ability to use the program effectively is key to its success, then you will have little trouble justifying the importance of training and the contribution it can make to sustained process improvement.
5. Support Compliance
I work pretty regularly with two process consultants, Kricket Ichwantoro and Nicole Whitelaw. I bring Kricket and Nicole in on lots of different kinds of jobs. They’re great program developers, they’re really strong at pre-assessments, and they know how to accurately gauge the scope of how much process is right for particular groups. But what I like to use them most for is what I call Project Quality Assurance. Depending on the improvement model or the industry it’s in, Project Quality Assurance goes by other names: auditor, inspector, assessor, etc.
The Job of Project Quality Assurance
The job of Project Quality Assurance (PQA) is straightforward enough: keep the project team on process. (This role is directly called out both in ISO 9001 and in CMMI.) In the effort to institutionalize a process program, this may be one of the most neglected or least appreciated roles. People might logically assume that since a process program represents a way to do business, people should follow that way without much prodding. Or they may think that the addition of people to oversee the use of the program amounts to unnecessary overhead. Or that maybe it implies distrust.
While I can understand those attitudes (at least a little bit), I’ve got to maintain that they aren’t completely accurate. Not only is the role of Project Quality Assurance essential to sustaining a process program, the job of the PQA analyst may be paramount.
Follow Kricket Ichwantoro and Nicole Whitelaw around on a project, and you’ll see what I mean. The first job of the PQA analysts is to know the process program inside and out. Since they are key to making sure everyone on the project team is able to conduct their jobs according to the procedures and activities of the program, they will need a deep, workable understanding of the program.
Next, the PQA analysts actively help plan the project. The project manager probably takes a planning view that focuses heavily on budget, schedule, and resources. The PQA analysts can complement this view. Working with the project manager, they can help provide a compliance plan for the project—one that details what key activities will be monitored over the course of the project, what work products will be required for delivery, what artifacts will be expected to be produced. This plan represents a compliance contract for the project team. It defines what compliance means. And it serves as an aid to the project manager who is also responsible for following established processes.
Then, during the various project phases, the PQA analysts execute the PQA plan. They are involved with the project team. They announce scheduled audits well in advance, perform the audits in accordance with current standards, note issues of noncompliance, and then help the team get back into compliance where needed or document the valid reasons for being out of compliance. Regularly they release summaries of all their audit reports, noting areas of strong performance and areas where performance might be improved.
If every IT project had a Kricket or Nicole working with it, team members would quickly see that process, when well planned and designed, does not interfere with project work. It complements it. It promotes it. It serves as an aid to using consistent solutions for moving in predictable directions, along a clear-cut path.
When an organization supports its process program by instantiating the role of Project Quality Assurance analyst, it sets up a framework of dependability, one that different project teams can use to not only make sure they stay on process but also to help saturate process into their teams, so that over time the program becomes a natural—almost unnoticed—way of doing business.
Provide Coaches, Not Cops
A great way to help sustain your process program is by supporting compliance, but there are different ways of approaching this task, some not as effective as others. One term that the improvement industry has unfortunately picked up over the years is “compliance cop.” That’s the person you think of as always looking over your shoulder, checking up on you, auditing you on a whim. The spirit most often associated with the compliance cop is that of catch-and-correct: catch someone doing something the wrong way and then push them (usually by consequence) into doing it the right way. I guess in basic training that approach might work—there, it’s probably the smart approach—but in the business world, that approach is not going to be very effective. It will probably backfire.
The better approach is to set up your PQA analysts as process coaches. They should be charged with helping your people gradually grow into the program, not in a passive, observational way but in an active way, while engaged in the program, while using it.
When your PQA folks are seen in this supportive way, the issue of compliance changes. It moves from being perceived (perhaps) as an intrusion to a tool, one that might need some getting used to, but a tool nonetheless. And the PQA analysts themselves begin to be seen as a visible sign of executive commitment to the program. These analysts are not, per se, linked to the project teams. They are part of the organization at large, and their willingness to help the teams move through process, engage in process appropriately, and realize the benefits of the program communicates management belief in the program.
The success of your process program will hinge on its long-term adoption by the people in your company. If the program has been designed well, it will probably meet the business needs of the organization. The key then is to get people using it until it becomes habit, until it is the natural modus operandi of the culture. A very effective way to help this come about is through the use of PQA analysts. By seeding these process coaches within teams across the organization, projects can stay on process, people can work with and appreciate process program elements, and the benefits of the system can begin to saturate the organization.
6. Active Feedback Mechanisms
You may be the sponsor of your organization’s process program; you may even be accountable for it, liable for its success. But your people really live with it. After all is said and done, the final test of the program’s effectiveness will come down to how well it fits the way your people do their jobs. If the fit is good, people will use it. If the fit is poor, they won’t. And so it’s important that you continually monitor the program’s fit with your organization.
So far in this chapter, we’ve looked at a few ways you can do this. But here we discuss a technique that carries with it a singular importance: feedback.
Organizations are dynamic enterprises. They’re ever-changing. So is the blend of people in the organization. So are trends in the marketplace. So are business objectives. The world of business is in a busy state of continuous flux. And because of this, you need to make sure that your process program does not remain fixed. It needs to evolve with your organization, to remain in sync with your organization. The best way to do this is to work with those closest to the program, your frontline people. This is where feedback comes into play. Your people—working the program every day—need to know that what they think and need can directly impact the shape of the program.
Through their feedback, you can work effectively to make sure that your program retains its goodness-of-fit for the organization. Here are four ways you might consider to help you establish feedback mechanisms in your organization that can work to sustain your process program.
Let Them Know Who the Ears Are
People are usually willing to provide constructive feedback when given the chance, but organizations often fail to identify who the ears are—that is, who it is they can talk to, who they can come to with ideas and requests.
Some organizations try to compensate for this by setting up web sites people can use to submit feedback. Or suggestion boxes placed around an office to collect ideas. But these are only half measures. Web sites and boxes are usually perceived as black holes: nothing that goes into them ever seems to come out.
Feedback needs human contact to make it valuable. People need to know who they can go to—not what—to offer up thoughts and ideas that can be used to make business processes more effective. It’s the organization’s responsibility to let them know who those ears are.
Provide a Means of Communicating
Now that your people know who they can go to with process improvement ideas, it’s important to set up communication channels to encourage and foster this feedback. There are various ways to do this. You can give out a map to your office. You can hand out your phone number. You can walk around and solicit ideas. You can also conduct more formal activities.
One commonly used activity is to hold formal process program review meetings at regular intervals. You can think of these as user-group meetings, where you bring together the people who use the program (maybe for a day or two each year) and gather ideas for making the program better.
You can take smaller actions, too. You can hold focus group sessions with targeted groups within the organization, looking at specific performance areas of the program. You can use the suggestion boxes and email centers I talked about earlier, but now with a real person waiting at the other end.
Use your creativity and experience here. The goal is to encourage the various work groups to think about how they use elements of the process program, to come up with ideas and suggestions to make it better, and then to know what to do with those ideas and suggestions, how to share them with the right audience.
Provide Evidence of Actions
The positive power of feedback will quickly lose its energy if you only pay lip service to it. Unfortunately that is often what many company managers do. They say they want to hear from the workforce; they want to think that they are responsive to what their people might express. But when it comes down to hard tack, they prefer the status quo. Or if change is required, it’s better if it’s their change. Of course, people see through that position pretty quickly.
Realizing the value of feedback requires two assumptions: that the frontline workers probably know how best to get a job done, and that the processes you’ve put into place to assist job performance could be improved. In my mind, those are pretty safe assumptions. Take your position along those lines, and you’ll quickly come to welcome feedback.
Feedback also requires two actions. First, demonstrate that you are collecting and analyzing the feedback you get (and accept that this will take a degree of work and energy on your part). You can do this several ways. You might create a public process improvement log or database that everybody has access to and is able to enter new data into. You might post what you judge to be the top five improvement ideas every month in some conspicuous place within the company.
Next, implement the ideas that really add value to your program. In other words, act on the feedback. That’s the best way to get your people involved in the program, to get them feeling that the program is really theirs, that they exercise a degree of control over how it’s shaped, and that they have a real and tangible stake in its outcome.
Seek the Wisdom of Balance
Hopefully, if you’ve let your people know who they can come to with ideas, and if you’ve opened up accessible communication channels, you’ll be getting a lot of feedback. Some of it will contain gems: really solid and pertinent ideas that can be used to significantly improve the efficacy of your program.
Another portion will contain some pretty good ideas for minor tweaks and adjustments.
And then a portion of it, while sincere, may prove not really relevant or practical, or contain no real improvement value.
The point I’d like to make here is that sometimes the act of implementing an improvement idea carries with it more value than the idea itself. Now you are not going to want to continually change your process program. It needs to be seen as a stable, well-managed methodology. But you will want to make revisions to it on something of a fixed schedule, and when those times come, it might be important to your people that they see some of their ideas being incorporated into the refinements you have endorsed.
Use these opportunities to look at their suggestions. And don’t just look for the Big Ideas. Small changes might not mean much to you (and so might be very easy for you to implement), but they may very well mean a lot to the people who suggested them. They may see the incorporation of these ideas as recognition of their business savvy and acumen. And when your program is supported by people like that, it soon becomes a solid asset within the company.
7. Promote Performance Incentives
In the business world, people are compensated for doing a job. They are often rewarded for doing the job well. These basic performance assumptions can be carried directly into your process program.
Chapter 3 established some general process program guidelines: identify business objectives, design processes to support these business objectives, and create activities within the processes to guide business activities. If you have done that, you have helped create a way for your people to do business in your organization. In fact, it should be the preferred way of doing business. Therefore, if the business is important and if your process program guides business activities, it should be important to your organization that your people become proficient in your process program.
The idea here is that if your people follow the program, they should be able to perform well in their jobs. In fact, process compliance should be seen as part of their job. And when they prove that they are able to work efficiently within your program using processes and procedures to get work done, they may well deserve to be rewarded.
Linking process proficiency with job performance evaluations is a good way to sustain process improvement across the organization. Following are four techniques that you can apply as a way to create performance incentives that encourage people to adopt and use the process program in place for your business units.
Link Performance Objectives to Program Components
Your process program, taken as a whole, may be a big thing, and its full scope may reach outside of most people’s day-to-day activities. However, people have specific jobs to do, specific contributions to make, and so they should be familiar with those parts of the program that impact their business views. These areas should be—at some level—represented in the program.
To foster compliance and the ongoing use of the program, then, part of management’s job—part of their own business view—should be to link the employee’s performance with proficiency in those program elements.
To do this, up front and early on, you can work with your people to establish these relationships and then use the traditional MBO (management by objectives) techniques of defining goals and then defining a path to achieve them. In this case, one objective could be to learn and use the program as part of overall job responsibilities. MBO is a technique that can help set a host of performance goals: increase revenues by three percent, reduce downtime to half a day per quarter, meet installation commitments 98 percent of the time. Those examples all have to do with job action. Other examples, those related to your process program, could be tied to job knowledge and job proficiency: train at least three new employees in our up-time maintenance procedures every month, participate in three process improvement committee sessions each year, attend two process program refresher courses. By setting these kinds of objectives, you begin to link business performance objectives to process program proficiency.
This will serve as a common yardstick you and your people can use to measure not only your increased knowledge and use of the program, but also to monitor overall organizational commitment to sustained process improvement.
Tie Performance Reviews to Program Proficiency
When you manage your teams, in part by setting them with objectives that stress process program integration, you should naturally expect them to work to achieve those objectives. And because you have made these objectives a tangible and measurable part of job performance, you should make sure that their work toward accomplishing these objectives is recognized in performance reviews.
In many organizations, job reviews and performance appraisals are handled as little more than chat sessions. They run as casual conversations that dip in and out of performance assessment topics. In other organizations, reviews and appraisals are structured along much more formalized lines. Whatever path your organization takes, it’s important to remember the commitments you share with your people, especially (for the focus of this book) those that deal with process proficiency. Bring these commitments up at reviews and appraisals and discuss them. For those people you feel have met or exceeded their process performance objectives, ensure that you can reward them in an appropriate manner.
Establish formal rewards
Because an organization’s process program should reflect the way it conducts business, the program should be officially viewed as a core business essential. From the perspective of human-resource management, process performance should therefore be officially tied to compensation. Salaries, benefits, bonuses, and perks should in some way be a reflection of that person’s ability and experience working within the program, as well as that person’s ability or potential to refine, improve, or promote the program.
You can move a long way toward sustaining process improvement activities in your organization when your people begin to understand that their levels of compensation are directly linked to the level at which they embrace the program. This should probably be an early consideration in the development of the program. It’s a good idea to work with your management to define the importance of process as a strategic initiative and then seek their buy-in to include process allegiance as part of performance reviews and personnel appraisals.
Establish informal rewards
You need not wait for annual or semiannual performance reviews in order to recognize achievement. You can use informal awards spread out over time that let people know you are following their progress and are recognizing the work they are doing. Actually, I have found that informal awards sometimes have more impact the formal ones. I have seen managers give people what I call “visible thank-yous” that really reinforce commitment and promote enthusiasm. Things like a dinner out on the town, tickets to theater or sporting events, special plaques, team lunches, or even success banners all provide a visible show of support to members of the organization. They are valuable reminders that the process program is important, and that the people who help it succeed, even in little ways, are sincerely appreciated.
8. Celebrate Success
If you are sincerely committed to nearly any path of action, you’ll probably run into success sooner or later. A struggling actor will land an off-Broadway part. A young father will get a “Best Dad in the World” T-shirt. Same for your process program. As a matter of fact, compared to the actor, the chances for big success are probably much better for your process program. But big success will take time. In the meantime, and probably more important, small success will arrive quietly through small doors, at gradual intervals, reminders of measured progress.
Often these small successes are overlooked. In this field, people tend to want to peer out to the horizon, looking for the tip of the mast of the S.S. Major Accomplishment. But I like for people (and companies) to focus on incremental progress. The good thing about that view is, if you roll your program out properly and you and your management team are truly committed to it, there will be plenty of incremental progress to appreciate.
I once worked with Dan Payne, a senior IT Project Manager for Cingular Wireless. We worked to implement a CMMI program that Dan and his team had pretty much built from scratch, and we helped roll it out to various organizational groups. In any engagement like this, the word “smooth” is a relative term, but Dan kept the Big Goal in mind. He coached his people through the rough spots and supported them as they maneuvered through new activities. He was always, and actively, looking for signs of success, even the smallest of signs, and at each sign, he demonstrated his enthusiasm for the program and for the effort his team was making to implement the program.
Of course, this attitude became contagious. His different teams began to enjoy making the program work. The idea of failure had been quietly removed from the equation. They weren’t afraid of any “invisible consequences” that might come from trying. Because the light was shed on success, they adopted the attitude of “let’s try until we succeed.” What a great attitude. It worked very well.
So, as your process program spreads out in your organization, train your eye to spot the small successes. There’s a popular acronym that’s been floating around for centuries: QED. It’s from the Latin phrase quod erat demonstrandum. It means, “There’s the proof!” My friend, Alan Mann, a quality specialist working in the Washington D.C. area, named a quality program he helped design QED: Quality Execution and Delivery. After it was in broad use, whenever he would notice another of a series of small successes, Alan could feel justified in announcing, “QED!” In other words, “There’s the proof, guys, that our process works.”
To encourage sustained process improvement, look for success everywhere you can. Do it by walking around and observing. Do it by finding true pleasure in your people working toward goals they’ve set. Seek out feedback. People will be anxious to tell you what’s working well, proud to announce what they have discovered to work well.
Celebrate these small successes. Let people know you are aware of the progress, that you appreciate it, that it means something to the company. You might consider small tokens of appreciation. Even silly things like awarding process progress cakes to a group or awarding success plaques to teams can be very positive reinforcements. As long as you yourself take these little gestures seriously, you can be pretty much assured that your teams will accept them gratefully.
9. Public Announcements
As we discussed earlier, it’s important to visibly demonstrate support for your process program. If the program is seen as being an integral part of the business and an important part of the overall corporate culture, then the program will probably be embraced. That’s why it’s important that executive management shows they are behind the program. And that’s why it’s important to tie incentives to the program.
Along these same lines, it’s important to keep the message of process improvement and program commitment alive in the day-to-day culture of the organization. A good way to promote this is through public announcement.
Many companies are required to report how they are doing financially. They issue quarterly and annual reports. Those are forms of public announcements. You should consider doing the same thing, internally or even externally, for your process program.
There are many ways you can do this, but they all aim to hit the same target: communicating your process commitment and your process achievements as forms of business success. From time to time, the company should publicly announce its progress and its goals in terms of improvement. Some ways of making these kinds of public announcements are:
- Newsletters
Regular articles in company newsletters that report on process program use and efficiencies in the organization
- Press releases
Sent to local and national media sources that announce program success, extensions, and recognition
- Posters
Displayed around the facilities that remind people of the company’s reliance on process and the part it plays in the organization’s overall identity
- Inserts
Perhaps in pay envelopes or company communiqués that ask for improvement ideas, nominations for process awards, or new support suggestions
There are a couple of good reasons for supporting your program with these techniques.
It Makes Good Business Sense
Public announcements of your company’s commitment to process and its evolving success with process tells a good business story. It’s one that Wall Street is learning to pay attention to. More and more, financial analysts and institutions are including process-related questions in their assessments of corporate value and stability. What was your IT spending last year? How critical is the growth of IT in your strategic plans? Do your IT units have a process program? What kind of program is it? How is it being managed? When you begin to communicate inside and outside that process is part of your business tool set, you gain the perception that you take your business seriously, that you are working to strategically position it for continued success.
Shows Commitment at the Highest Level
When the executive suite invests in public announcements of process progress, the rest of the organization will begin to pick up on the vibe. Of course, the communication must reflect a true commitment to process improvement—that’s what the line force will really pick up on—but the visible expression goes a long way to expressing that commitment.
You’ve seen how it’s important to expect only the kind of commitment to the program that you’re willing to make. This idea of public announcement, of open announcements, is an extension of that. These techniques keep the voice of commitment resonating in the hallways. I have just completed an engagement with a major Medicare claims management company. Naturally, any company dealing with Medicare claims must comply with a host of regulations; it’s essential to the integrity of the business. Everywhere you walked around the place—and this was a huge campus—you would see signs that read, “Compliance. It’s not a style job. It’s a job style.” That’s the kind of message that after a while really takes hold in the culture of the organization.
10. Measure, Measure
Measuring is important in process improvement. You’ve probably heard that. Maybe a few times. The problem I have found is that the people who are the ones saying it may seem to believe it, but they don’t seem sure why. That often leads to a common misdirection with process improvement programs: thinking you have to support it with a complex measurement program.
When people are led down that path, the result can indeed be a very complex measurement program, maybe even a good one, one that on paper promises to reveal a host of nuances and facets of your process set. But then comes the chore of doing the measuring: finding someone to amass and collect the data, analyzing and figuring out what the results might indicate, reporting and communicating the results, and then deciding what to do with it all.
What happens next—after the paper program is admired—is often nothing. It takes work to collect measures. It takes energy. And resources, and time, and (admit it) interest. When an organization drifts from the chief purpose and use of process program measurements and creates a mathematical and statistical Methuselah, no one wants to be bothered with it. No one wants to look at it. It appears too cumbersome, too tangled, or like too much work. Besides, people might think, why are we collecting all this data anyway?
Measuring is important in process improvement. But the reason is simple. Measurements tell you how you are progressing. They help show you the direction you are moving in. A trip odometer is a measurement system. A compass is a measurement system. Kricket Ichwantoro and Nicole Whitelaw, the process quality analysts I try to work with whenever I can, know the measurement conundrum well. They often step in to help IT shops plan for and develop metrics for new or existing process programs. Their common philosophy is pretty straightforward: keep it straightforward.
The measurements you define will work best when they possess three traits:
The measures tie to hard business objectives.
The measures give you meaningful information.
The measures are things your people can identify and collect.
With those traits in place, you don’t need a complex measurement approach to help analyze your process program. If the approach you design reflects real business needs, if it contains data that means something to the organization, and if it focuses on data that’s readily available, you can go a long way toward setting up the foundation of what can become, with use and improvement, a solid metrics-analysis program.
To begin with, though, two things are handy to consider: measure to monitor and measure to know.
Measure to Monitor
The concept of measure to monitor sets the stage for the opening advantage metrics can deliver. Regularly measuring your process program is an effective way to monitor the program’s affinity with business objectives and project efficiencies.
As mentioned in Chapter 3, one of the key factors in establishing an effective process program is to tie the activities in your program to overall business objectives. It’s important to shape your program to the needs of the business, and it’s important to demonstrate that your program is helping your organization achieve those objectives. And so, as you decide what kind of measures you might begin to trace through your organization, think about what you’d like to demonstrate.
Is fidelity to schedules a point of special interest? Is the rate of resource churn of particular concern? Budget? Length of project phases? The number of change requests?
All of these kinds of metrics—quantitative snapshots of evolving activity—can be used to help you monitor how your projects are doing. Not just in retrospect, but in real time as your project unfolds, so that you can better manage the unfolding.
Measuring can also help you monitor the performance potential of your processes. Not just how things are working now, but how things will probably work later on: process performance. Even if your measures begin simply in a qualitative mode, you can begin to discern how well the processes, procedures, and other tools that you’ve implemented are working for your teams.
With time, this facet can become the greatest growth factor of a process program. The ultimate achievement is to measure the performance of your processes to such a degree that your people, by implementing the processes, can predict quantitatively how they will perform and thus anticipate how the overall project will perform.
That’s quite an achievement. And many process-centric companies have attained that achievement. But for now, for what we are after—sustained process improvement—a little less is just as respected. You needn’t begin with what you know you know. It can be just as valuable to begin with what you’d like to know.
Measure to Know
Over time, as your measurement repository grows, the information that begins to accrue will point toward opportunities for improvement. The repository will give you a foundation to know what to improve. The following is an example.
If you’re monitoring how well your teams comply with published processes, and your auditors are recording noncompliance issues, their measures might indicate that for one particular process, noncompliance is abnormally high. This might indicate a few things. Maybe your training needs to be beefed up for that procedure. Maybe team members haven’t been trained to effectively follow the process. Then again, maybe the teams are regularly avoiding the procedure because it doesn’t fit the way work flows. Or maybe the way it’s built does not allow for the kinds of tailoring that’s needed for the particular activity across different projects.
So measurements, carefully designed to reflect your business and your program, can help you know what you might need to improve.
Measurements can also establish avenues to improve elements of your program in specific ways. As you begin to look at ISO 9001, CMMI, and Six Sigma in Part 2 of this book, you’ll see how these models place particular emphasis on metrics. And with greater levels of capability and sophistication come increased measurement. The idea these models support is that metrics provide valuable information for making data-driven decisions. In other words, your experience, judgment, and intuition are valuable assets for your process improvement strategies. But a strong complement to these is the solid component that data supplies.
Measuring the right things in the right amounts will help you sustain process improvement activities by providing you with hard data that can complement your experience and judgment when it comes to refining the program for more efficient use in your organization.
11. Periodic Reassessment
To successfully sustain your process program over time, so that it develops in sync with your business operations and in line with the responsibilities of your workforce, you will need to periodically assess the program.
After all, business changes over time. Objectives change. Technologies change. People change. Your process program, being a reflection of your business activities then, should also be expected to change.
As discussed in "6. Active Feedback Mechanisms,” earlier in this chapter, you can support this by setting into place a series of feedback mechanisms within your business units. These mechanisms give your people a path for making improvement suggestions over time. At the same time (as discussed earlier in "3. Participate“), you, your process teams, and your executive management have all been actively involved in monitoring the program and in assessing its effectiveness on a daily basis. The result is that your organization should be able to accumulate a good foundation of improvement information that can be used to refine program operations.
The balance to seek in refining your program comes with the frequency of updates. Continuous improvement is the governing theme in almost all process and quality management systems. But that doesn’t mean constant change. In fact, one could argue that too much improvement can actually wreak more havoc than no improvement at all. Process programs are intended to help an organization achieve a degree of operational stability. And for this to be true, the program itself must achieve a degree of stability.
This brings us to the concept of strategic reassessment.
The idea here is that the organization should reassess its program at set strategic intervals. In well-designed systems, business success ties closely to process program success. To help keep the two in line, you and your process teams should plan to review the program in depth at certain defined intervals. And the organization as a whole should be aware of these intervals.
The frequency here naturally depends on the particulars of your program. In dynamic organizations in emerging markets, with new processes, the reassessment period could be as short as every six months. For more stable businesses, in mature industries, and using well-refined processes, the period might be every three years or so.
But in each case, the strategy is the same: to refresh the program as needed for its next cycle of productivity.
Chapter 3 looked at the steps you typically undertake to establish a process program within an organization. Some of those steps included establishing your process objectives, performing an analysis of existing business practices, and then creating and refining processes to better tie the practices to the objectives. These happen to be the same kinds of steps you’ll take when you conduct a reassessment. It represents its own process improvement project, and so it should be treated as such, coordinated through the organization as both an executive and strategic effort.
In brief, there are 10 steps you usually follow when coordinating a reassessment of your program. Here they are:
Establish the reassessment period and scope, and communicate it to the organization.
Collect feedback and observations over time, positioning for reassessment.
Plan the reassessment activities.
Announce the reassessment initiative to impacted business groups.
Create improvement data review committees (as appropriate).
Create improvement teams as appropriate.
Conduct reassessment activities.
Analyze, validate, and prioritize assessment results.
Create improvement plans.
Implement improvement plans.
These steps will help you execute the reassessment in a smooth manner, and in a way that involves as many of your line people as practical. The push of this approach is to first establish the assessment interval. This will help orient people as to how often they can expect the program to change. This will steer them away from making frequent and willy-nilly recommendations, and focus their inputs where they will have the most impact. Next is the action to conscientiously collect and store feedback and observation improvement data over the time between intervals. Don’t simply rely on the assessment period to find out what you might need to do. Reference all the data your people have been providing you. Then thoroughly plan the assessment activities. You want to have a solid pan here for two reasons. One, you’ll no doubt have limited time to perform the assessment. Two, you’ll want to coordinate assessment activities in a way that reaches the broadest groups of people while intruding on normal work duties as little as possible.
After that, you should appoint people inside the organization to participate in the assessment activities. You’ll want groups to evaluate existing process improvement recommendations, and you’ll want groups who can go out and investigate current activities across the organization.
Once the planned activities have been conducted, you should have the groups analyze, validate, and prioritize improvement opportunities according to their potential impact and their promise of positive influence on business activities. From this, you can begin to create improvement proposals that address specific ways in which the elements of your process program can be adjusted or refined to increase efficiencies.
After a review and a decision as to which improvements might work best for the organization at this point in time, you can move to implement the refinements.
For some, the effort of conducting periodic reassessments of your process program may seem like a major task. And in fact, it should be treated as a serious effort. It is certainly a significant and important task. But similar energies are spent on business infrastructures and regulatory positions all the time. Why shouldn’t similar energies be spent on the program that guides what might be a major portion of the business?
The sustainability of any process program is one of the surest guarantors of success that a program can demonstrate. And effective sustainment comes from ensuring that your program retains its business relevance in the organization. This relevance links your program to productivity, to workplace efficiencies, and to acceptance by the work force. At the same time, it serves as one of the key controllable assets that drive achievement of business objectives. Given all this, periodic reassessment might well be considered as basic a practice as changing the oil in your car or replacing the filter in your air conditioner.
12. Appreciate the Journey
Process improvement is not a project in the sense that we think of for IT projects. There are no start and end dates; it is not a single, self-bounded initiative. And it is not a goal, someplace where you arrive and then issue congratulations all around for a job well done.
Process improvement is a Way. It is the way you see your company. It is the way you do business. And so the only time it should draw to a conclusion is when your business draws to a conclusion. It is a way to plan for business, to manage core business activities, and to oversee business progress and success. And it is a way to forge tangible links between the three core elements of any organizational design: people, activities, and technology.
Process improvement, and its larger discipline, process management, are also about standards, consistencies, and common expectations. They can be used to set the bar for performance, for production, for service, for responsiveness. And they can provide much needed benchmarks for creating and delivering the most important business differentiator of them all: quality.
Performance standards, operational efficiencies, quality: these three ingredients—this mix that makes up success—have been recognized as sound operating principles in most business markets for decades. Look at Detroit. Look at the way cars roll off the assembly line. The days of the Gremlin, the Vega, and the Chevette are long gone. What are rolling now are rock-solid, dependable automobiles. It’s nothing today to think that your new car will deliver 200,000 miles with few if any headaches.
Look at Coca-Cola. That brand is recognized worldwide and sold in more countries on planet Earth than any other drink product—probably any other food product. That’s because the formula for Coke is a success formula. And all the structures and processes that drive that bottle to market drive toward the single goal of supporting and maintaining everything that Coke has come to mean to a global marketplace.
Why the technology markets have been slow to embrace process in a similar way has always puzzled me. Maybe it’s because the industry as we know it today is relatively young—barely 40 years old. Maybe it has a right to be immature. Maybe it’s because so many of it top managers have risen from the ranks of technical development. Maybe they know more about technos than technique. Then again, maybe it’s because the pace of change here is so fast, so prevalent that the temptation to run with the latest and the greatest overcomes any strategic notion toward stability.
Whatever it is, the shortcoming of our IT organizations—the shops that more and more run American business—cost over $50 billion last year. That’s $50 billion in lost profits, in misdirected energies, in lost opportunities, in abandoned projects.
When you look at it long enough and think about it deeply enough, process improvement and process management are not esoteric philosophies or abstract theories. They aren’t amorphous approaches or wall-mount placards. They are programs of action steps, concrete catalysts. They push you to the action of externalizing the fundamental understandings of any business enterprise: Why are we here? What do we do? Why do we do it? How do we do it so we make a difference?
Visit a large IT shop nearly anywhere. Ask those questions. More often than not, you’ll hear confident concordance that all that’s clearly understood. But then ask individuals. Chances are you’ll get a surprisingly wide variety of differing responses. Have those crucial and elemental defining points been externalized into guiding principles? Have they been shaped into structures and avenues that unite and coordinate? You probably know the IT industry well. What do you think?
Is process the “capital A” answer? Is it the silver bullet? No. But I do know this: the process program you create is the vessel that holds the answer. And it will often come to the aid of the company in ways that look like a silver bullet.
What the program holds is your expertise, the experience of the people in your organization. Designed properly, it should carry the best of what your organization has to offer. And so the program should hold a central position within your organization. But it is not an end-all in and of itself. It is a way that you establish to guide your people along a managed and conscientious business path. That’s the aspect of the program that should be most appreciated. It is a journey to quality, an ongoing momentum leading to increased business success.
Summary
Sustaining process improvement requires more than setting a process program in place. It requires attention to the program from multiple directions. To help sustain process improvement in your organization, consider employing some of the following techniques:
Remember what you do. Understand your products and your customers so that your process program can continually reflect the needs of both.
Weld business success to program success. Engage upper management in program commitment and use by tying business performance and process performance together.
Participate. Visibly participate in the program’s organizational use. This demonstrates that all levels of the company find value in the program and are committed to its success.
Train. Remember to provide adequate training to the organization so that various work groups can use the program in an informed and appropriate manner.
Support compliance. Provide resources to monitor process program compliance and provide guidance and support when teams need to better adhere to process guidelines.
Seek active feedback. Seek open and regular feedback on ways to improve the program.
Provide performance incentives. Give your people formal and informal awards to encourage their use of the program across daily business activities.
Measure, measure. Collect and analyze measures that help you understand, from a data viewpoint, how the program is working for you and the different business teams.
Implement periodic reassessment. Periodically reassess your program, seeking opportunities for refinement and improvement.
Appreciate the journey. Understand that process improvement is not a goal; it has no end point, no finish line. It’s a cultural atmosphere that seeks to continually make business more efficient and more effective.
[*] I know that mission statements can often become window dressing in an organization. They can even become curtains to hide what’s behind the window. But I’m taking the more positive approach in my discussion here. I’m going to assume that an organization’s mission statement is at least a close proximity to what the organization really thinks its job is, what its values are, and what goals it is built to address.
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