Chapter 15

Ten Tips for Smoothing the Transformation Process

In This Chapter

Keeping lines of communication open

Acknowledging each success

Learning from your mistakes

This chapter summarises ten best practices to help you achieve a successful transformation. If you adopt these you are more likely to stay focused on the right things and carry the people you need along with you. There’s no panacea and your transformation journey may be long and challenging but you’ll make it seem shorter and straighter with these tips.

Obtain Leadership Ownership

Business transformation starts at the top. Success can only be achieved through having a clear overall vision and related business strategy. Obviously, it’s in implementing that strategy that things most often go wrong. Strategy is the responsibility of the leadership team of the organisation; so is its deployment. Hence obtaining leadership ownership is fundamental and critical to success.

Leadership ownership is both individual and collective. While individual leaders may be responsible for some particular aspect of strategy and transformation, success only comes about if all members of the leadership team fully buy into and support the transformation. Any doubters or leaders who are ‘off-message’ will likely derail the whole effort. The analogy of the chain being as strong as its weakest link applies here. Without the wholehearted commitment of the entire leadership team those people in the organisation who are reluctant to change will exploit the conflicting messages to block or hinder progress.

Ultimately the senior team may have to replace members not wholly committed to the agreed course of transformation.

Communicate, Communicate, Communicate

Successful transformation requires that the actions of all those involved be tightly aligned to the critical transformation objective. Unless people at all levels – from the leadership team through to frontline managers and staff – are kept informed and engaged, this alignment won’t be achieved. And it’s not just top-down communication that’s important; people also need to be able to challenge what’s being demanded of them so that the eventual plans and actions are realistic – albeit stretching. The ‘catchball’ process through which the different levels or groups of managers align their objectives (described in Chapter 8) is the main vehicle for much of the communication during the planning phases, but the other normal internal communications media will need to support and inform people as the plan unfolds.

The RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted, informed) model is appropriate here. Distinguish those who are directly responsible at the sharp end for the actions from those who are accountable and ultimately responsible, those who are in the loop and need to be consulted, and finally those who need to be informed so that they can take appropriate action as a result. Communications with those to be consulted must be two-way; in contrast, those with people who need to be informed must essentially be one-way. The key point is to structure an overarching communications plan that identifies the audience at different levels and locations and the role that each member plays. The plan should include the media specific to transformation, such as the catchball process, as well as normal internal communications such as team briefs, emails, intranet messages, and others.

You can never over-communicate during the transformation process, although timing is of the essence.

Use Strategy Deployment to Drive Improvement Programmes

Strategy deployment in its Hoshin Kanri form is the best-in-class mechanism available to you for decomposing and aligning the actions and plans in the transformation process. Improvement programmes only deliver to their full potential if fully aligned to the strategy and core objectives of the organisation. So it’s natural that strategy deployment should be the vehicle used to drive your improvement programmes.

Remember that strategy deployment focuses on a very limited number of breakthrough objectives and includes a separate stream for business fundamentals – or everyday operational excellence. Likewise, you must tightly limit the scope of specific improvement projects to avoid loss of focus and ensure timely delivery. In both senses ‘less is more’ here – not everything needs to be changed to effect a transformation. Addressing the critical few objectives and undertaking the vital projects can enable a quantum leap.

Don’t Let Perfect Get in the Way of Better

Business transformation, strategy deployment and Lean Six Sigma aren’t difficult concepts but they require effort and commitment to implement effectively. So it’s not surprising if you make mistakes along the way, or at the very least don’t get it perfectly right the first time you try.

As the old adage tells us, ‘practice makes perfect’ and this is as true of business transformation as it is of any sporting or other activity in life. When one of the authors first implemented strategy deployment in his operation at Hewlett-Packard, it took two rounds of annual planning before the approach became fully effective. The company made the mistake of trying to apply strategy deployment to too many business objectives rather than just the absolute critical few. However, it persisted with the approach and eventually it transformed the way the company undertook business planning. There’s no more effective method of aligning critical objectives across an organisation – and even if imperfect the first time around, the degree of alignment will be better than without attempting this approach.

Lean Six Sigma is about continuous improvement. Obviously, you don’t seek to do things imperfectly to give you the headroom for continuous improvement, but the reality is that, no matter how well you do things, room for improvement always exists. Toyota has been seeking to eliminate waste for more than 40 years and continues to do so. Its ongoing business transformation, strategy deployment and Lean Six Sigma efforts mean that it is constantly dealing with this issue. Your aspiration is perfection – but getting there is a never-ending journey.

Recognise and Celebrate Successes

There’s no better predictor of success than success itself. So, success needs to be encouraged, celebrated, and recognised. A successful outcome will act as a ‘proof of concept’, encouraging participants to continue and others to replicate and extend the transformation process. Evidence suggests that fun is itself a strong motivating factor – so no better combination exists than success and its celebration and recognition.

Recognition doesn’t need to be expensive. A simple handwritten note from the CEO or the opportunity to present a successful project to the leadership team or more widely across the organisation can have more impact than a prize or monetary award. Simply being valued and being seen to be valued may be reward enough!

Create a Capability Maturity Roadmap and Regularly Review it

We all need a map from time to time to help us reach our destination. Business transformation is a journey and the capability maturity matrix (see Chapter 5) helps you to better understand where you are and where you’re headed. It acts as your compass and guide, and the information contained includes the experience of others who have journeyed there before us on their particular transformations. Better you learn from the mistakes of others than have to learn from your own – and you can learn from their successes as well.

Transformation often comes in stages and usually takes time. During the journey the environment can change; competitors don’t stand still and also respond to changes in the market place, whether or not in direct response to the specific transformation you’re undertaking. It’s not just a question of reviewing where you are on the roadmap; the roadmap itself needs to be periodically and regularly reviewed and amendments made in line with circumstances. Maintaining an up-to-date roadmap is an integral part of the overall strategy deployment process and is covered in Chapter 14.

Provide Appropriate Training as it is Needed

Training is essential for all levels in the organisation to effectively implement transformation through Lean Six Sigma. At the very least, the leadership team and their reports will need to learn how to undertake strategy deployment, and those at the operational level will need to learn how to lead and undertake Lean Six Sigma projects.

Training is most effective when delivered ‘just ahead of time’: too early and it will be forgotten if not built on through practice (remember that learning isn’t just in the classroom but is also on the job); too late and it will clearly be of little use. Plan training sessions well in advance of when they’re actually needed and bear in mind that not everyone learns and absorbs new techniques and ways of working at the same pace.

To avoid learning overload, offer training as it’s needed.

Encourage Leaders and Managers to Manage Daily Improvements

Although transformational change is exciting and important, attending to the daily operational issues is also vital. Simply ‘fixing’ the problems that occur is insufficient. Yes, you need to fix them, but you need to go further and improve the activities and processes that caused them in the first place so that the same problems don’t recur in the future.

To this end, you must encourage leaders and managers to manage daily improvements. Everyone in the organisation must be encouraged to identify problems, defects and waste and to make these visible so that they can be addressed. In many instances, the individuals and teams that discover them may be able to lead the improvement actions themselves; in other cases, they may not have the skills, competencies, or resources to do so, in which case leaders and managers need to identify and enable others to do so as part of the overall continuous improvement effort.

Visual management is a key approach to helping identify and manage work backlogs and other problems and issues. Simple methods of presenting real-time information and demonstrating whether processes and systems are operating in a normal manner underpin this. Co-ordinating actions locally through daily team meetings at the start or end of shifts, particularly when located around visual information displays, can transform daily performance and highlight issues to be addressed through structured improvement activity.

Listen to the Voice of Your Customers and Other Stakeholders

The first principle of Lean Six Sigma is to listen to the ‘voice of the customer’ and focus on their requirements. Remember that any instance where you fail to meet the needs of a customer – or other key stakeholder – is a ‘defect’ and one of the key goals of Lean Six Sigma is to minimise the level and rate of defects. Customer satisfaction and profit are inextricably intertwined. However, customer requirements aren’t static; things that delight the customer and create market leadership today may rapidly become obsolete.

So listening to the voice of your customers isn’t something to be done just once – for example, before starting out on a business transformation. You need to do so continuously to ensure that you promptly pick up on changes in customer needs and market trends.

Don’t Be Afraid to Make Mistakes, but Do Learn from Them

Making a mistake isn’t a sin – but not learning from it arguably is. One story goes that a senior manager at IBM made an error of judgement that cost the company $2 billion; when he was summoned by his boss he fully expected to be fired. But his boss simply commented that he’d just spent $2 billion on training his manager and that the real mistake would be if he wasted that training investment by firing him. Clearly, people don’t seek to make mistakes; indeed, most aspire to getting things ‘right first time, every time’. However, if you’re too afraid of making mistakes, then you’ll never get anything done.

You need to plan and train well to maximise the likelihood of getting things right, but be prepared sometimes to get them wrong and then to learn from the experience. Where possible, learn from the mistakes of others rather than repeating them personally. Where doing so isn’t possible or practical, then don’t be so afraid of making mistakes that nothing gets done. What’s vital overall is optimising the level of risk; there comes a point where the risk to the business of inaction overtakes the risk of making mistakes by acting. Over time you reduce the overall risk to the organisation by preparing well, learning from others and taking action. If mistakes do happen, you then learn from them.

Remember to learn from your successes as well. Learning what and how to do something right is an easier lesson than learning how not to do something.