Operational Excellence Barriers
By Kevin McManus, Chief Excellence Officer and Systems Guy, Great Systems
What are Your Operational Excellence Barriers?
Poor work system design is the primary cause of our failure to sustain high levels of performance. Over time, I have discovered ten key work systems that must work well, and in sync, in order for sustained operational excellence to be realized. Similarly, I was able to identify ten common operational excellence barriers. Common barriers include poorly designed leadership development systems, technology utilization systems, and measurement systems. What might your operational excellence barriers be?
Systems give you what you design them to give you. Your personal food selection process determines to some degree the performance of your body. Think about the compensation system you use at work – the ‘package’ of wages, benefits, and work environment. How does that ‘package’ affect the levels of motivation, ownership, and commitment your people feel towards your organization? Commonly, operational excellence barriers exist in organizations when work systems fail to encourage and support high performance work.
EXPLORE MORE: How Great are Your Work Systems?
How Do You Optimize Work System Performance?
This is not an ‘either – or’ argument. Organizational performance is both constrained and aided by systems design and integration. The positive performance of one system offsets the negative impact of a different system. For example, a strong leadership system overcomes some of the negatives that result from a poor compensation work system design. The goal, of course, is to get all ten work systems to spin in a positive direction, in a consistent manner. That is how you optimize work system performance.
Think of poor work systems design as being similar to a dog on a leash in the back yard. The length of the leash is the constraint to the dog’s ability to explore and defend the yard. We can view the leash as a operational excellence barrier or performance restrictor plate. If we optimize the length of the leash, we provide benefits to both the dog and the owner. If we find and remove other performance restrictors, we gain further benefits.
As your key work systems improve in their design, site, business unit, and organizational performance improve. However, certain work systems contribute more than others. Work to get all key work systems and processes spinning in a positive direction. Then, they provide more and more value. Plus, they improve consistently over time.
LEARN MORE: Process Improvement Strategies
Top Ten Operational Excellence Barriers and Work Systems
The key is that you must change your work systems. Let’s explore these barriers to process improvement, and the types of changes we need to overcome them, in a little more detail.
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#1: Limited time built into job for improvement – Provide little time for projects
Many people don’t have time built into their jobs for projects. People often expect certain levels of performance to be reached, even though the existing processes are not capable of performing consistently at those levels. Time is the fuel for high performance because it is required to improve process capability. There is a direct correlation between available project time in your jobs and your improvement rate. Where does this time come from?
For starters, consider using process improvement tools to minimize the substantial waste that exists in your meeting and e-mail / text processes. In most organizations, no one measures these processes, even though they often require 50% of a leader’s time each day. What do you do to reduce meeting defects and optimize meeting cycle time? What actions do you take to reduce non-value added e-mails and texts?
LEARN MORE: How to Measure and Improve Your Job Design Work System
#2: Poor alignment in leader actions and behaviors – Allow leaders to behave badly
In many companies, leaders behave as they wish, at least up to a point. For example, they don’t communicate enough with their people. When they do, that communication is often negative. They may also act in ways that are inconsistent with the mission, vision, and values of the organization. Many leaders are not very good coaches, and their positive recognition and rule enforcement skills are often weak, if not non-existent.
How do we improve leadership behaviors on the job? For starters, consider using a portion of your annual climate survey to gauge leadership behavior consistency. FedEx has done this for over twenty years via their Survey-Feedback-Action process. Most Malcolm Baldrige Performance Excellence award recipients doing something similar.
DISCOVER MORE: Measuring Leadership Behavior Effectiveness
#3: High levels of unknown waste, limited process-based improvement – Ignore non-operations processes
Most improvement efforts focus on process improvement in the value stream. Processes that support, and often drive, that value stream, such as sales, marketing, human resources, and accounting, often lack improvement expectations. How often do you see your accounting team talk about the efforts they make to minimize the time required to close the books each month?
How do we engage every work team in daily, process-focused improvement? You need structure, for starters. Design each job to include the necessary amount of project time. Job descriptions for all staff must include process-based measures and quantitative improvement expectations. Most importantly, build such expectations into the job descriptions and compensation plans of leaders at ALL levels.
LEARN MORE: How to Measure and Improve Your Measurement Work System
#4: Low commitment to teamwork and success –Â Lay people off as you improve processes
Instead of being recognized in a positive manner for their improvement successes, people often see the jobs of their friends, or even their own jobs, being eliminated. On more than one occasion, I have seen people purposely, but not admittedly, slow down or even fight against efforts to improve to help avoid personal or peer job loss.
How do we save money if we can’t reduce headcount? This is the wrong question to ask. Instead, we should ask how can we grow the business through sales, marketing, and other customer satisfaction-based process refinements. How can we make better use of the people we have on staff?
We don’t have to replace people one-for-one as they retire or otherwise leave, but layoffs are the ‘kiss of death’ to an improvement effort. The real lean upside comes when we improve our processes so that they provide consistent and high value to every customer.
EXPLORE MORE: How to Measure and Improve Your Strategic Planning Work System
#5: Low idea generation rates and minimal innovation – Fail to recognize improvement success
As we learned with the last barrier, laying people off as a reward for improving their processes is not an effective strategy. Enhanced job security is one real benefit of a process improvement effort, but many people want more than that. How should we recognize improvement success?
When it comes to recognizing employee improvement efforts, there are a lot of options to consider. Certificates, mugs, and other giveaways lose their motivational impact over time. Spot rewards and employee of the month recognition often discount the efforts of others who helped make the improvement happen. Provide a financial stake in the success of the business via profit sharing and possible stock ownership as best practices. Many leaders are hesitant, however, to take such a bold move.
EXPLORE MORE: How to Measure and Improve Your Compensation Work System
#6: Low product or service value – Ignore process capability
This barrier is a close relative of the error we often make when setting performance goals. A work system gives you what it is designed to give you. Another way to say this is that you can only go so fast. Don’t make the mistake of expecting too much change in the short-term. Consistent, daily process measurement is a ‘must’ to understand any process.
Apply statistical process control techniques, such as a moving range control chart, to measure and analyze process performance over time and to learn what a given process is currently capable of outcome-wise. This tool also tells you the probability of achieving a given performance level. To go outside the lines and improve to a significant degree often requires creativity and innovative ideas, not just process tweaks.
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#7: One way ‘Negative Street’ is the communication road most traveled – Restrict information flows
All organizations have resource limitations in the form of time and money constraints. Strategic priorities exist as well. People don’t understand why their ideas are not selected for implementation when leaders fail to teach their teams about resource constraints. They wonder why certain improvement options are placed on hold or dropped, versus put in place.
One of the key first steps to improve the business literacy level in any organization is to get the information out there. The best way to fix this problem is to have senior leadership create and follow a formal communication plan. Such a plan defines the key communication vehicles used within the organization to communicate with the workforce. This plan also identifies frequency of use, the affected groups, and the type of information communicated for each communication vehicle in use.
LEARN MORE: How to Measure and Improve Your Communication Work System
#8: Low use of digital, AI, and wearable options – Too many manual and vintage work flows flows
How often do you see people still move paper around as they process products and provide services? How many of your leaders spend time on document review for accuracy and completeness prior to approval? Are there times where they either delay the process and / or fail to catch key errors or omissions? In this day and age, low-cost technology exists to replace most routine tasks, be they cognitive or non-cognitive in nature. Why are we stuck in the past?
A lot of our problems is explained simply by the unprecedented rate of technology change – Moore’s Law – in memory capacity and processing speed. Also, our schedules keep us from going out and looking at what others are doing from a best practice standpoint. The digital transformation has begun, whether we recognize it or are affected by it … yet.
DISCOVER MORE: How to Measure and Improve Your Technology Application Work System
#9: Use the wrong measures in the wrong ways – Focus on reactive concerns result in lost opportunity, profits, and cash
Too many organizations fail to measure a significant percentage of their work processes at the process level? Instead, leaders use aggregate, and often static, metrics to review site, business unit, and organizational performance. Most leaders can spot big problems at the 10,000 meter level, but more sensitive, process-based measures are needed to find and fix costly recurring challenges.
How do your people spend their time each day to support your different product and service value streams? How much of this daily work time is spent on non-value added activities? If you expect all leaders to capture, analyze, and improve the key measures for the processes they own, you can accelerate your improvement rate dramatically. Provide time in your Leader Standard Work plans to help drive process-based improvement across all work process types.
LEARN MORE: How to Measure and Improve Your Measurement Work System
#10: Little practice, low retention, wrong application – Failures in skill development and transfer result in daily errors, failures, defects, and injuries.
Little time exists for formal classroom training in our next generation workplace. Few leaders have developed their ability to coach and teach in real-time. Remote learning can work, but most have yet to master the requisite content design and delivery shifts.
The leverage point lies with local leaders who can teach the basics of effective process execution to a diverse team, on a real-time, on-demand basis. The use of low-cost video and audio can provide all team members with on-demand content to drive personal development. However, too many of us are still trapped in our vintage training design and delivery systems.
LEARN MORE: How to Measure and Improve Your Training and Learning Work System
Minimizing Operational Excellence Barriers
To change behaviors, you need to change systems. Leaders need to remove, or at least minimize, their existing operational excellence barriers. It will not work to simply ask for, let alone demand, behavior change. Click on the above operational excellence barriers and/or systems to learn more.
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Keep improving! Kevin McManus, Chief Excellence Officer and Systems Guy, Great Systems
If you would like more information about the improvement tools and systems I have to offer, please send me an e-mail at kevin@greatsystems.com.
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