Everyone in an organization has a responsibility and something to contribute to Process Management.  Executives, Process Owners and Process Team Members all have a role to play to create a Customer-Driven Process Enterprise.  But leadership’s role is the most impactful in truly achieving the end state.

Leaders need to have a map in their mind and understand their vital role.  They should know the foundation they can lay, the steps along the way and how to identify when they have arrived.  But first and foremost, they must understand what they can do as individuals and buy into those actions.

Our BPM Overview Presentation.

So what personal role must leadership take to create a customer-driven process enterprise?  We believe those steps are as follows:

• Demonstrate commitment.
  • Stake your own reputation to the transition
  • Commit to the goals in public
  • Adjust reward and recognition programs
• Commit the required resources
  • Fund in full the up-front investments to get started
  • Dedicate excellent people to the effort
• Demand participation and engagement
  • Stay personally engaged throughout the process
• Be passionate about change
  • Talk about it to everybody and get them emotionally engaged

If a leader can’t buy into those steps, don’t go any farther. But if they see the risk worth the reward, they should first focus on building a foundation in the organization which ensures success.  So here are the prerequisites for transitioning to a customer driven process enterprise.

• Bring all initiatives together under the umbrella of business process management
• Communicate the seriousness of the need for a customer-driven process enterprise
• Determine an implementation plan for becoming a customer-driven process enterprise

With a foundation in place, how do you get from point A to point B?  Here are the phases of the process and what you have to do at each step along the way –

• Stage 1 – Establish.  Set a Vision, Mission and the elements of a balanced scorecard.
• Stage 2 – Deploy. Identify Key Business Processes and their Process Metrics.
• Stage 3 – Implement. Provide Process Owners and Team Members the support to establish a management system which measures actual results, gaps to the desired state and actions by which to improve.
• Stage 4 – Review.  Evaluate and tie performance evaluation and rewards to how the management system operates.

Download our new executive brief discussing scorecards as part of BPM.

Often, you work so hard at something that it is difficult to know when you’ve realized your goal.  Keep in mind the goal isn’t simply achieving the numbers established for process metrics.  The goal is a cultural shift that orients the company to the customer using processes.  So how do you know when you’ve arrived.  When all is said and done, you’ll know you are there when you see the following –

• More focus on processes than on functions
• Employees know and accept process goals
• Everybody understands how the processes are performing
• Processes are measured objectively and frequently

So if you are a leader in an organization, or working closely with one, think about whether you exhibit those last four bullet points today.  And if your organization doesn’t, ask whether you need to before one of your competitors does.  If the answers tell you to start changing, feel free to contact me to begin your efforts.  In the meantime, if you want more information, see the complimentary downloads featured in this article.  Upon download, we’ll follow up to offer a complimentary copy of our two day course “Establishing the Strategic Vision” which gets into much deeper reviews of all my points above.

A core commandment of my philosophy toward Quality Management Systems is that the QMS is not separate from the business environment, but rather just another facet of the business. This leads us to the idea that there is no room in the QMS for non-value added activities, however due to the segregation of the systems, much of the time Quality Auditing is seen as just that… non-value added. Historically this is not an untrue view, as previous quality systems relied on a complex checklist that only scratched the surface of a process, and provided little or no value to the organization.  For this reason my next few posts will deal more specifically with how Six Sigma and other Continuous Improvement  techniques and methods can be used to achieve the GOAL of certification while actually adding value to the business.

Our Complimenary Executive Brief on how Yellow Belts can play a key role in Quality and CI programs

                To re-affirm my stance, certification is the GOAL, how you get there is up to you; coincidentally what you have to work with at the end is your choice as well (for good or bad). This week we will focus on the application of Six Sigma Yellow belts as the foundation of an Internal Audit Program, a requirement of ISO 9001. This applies to all of the System and process audits that ISO9001 requires, product audits are a whole other animal.   In his post “What can Yellow Belts do…really” Eric Harris hit on a few key roles for Yellow Belts in a Six Sigma organization, these were:

1. Characterization of processes
2. Establish/ Validate Measurement Systems
3. Establish process Control Systems
4. Perform Small Scope  projects

                 In ISO 9001:2008 the requirement is to have an internal audit program with qualified auditors. Now if you are looking to add value to your organization doesn’t it seem most advantageous to have an auditor with the skills listed above. Training an “internal auditor” traditionally revolves around a lengthy class of standards exploration, leaving them competent to fill out their checklist and audit to the “shalls” in the standard, but what value are you really getting from these “checklist jockeys”? Wouldn’t it make sense to have your auditor explore the process map, improve the process and continually push the process to new levels? Yellow Belts can do this, and this is more powerful than you realize due to the fact that you are actually performing Continual Improvement (a requirement of the ISO standard) and at the same time knocking out the requirements for ISO 9001:2008 relating to internal auditing….. This is a multiple win when coupled with the below suggestions:

1. Use your Yellow Belts as your Internal Audit staff, the standard is easy to learn and application is simple.
2. Use your auditors to follow the process through using a process map highlighting the non-value added steps and constraints to feed into your CI activities
3. In the event of an audit NC to the standard the Yellow Belt can assist the auditees in performing true systemic correction with adequate measurement systems, their mentoring can provide sustainable change in an organization, and this is a huge cultural change win!

             This in the end comes down to a fundamental decision as management: Do I have a Yellow Belt that knows the standard, or someone that knows the standard more completely but cannot help me along my way? In my humble view I feel there is more value derived from an individual familiar with process improvement that knows what the process must do, rather than someone that can recite the standard but cannot improve process and metric. As mentioned above, the GOAL is ISO certification… how you get there is up to you. What you do to meet the requirement for internal auditing can very well make the difference between having to add overhead and cost to meet the requirement, or multiplying the power of your CI activities in a way that happens to meet the requirement. In the end the results you end up with are exactly what you have set yourself up for ….. Which will it be?   If you wish to discuss contact me.

A long time friend told me how his boss asked him to manage his processes on a systems basis.  He wanted process maps and metrics.  He wanted control.  I’d like to help this friend so I asked him about his processes.  What were they?  Who owned them?  What was wrong?  But as he started to describe the work environment, he quickly took a left turn.  He began to tell me how hard everyone was working.  He told me how in the end, they met their goals but that it was killing them to get there.  He told me how the number of clients was growing and they anticipated growing further.  He told me how his company planned to add these clients without adding people.  He feared continuing to add work to the existing personnel would simply create an unstable environment in which the best people, who are starting to see job options, might leave.  And these are his most productive colleagues. 

Our new Lean QuickStart powerpoint presentation.

Basic psychology tells you that when you find someone’s fear, then you have found the motivation for change.  He was talking to me more out of the fear of an increasingly unstable environment with his team than his boss’ desire for control.  What advice could I offer him?  There are lots of options which we offer as services.  This friend is in a highly entrepreneurial environment so he gets to just do one. Which will it be?  What will reduce his fear? 

I told him he needed to simplify what they are doing.  It’s not time for control.  It’s time to reduce complexity.  How could he do that?  Well his company must be doing something right if they are adding clients in this environment.  But how much of what they do along the way is valued by those clients and how much of it is done because it’s the way it used to be done?  He needs to get rid of everything his customers don’t value.  He needs to get rid of everything that makes his team’s life so stressed and isn’t prized by his clients.  The things that make them work late and extra days.  We didn’t talk about deployment maps or how to introduce management systems.  We simply spoke about his fear.  

How many of us find ourselves in the same work environment?  We are trying to do all the things we used to do. But there are less people around.  And we are starting to grow again.  Maybe growth is not in an accelerated fashion but it is enough to stress out who is here.  And while the fear in the board room may be another decline, the fear in the workplace is of accelerated orders.   So, if people are working at their limit, eliminate what your clients don’t value.  And, if you’re sensing a greater risk from adding a customer ahead of another resource, reduce the complexity.   Let’s take out those non-value added activities and reduce the stress.  Let’s give ourselves the ability to handle growth without taking more risk.  If you find yourself in the same situation as my friend, contact me.

I’ve posted a number of articles around lean.  However, I still get basic questions around Lean that none of these posts have really touched. Things like … what is lean, where did it come, how do I get started with lean, or how is lean different from Six Sigma.  I thought I’d touch on a few points here.

Our Lean QuickStart Presentation …

What is Lean?

There are a lot of more complete definitions, but I like to define lean is a relentless focus on the identification and elimination of waste.  A few points:

• Lean is about doing more with less
• Lean is based on the premise that anywhere work is being done, waste is being generated … and should be minimized or removed
• It should be team based process understanding business processes in a way that identifies and eliminates waste to increase efficiency and effectiveness.
• It can be used at any level of the organization and applied to any process or work area

What Lean Isn’t …

It is not a long, complicated process based on detailed data analysis, like Six Sigma.  There are certainly projects/problems that need Six Sigma, but Lean approaches a different kind of problem (flow, throughput, cycle time, etc) in a simpler way, and typically focuses on incremental improvements instead of big bang breakthroughs.  And, Lean is for everyone, from the lowest level operator to high level executives.

How do I get started?

In my opinion, Lean should not be rolled out as a top-heavy initiative.  Lean can be effectively deployed in a grass roots, pay-as-you-go model that requires minimal up-front investment, and still delivers quick ROI. See my recent post on this.

How can Lean help me improve processes?

• Faster. Removing waste, complexity, and bottlenecks improves process flow and assures that things can be done faster, and be more predictable
• Cheaper. If there are fewer unnecessary steps, less complexity, and things get done faster because of better overall flow,  then fewer resources need be consumed
• Better. Complexity = more opportunities for defects = reduced service quality. Reduce  complexity, and quality improvements often are a natural by-product

Difference between Lean and Six Sigma?

There you have it.  I hope this helps to answer some of the fundamental questions.  Contact me if you want to discuss in more detail.

I was thrilled when I was offered to contribute to SSQi’s blog and share my thoughts and opinions with such a diverse and influential audience, but then I had to consider what to write about. A focus of recent posts is the ability to do more with less in the current reality in which we find ourselves, which is both a challenging and wonderful place to be. I say challenging because of the obvious competition for priorities and resource allocation, but wonderful because it is this “steel-sharpens-steel” approach that drives innovation. We can only grow in an environment outside of our comfort zone, and this is a country that thrives in the area of adaptation and evolution at every expansion of boundary. While the manufacturing floor is changing to more and more a specialized lean-based methodology the quality expectations are being pushed to new boundaries by customers more able to eloquently and specifically express their needs and wants in terms of specifications (both written and implied). However a company’s QMS is not evolving with the changing times and tools to continue to be a useful relevant tool for an organization.

our Complimenary Executive Brief on how Yellow Belts can play a key role in Quality and CI programs

A company’s Quality Management System is perhaps more vital than a customer’s perception of quality because of the intimate relationship it has on every aspect of the business, yet it is constantly given second class treatment with external and manufacturing processes taking precedent in a crowded environment of scarce resource. A company’s QMS forms the structure of how a company realizes the products and services it manufactures, it is in effect the vehicle for change. ISO 9001 has made great strides to bring about a process perspective, yet the application is still very much rooted in the perception of overhead intensive systems. Processes must be made simpler within the QMS, measures must be formulated to judge processes from the customer perspective (i.e. what is the average cycle time for a customer corrective action implementation… and is that an acceptable number?). How much redundancy is present in repetitive loops and data transfer (how many times do we record the same information)… a common theme I hear from company to company is “add”. We can no longer add, no more than it would be acceptable to “add” a non-value added step to manufacturing process to compensate for a failure.

Addition is the antithesis of innovation; addition is a poor substitute for failure to really think outside the box in a QMS. We need to be smarter, face the challenge and set a basic premise that we will no longer “add”, but rather “evolve”. Now don’t misunderstand me, some processes need an EVOLUTION, and some need a REVOLUTION, and it is up to each business to decide which is appropriate. Whichever one it chooses the fundamental task is a simplification to the raw requirements of the customer, and for the QMS that is the organization. Turn the tools of Six Sigma inward on your QMS, help yourselves through the core competency that you turn to in a manufacturing crunch, and in doing this your system will be leaner, require less maintenance and ultimately fit within the new reality in which we all find ourselves. If we do not then we risk failing to meet the customer demand through failure to help ourselves…but more on that in subsequent postings.  If you wish to discuss, feel free to contact me.

What do we enjoy about leisure activities?  A symphony’s crescendo.  A well executed touchdown.  A sunset from a summit.  We love the harmony.  But in business, there is also value.  Along with that feel good moment, alignment creates value.  It ensures the whole is worth more than the sum of the parts.  And the potential for alignment is in many directions.  We want to be aligned to customers, shareholders, employees and our communities.  But alignment only occurs through design.

In a phone conversation this week, someone asked me what BPM is.  To me it is the design of the alignment.  BPM isn’t the only discipline driving alignment.  In another conversation with a private equity sponsor, when asked about their upstream measures of alignment, I was quickly given financial metrics which if crossed triggered an action.  In such an advanced market economy, we have very refined measures for alignment to the requirements of capital.  And alignment with customers is the essence of Voice of the Customer. 

So where can the elements offered in SSQ’s business process alignment focus?  How do we contribute to an organization’s quest for value?  We focus on aligning processes vertically and horizontally using KPI metrics. 

We introduce scorecards or dashboards as a way to monitor alignment vertically in an organization. The built-in ability of cascading scorecards, regardless of the number of hierarchies, depicts how the business rolls up from any perspectives.  While easily attained but it is readily understood and accepted.  It fits our view of organizations and compensation systems.

A greater challenge is achieving horizontal alignment.  Even though vertically defined functions and groups have a stake in a company’s outcomes, many times the overall company fails to optimize its potential because resources and information are “owned” by the vertical components. Thus, we create silos.  I am an optimist and believe people want to work together.  But I also believe in our quest for simplicity and accountability, we’ve failed to fully understand horizontal relationships and created incentive systems that drive people to work on their own.

So our implementation of BPM seeks to facilitate an organizations’ understanding of how a course of action adopted by one function impacts other functions. We seek to aid the company building a systems approach by giving the various vertical entities visibility into each other’s plans, resources and performance gaps based on internal and external customer requirements.

We finally seek to redefine the KPI’s balancing the vertical requirements with the horizontal requirements to get the alignment in harmony.  By comparing those KPI’s with actual performance we help a company define the projects and activities that will close the gaps to the highest scorecard to ensure we also meet external alignment.

The BPM we introduce has many benefits.  It examines and aligns to scorecards.  In ensures financial and vertical measures are met by building the muscle tissue in the form of process definitions.  It focuses on KPIs, performance gaps and prioritized project lists.  But it is unique in its facilitation of an understanding and acceptance of horizontal alignment and thus takes organizations a step closer to its optimal value creation.

So in answer to the question for a definition of BPM, I say the essense is alignment.  And in answer to what we bring different than any other focus, we feel we facilitate overcoming horizontal barriers to value creation.  If you’d like to discuss these concepts and how we can help your organization, contact me.

We’ve been blogging regularly and published a white paper about the use of social media tools in learning. The central thesis has been that our economic environment demands continued, and even accelerated, learning while the traditional costly and time consuming paradigm of training isn’t meeting our needs. Take a look at On Demand Performance Improvement and Economically Delivering the Right Mix of Lean, Six Sigma and Business Process Management. Do our writings have merit or are they simply futuristic musings? Well take a look at this You Tube video entitled Did You Know?

Those of us that are going to make it to the other side must learn new skills and will use technology differently to do so. We’ll learn to do something by going to You Tube to find a video; by using search engines to find the knowledge we want when we want to apply it; and by asking our network of friends, family and colleagues using FaceBook and LinkedIn. Socially connected in the business world does not mean going to lunch together, it means peer learning and sharing. Almost all knowledge will be new in the sense that it will be continually learned. We are excited about this prospect. Continuous learning is essential and we have the means by which to provide it.

My colleagues and I have written about this subject from several angles I want to start bringing it togetter.  In my post On Demand Performance Improvement  and Lynn Monkelien’s, Senior Director of Enterprise Learning at the Apollo Group and SSQ guest blogger, post entitled Pull Learning in Business Process and Performance Improvement we discussed how to break the paradigm of training inefficiencies.  This was further supported in my white paper entitled On Demand Performance Improvemnt – Traditional Training Meets Social Media which is available on our website’s home page in the “spotlight” section.  Then my colleague, Eric Harris wrote Back to Basics where he introduced the various foundation aspects of Yellow Belt, Lean and Business Process Management.   Since then there have been numerous posts on each of these subjects. 

Together we are all describing a new training paradigm that is emerging where with our clients we not only making better use of technology and social media standards but also of a contemporary and robust library of materials and broad capability of personnel to meet the contemporary needs of organizations.  Specifically, with so much pressure on costs and the limited availability of company personnel’s time, it’s not surprising that most companies are looking hard at how and what they delivery to their workforce.  The key is to define what is needed… nothing more and nothing less…in terms of both content and exposure.  And that is done by matching the depth of training to the problems the organization seeks to address and putting the information into the users hands in as many low cost forms as possible as close to the actual application as possible. 

Here are some factors to consider when asking what training and coaching is needed:

* Are you addressing manufacturing, engineering or transactional processes?  In factories and laboratories where much of the improvement activity may focus on equipment, techniques such as Gauge R&R, Process Capability, Setup Reduction, Total Productive Maintenance and perhaps even Design of Experiments are invaluable.  But in transactional businesses, they can be substituted with more impactful subjects.

* Are you dealing with high-volume repetitive processes?  Much of the Lean training can be simplified and reduced if you are not.  Value Stream Mapping, for example, can be covered at a more general level.

* What is the objective and the environment?  Are you attempting to remove defects or reduce cycle time?  If you seek to reduce errors in a financial services company, the focus is on process analysis so Pareto Charts, Run Charts and the like, which are quick and easy to teach, become the focus.

And here are some questions to ask when considering how to get the chosen information to the user:

* What sort of time is available from the targeted personnel? Can they spend a day in a classroom or is thier time limited to hours per day or per week? Will targeted candidates be in different locations or at one facility?

* Do you know exactly what thier problems require or will it evolve over time? 

* Are they comfortable with technology and social media?

 The point is that you have choices.  You can follow a fairly standardized prescription for Lean Six Sigma training as described through the classic belt definitions or you can tailor your training to unique needs.  At the same time, you can perform standard instructor lead training or you can use various communication tools that leverage technologies and social media standards. 

I have one note of caution –if you cut the content or instructor interaction too far, the price for the mistake doesn’t immediately show itself during the training.  Problems evidence themselves once the training is well underway or completed.  And the problems might be that projects get delayed, more coaching is needed to complete high value projects or certified candidates fail in follow-on projects.  The result is a general loss of confidence emerges for the whole process.  By the time you discover your mistake, the effort is deemed a failure.  We don’t say this to scare you into overbuying or overdesigning.  We believe the answer is to monitor the situation closely and maintain flexibility in both the training and support.  It is in this reaction time that modular content and flexible, technology enabled support tools and methods really make a difference.

If you would like to discuss this emerging model, contact me.