Do Your Improvement Efforts Impact Larger Business Results?

Communicate how specific improvement efforts are affecting larger business results.

Practitioners: tactical, integrative, and strategic

Since it is strategy deployment season, OpEx TopEx number 163 fits the season. In a current strategy deployment engagement, with a frequent client, we are exposing the executive team to this new experience in strategy deployment. The relationship between specific improvement efforts and larger business results is key. I want to work from the top down in this brief piece to emphasize the relationship.

Many organizations think strategy deployment results in a multitude of improvement initiatives. That is a common point of failure. If your business performance is so bleak that you must change everything, strategy deployment is not going to save you from that. Quite frankly, I have only worked with a couple of organizations in that dire condition. What we more often encounter is the strategy deployment efforts Validate what we are doing as effective and identify those few areas where improvement activities must be focused.

When performance expectations are deployed, interpreted, and negotiated properly, these few processes with the greatest impact find their way to the surface. At one manufacturing site, when we deployed to the functional and process level, we identified four powerful projects to pursue. When we finished all four of these projects, this factory rose through the ranks from last in three of the four major performance categories to first in all four. This transformation took ten months to complete. We did not initiate 50 projects, we finished four, but these four had enormous impact on the larger business results.

What is the Connection to Larger Business Results?

This is the point. When we flip the script and move from bottom up, we should be able to understand the same thing. How does the project impact the top-level strategic imperatives? How do we know we are working on the right problems? This is one of the greatest failures of our lean efforts. Misaligned and unsustainable improvement activities. The SMPL framework emphasizes the relationship between strategy and management, specifically, the communication of results and the knowledge of the impact to higher level results.

Whether you are working through the strategy deployment phases or addressing a process level performance failure, we communicate how specific improvement efforts are affecting larger business results. If we can’t do that then I want to know why we are consuming organizational resources. The framework is effective no matter which direction we are facing. When this relationship is in place, our performance system becomes a powerful tool for delivering results, not a wasteful use of precious resources.