Qualtec's Business Performance Improvement Blog

Recently I wrote about the history of Operational Excellence.  Now let’s turn around and talk about its future.  Where are we going?  What will it look like in the year 2020 and beyond?

First, as I noted in my last article, there are certain elements, such as the construction of the original control charts, which have been the same for nearly one hundred years.   The foundations of Operational Excellence, expanded upon by Deming and refined by today’s companies to consistently drive productivity gains and market share growth, are timeless.  We will continue to express goals in the form of scorecards.  Enterprise level value streams will continue to exist as they are simply the expression of an organization’s value creation process.  And improvement methodologies with roots dating back to the 1920’s will continue to be applied to performance gaps identified by customers and stakeholders.

So what will be new?  First, the evolution of many of the deployment philosophies will race ahead. As the pace of change in business accelerates, so too will the pace of change in change models.  We have written extensively about Alignment, Pull Don’t Push, Go Broad Before Deep and Pay As You Go.  These philosophies yield a very different deployment model than what evolved from the late ‘80’s to about midway through our first decade of the new century.  We deconstructed a very heavy change model we helped to create.  And we think it will go further as a modular and quick iterative workstyle will race ahead. To allow it to happen, we will “chunk” problem solving methodologies to how they are used and develop new ways of making them faster and lighter.

Another force that will accelerate the application of Operational Excellence activities will be technology as enterprise software collects hordes of data, business process management software uses that data for alignment, dashboard reporting of aligned metrics is constructed to lower level processes where projects can be scoped and everyone has mobile access to the reporting and to rich media libraries of improvement methodologies in consumable “chunks” addressing specific performance gaps.  Everything we do over extensive periods of time, will be real time.

Operational Excellence has become a fundamental aspect of every company’s management systems.  But it diminishes its usefulness by being slow and cumbersome.  What everyone has come to call the “New Normal” doesn’t have the patience for that sort of speed, or lack thereof.  It will come because many, many good professionals will work at pushing it forward bit by bit, just as it happened in the past.  And, like so many other professions and businesses, it will happen on the back of technology.

If you’d like to discuss, feel free to contact me at jlopezona@ssqi.com.