As a Master Black Belt, I have been working for years with subject matter experts, team leads, and senior managers to provide a structured approach to process improvement. The objective of the process improvement champion is to pave the steps for safe and structured transformation, and prepare the stakeholders for continuous improvement, once the foundations of a healthy process have been set. I know, as a matter of fact, that the methodology works: you follow the steps, resulting in a clear improvement of your KPIs. It is a fact: the approach works.
Yet, I recently witnessed an awkward situation, with an expert who applied the methodology so well that his KPI reached 100% ! Top Quality. The paramount of Process Improvement rigorously followed by Continuous Improvement. Nothing to do anymore, the process had reached 100% quality.
The Gap between the KPIs and their intended outcome
When you are a change leader, your mission, together with improving processes, is to challenge the status quo. Which is what the change management leader of the value chain did in that specific situation, puzzled by the fact that a KPI could even reach 100%. How can you imagine reaching 100% quality? What does it mean? And indeed, without surprise, the conclusion was that the process was far from being perfect. Even worst: on that particular day when the KPI showed a magnificent 100% in the dashboard, the process was in the deeper crisis ever seen in the history of the company. On that particular day, the process had 0 defect, precisely because there was 0 input. The process had failed to a point of not even receiving the input. Instead of total quality, the reality was total failure.
This makes me think.
Of course in that context, when the KPI shows 100%, you naturally get suspicious and challenge what you see. Then you quickly realize that your dashboard is obviously wrong; you analyze the process and you find out. But how can you challenge your KPIs in not so abnormal situations? If the purpose of a dashboard is to provide a representation of the reality, how reliable is the approach? How accurate are your numbers in translating the reality of the ground? You can do as many Gage R&Rs as you want, there will always be a small gap between the KPIs and the reality. Why? And how to concretely monitor that gap and work with it?
In my opinion, this gap comes from the fact that KPIs and dashboard are made in order to monitor a process piece by piece instead of monitoring the big picture. I have very, very seldom seen KPIs translating the performance of an end-to-end process, from suppliers to customers, from inputs to outputs. And it is the case because our process improvement and continuous improvement programs aim at building incremental changes instead of at obliterating. Even if every process improvement champions are fully aware that silos are destructive in building sustainable change, when working in an organization of a certain size, we are all guilty of improving a limited scope of a given process, without holistically considering the connections to the big picture. We identify a small portion of a process, because the improvement is then easier to control and implement; and I believe it is the right thing to do. It would be unrealistic and impractical to even try changing everything each time we try to improve a small part of a given process. However, when the process improvement initiative ends, the mistake is to build the foundations to continuous improvement on the very small part of the process in scope of the improvement program.
Transitioning from Process Improvement to Continuous Improvement
Instead, the approach that process improvement leaders should drive in the Control or Closing phase of a process improvement initiative should be to define KPIs, dashboards, control plans linking back the outcomes of the improvement to the bigger goal of the process in the context of the value delivered by the process for the end customers. Not only this approach would help to ensure the process improvements are stabilized for the end customers, but it would also force the process improvement team and the process owner to think bigger. To think about improving the improvement for the value it delivers to the end clients, rather than for the sake of improving a meaningless dashboard – certainly meaningful for the department manager, but meaningless for the customers. It would force process improvement teams to obliterate rather than to just build incremental changes.
Furthermore, it would force the process owner to think big, and to define his next improvement priority with the intention to deliver further value to the customers, rather than incremental value for his or her own team, in its silo. Defining the right KPIs, the right tools helping to figure out how well a process is connected to the big picture will help the process owner and the team in charge of the process to continuously connect the outcomes to the end goal – ie the expectations of the end customers – even if the specific process is only directly linked to internal customers.
Metrics should not just tell you how well a process performs; they should more importantly tell you the actual impacts a given process has on the end customers.
Fundamental transformation
Once you see the big picture, as a change leader, you start thinking obliteration instead of incremental change. Instead of just aiming at increasing your automation rate by 2%, you aim at increasing your time to market by 0.5%; instead of just aiming at reducing by 20% the number of defects or breaks in your siloed process, you aim at increasing your client satisfaction by 10 points in the next survey.
Yet, this approach is a lot more complicated, as, in 95% of the situations, the change initiatives will likely not impact only the department you can control. You will have to involve other departments who will not necessarily see immediate benefits for them, in their own silo. You will have to get buy-in from people who do not care about your own siloed performances, and who will not see their own KPIs changed a tiny bit by the improvements you are in charge of delivering. You will have to get time commitment from other departments who have very different priorities than yours. As if the priority of a department should overcome the priority to improve the customers satisfaction.
And on top of that, you will have to find innovative ways of performing the process. Instead of fixing a small bug on which you can easily define technical requirements, instead of fixing a small pain point here and there, you will have to think differently about the process. You will have to get back to your SIPOC, list your inputs and outputs, define how the customers are satisfied by the outputs, and then only, define how differently the process could run. The design of the new process will be tough. And think then about the difficulty to implement such a new process. You will have to define a difficult path to get to the new process, manage the change throughout the change, get the buy-in at all levels of the organization…. And manage in parallel the “old” process until the new process is fully in place. It will be hard and long.
Yet, it is the only way to transform an organization when the need arises. We often give up because we are better satisfied by improving a small area that we can control than by truly making an impact on the end customers. And so we forget the Big Picture. We think small and local. And we miss the point. Thinking big and global is certainly more difficult, but it is, in my mind, the only way to implement true and sustainable change, that delivers real value to the end clients.
In conclusion, there are some times when an organization has to think differently about how it operates for its customers. When that time comes, incremental changes will not help the management to reach its objective. Change leaders have the duty to help managers to drive these transformations, by giving them the glasses – the KPIs – to see the process differently, and think it in another way. Have you lived such fundamental transformation from the inside? Can you share how you helped managers to think differently?
The Process Excellence String of Ariadne 