Why do most improvement efforts fail?
There are many factors that determine whether or not a well intended improvement effort fails. In my experience implementing many different programs across many types of organizations and making many mistakes along the way, I think there are three main categories that contribute to the lack of sustainability: Not fully understanding the processes you are trying to improve, Not adequately changing the people processes, and Not adequately changing the supporting systems.
- Understanding the processes typically involves not defining the magnitude and sources of variation. This could lead to working on the wrong things. It could also mean not fully understanding the system constraints. This results in trying to change all sub-processes as if they are equal with respect to throughput or costs. This leads to under-resourcing and not seeing end of line gains.
- The people processes involve not changing the organizational structure to put the right people in the right roles to allow them to do the right things. If you don't fundamentally put the right people in the right roles after a change effort, then you will likely not get the results and actions you need for success. Another pitfall is not designing the engaging systems that will allow for improvement to occur at the lowest level in the organization as close in time to the need as possible. A couple of examples are good workplace design, standard work and control and response plans that employees are asked to help design and improve.
- The supporting systems that allow for the right metrics and behaviors to be reviewed are update meetings, strategy sessions, budgets and alignment with the service and support departments such as HR, Accounting and IT. For examples, update meetings need to reflect the new improvement metrics and behaviors displayed in the right form that you are trying to improve or change. This will allow the manager to ask the right sets of questions versus just trying to manage through the rear view mirror.
Couple these things with the typical Lean, Six Sigma or Reliability effort and you will increase your chance of success.
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http://buildingabrandonline.com/BlakesBlog/
Good thoughts Dave; effectiveness and sustainability of improvements is correlated to effectiveness of the executive and management team and the sustained focus of that team. Easier said then found!
Agree 100%. Patience and executive buy in are keys. What I have seen is that sometimes the wrong metrics create the lack of patience as executives are still looking at the same measures before the change process. These measures are not designed to properly evaluate an improvement effort. If executives were looking at new metrics that would highlight improvements to the required behaviors, they would see progress and ask the right questions. Buy in and patience would be much easier to obtain.
Dave, Great thoughts. Another important element is getting executive buy-in and cover to implement change, even as priorities and markets shift. We've seen this, most especially in innovation, when good ideas and programs are put on the shelf, despite their long-term value, because insufficient communication and buy-in led to abandonment by the sponsor (assuming one even existed to begin with).
Dave, Well put. I had a lot of thoughts to add but when I read your post and thought about how all three categories tie into what I was going to add there wasn't the need. I would add one more to reason for failure is patience by the company. Generally when we are changing a process the hardest piece to change is the culture of the people working in the process. The culture is developed over time and in some cases over decades and the expectations of the company is that we can change that culture over weeks and months and when we don't see the expected changes we start to design competing initiatives that take away focus of the initial change process.
Thanks Dave a very succinct summary of why initiatives often will not stick.