All Posts Tagged With: "process management"
One Team’s Systematic Approach to Improvement
A recent case study published by ASQ tells the story of how FirstSource Solutions used tools and processes that are common among Baldrige Award winners to tackle a single problem—reducing the turnaround time (TAT) to approve applications for a retail mortgage client—with impressive results.
The client was in the United Kingdom. Here’s a synopsis of how Firstsource tackled the problem:
- It used data to define the problem: Over a nine-week period, the client offered mortgage loans in 14 days or less 69% of the time, well short of the 75% target.
- A financial benefit estimation exercise determined that improving performance on TAT to 80% would increase revenue by six million pounds annually, create a more efficient process, and provide faster service to applicants.
- Firstsource formed a team to improve TAT. The team received training on the Six Sigma DMAIC methodology and quality tools.
- The team started with a supplier-inputs-process-outputs-customer (SIPOC) exercise to create a high-level process map and identify stakeholders.
- The team produced a three-stage analysis road map to assess the current situation and identify possible root causes and improvement activities. It used the road map to agree on five causes of the longer TAT.
- The team brainstormed possible solutions and then assigned a relative rating for each solution to eliminate half of the original possibilities.
- The team validated the impact of the solutions through a one-week pilot study with a metrics dashboard that was shared with all stakeholders involved in developing solutions.…
What Process-Centered Looks Like
The journey to becoming a process-centered organization begins with all employees in the organization recognizing and focusing on their processes. All employees understand that their work is contributing to the performance of the key process.
This excerpt from Montgomery County Public Schools’ 2010 Baldrige Award-winning application could describe every Baldrige Award winner. All are process centered. A great example of what it means to be process-centered can be found in MCPS’s Road Map to Process Management and Improvement and Knowledge Management, which you can view by clicking on the title of this article or on the blue “Continued” below.
At MCPS, every office, department, and division has identified its key processes, mapped them, used a systematic and systemic model (IGOE: inputs, guides, outputs, and enablers) to identify interrelationships and interdependencies of key processes and staff, and determined how to measure process effectiveness. You can read more about IGOE and process management at MCPS in its application summary here.
All key processes have in-process measures that monitor quality such as rework and errors. And no, MCPS is not a manufacturer: It’s a school system, even though its approaches to process management sound like those of a well-run business. If rework and errors continue, a process team determines which improvement method of PDSA (plan/do/study/act) is appropriate: Lean, Six Sigma, or project management.
In its response to Item 7.5, Process-Effectiveness Outcomes, MCPS provides a one-and-a-half page table that lists its key processes,…
12Apr2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedNo Excuses for Avoiding Baldrige
One of the most common objections to integrating the Baldrige model comes from organizations, divisions, or departments that claim that what they do cannot be standardized. Their services are customized for every client. Marketing is too creative. Sales must move too fast. Etc. Etc.
They are excuses for avoiding accountability and continuous improvement. I know this because Freese and Nichols, Inc., (FNI), a 2010 Baldrige Award winner, proves them wrong.
FNI is a small business that provides engineering, architecture, environmental science, planning, and construction services. It grew revenue by 12 to 16% every year for the past four years. Each of its projects is unique, yet it has developed systematic approaches for meeting its customers’ requirements.
The PM Steering Committee is responsible for the project management process, which includes managing work assignments, schedules, and budgets for each projects. Each Technical Excellence Program (TEP) team is responsible for procedures related to technical discipline, which are the tasks executed by individual engineers to create project deliverables.
All client projects are executed through FNI’s project management processes. FNI’s application summary includes a table on page 32 that shows how the company manages project delivery to meet key requirements.
TEP teams create tools, checklists, and references to reduce project time and improve project quality. “Because each project is different, the engineering procedures are designed and documented as discrete tasks to be assembled as needed,” the application summary states. Each TEP team has its own intranet site…
6Apr2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedBaldrige and Process Improvement
“Have you seen process owners or other organizational structures that sustain cross-functional process improvement?”
Brad Power poses this question at the end of his article, “Where Have All the Process Owners Gone?” (HBR, January 7, 2011). Anyone who’s been following Baldrige.com or been involved with integrating Baldrige or evaluating Baldrige assessments knows that some of this country’s best examples of “organizational structures that sustain cross-functional process improvement” are Baldrige Award winners.
The Baldrige model is a process model. The first six of seven categories in the Baldrige Criteria ask how you design, manage, and improve your key processes, while the seventh category requests the results of those processes. Each Baldrige Award winner has found its own way to improve processes, some of which include process owners and most of which use similar quality tools and techniques.
They have also developed systematic approaches to sustaining process improvement. Power bemoans the fact that too many organizations attempt process improvement by establishing process owners, only to revert to functional management in the end. He suggests six reasons for this; none of these reasons hold true at Baldrige Award winners.
- Attention shifted. Organizations lose their focus on process improvement when senior leaders are distracted by new or more urgent issues. Baldrige Award winners sustain their focus on process improvement through unwavering, visionary leadership.
- Roles were misunderstood. They botched the process for improving processes. Baldrige Award winners clearly define roles and responsibilities, deploy reporting and review processes to…
Keys to Successful Process Improvement
The Baldrige model is all about process improvement. The first five categories in the Baldrige Criteria focus on an organization’s key processes in leadership, strategic planning, customer relationships, measurement, and your workforce, and the sixth category asks how you design, manage, and improve these processes.
Baldrige Award winners achieve what many organizations attempt, which is to realize the benefits of process improvement in world-class results. Why do they succeed where others fail? Brad Power attempts to answer that question in “What the C-Suite Needs to Do for Process Improvement?” (HBR, December 15, 2010) He draws on 30 years of experience as a consultant to identify three reasons that process improvement initiatives fail:
- Organizations optimize processes within functions and departments rather than across them. Your most important processes involve multiple functions and departments.
- Frontline workers can’t properly contribute to company goals when they lack information about how to have an impact on them. Organizations that integrate Baldrige use strategic planning and performance measurement systems, as well as frequent communication, to show workers what the organization’s goals are and how everyone contributes to reaching them.
- Top managers can’t realize the substantial benefits of process improvements if they, rather than workers, identify what needs to change. The people who work the process are in the best position to improve it.
Power proposes three deliberate actions to turn this around:
- Listen to how well your organization meets customer expectations. The third category in the Baldrige Criteria…
Close That Open Door
Cy Wakeman has a thought-provoking post on FastCompany that pleads: “Please Kill the Open Door Policy, the Drama Is Killing Us” (November 17, 2010). Every Baldrige Award winner I can think of touts its open door policy. In fact, I can’t think of the last organization I worked with that didn’t have an open door policy. Wakeman thinks it’s a waste of time.
“The practice of the open door has proven to be disastrous,” she writes, noting that it “produces few if any real changes in the organization and often hijacks resources that could be focused on real issues.” Her reasoning is that employees use the open door “to report concerns about others, to tattle, to report their analysis and judgment of coworkers, to provide leaders with a list of things they’d like to see changed in their reality, or even to provide leaders with an evaluation of the leaders’ strengths, weaknesses, and development needs.”
Wakeman believes that, rather than using an open door to hope for change, leaders should “close the door and start developing your people.” Don’t wait for employees to come to you: Schedule time with each employee to talk about their challenges, development needs, and opportunities. Don’t encourage them to wish things were better: Coach them in how they can make things better. Don’t accept their narrow views about the nature of problems: Challenge them to take responsibility for understanding and improving performance in…
22Nov2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedImproving Processes through Observation
When you come across a story that involves process improvement in both education and healthcare at the same time, you have to share it.
The education part is the Executive Master of Public Administration: Concentration for Nurse Leaders program at NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. (Let’s see you fit that on a business card.) For their Capstone project, the six people in the program decided to analyze how much time nurses spend getting the equipment they need to get their jobs done.
They carefully observed nursing staff at New-York Presbyterian Columbia University Medical Center. They wrote down how much time nurses spent with patients. They photographed rooms after patients were discharged. They watched what nurses did when they weren’t with patients and they discovered that nurses had to get supplies for each patient from a central storeroom. It wasn’t a quick trip and it took them away from patients, which meant nurses tended to get everything they thought they might need to avoid return trips. Once supplies are brought to a patient’s room, they must be used or thrown away. If they forgot something or needed more supplies, nurses had to return to the central storeroom. They were often interrupted on their way to and from the storeroom, which increased the risk of error.
From a process management perspective, this process is fraught with waste, from unnecessary supplies being thrown away to long trips to…
8Nov2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
