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Leveraging Lean Six Sigma

By Ron Crabtree CPIM, CIRM, MLSSBB
President, MetaOps Inc.

It does not seem all that long ago that business process reengineering (BPR) was sweeping most industries. Actually it was nearly 20 years ago. The 1990s and new century saw the ascendance of Lean, Six Sigma and more recently the fusion — Lean Six Sigma (LSS). Operational Excellence (OpEx) has seen popular press in recent years. Our latest book, Driving Operational Excellence provides a view of this from 24 contributing authors. More recently Business Process Management (BPM) and Business Process Optimization (BPO) have been popularized — especially in the ever-increasing areas of finding information technology enabling lines of thinking where melding process thinking first with an overlay of technology to provide workflow support, better exchange of information and business intelligence (BI) has delivered excellent results.

Recently I have seen a resurgence of interest in BPR. Organizations are redefining it as something much different than traditional thinking around BPR, which often involved an expert/engineer/consultant-driven process and organizational changes that quickly changed the landscape in business — sometimes to its detriment. We have all heard the stories or worse, lived the life of organizations that re-mapped processes and made wholesale changes to the way business is done without involving all stakeholders in the process, and later wonder why they fail.

I keep hearing the same stories about misguided, “expert” attempts to provide silver-bullet solutions. Forward-looking organizations are rethinking BPR and alignment of their IT strategies at a furious pace. I am working with a Forbes Top 100 Best Companies to Work For organization that is grappling with how to move forward in modernizing its IT infrastructure, maintain their connection to their people, and re-invent processes at the same time. Outperforming their competitors is something they have done well over the years. To their credit, they know that new approaches are now required to maintain and expand their edge. They acknowledge that today they achieve it through excellent people and brute force, something hard to sustain over time.

Organizations are looking to pick the right business drivers and metrics, build better processes to deliver what customers want, leverage the best of technologies and marketing and finally, aligning their people to make it happen. I am introducing an acronym that may serve your organization well, taking in all these issues I have outlined. The phases of a never-ending wheel of action I suggest follow the letters of the word “RESULTS:”

R = Reflection and vision

Driving improvements is a top-down, bottom-up affair. It’s amazing how many smart organizations struggle to articulate what they should look like in the future in terms easily understood and embraced by the stakeholders. This is not too hard for things like market share, positioning in benchmarking results by research companies, and the many different financial metrics that stock analysts toil over for publicly traded companies. Top management must reflect and develop a vision of the future. This vision needs balance. For example, customers first, employees second and the company last is a valid way to address this. The harder part is putting some specific measures to these things.

E = Expectations and alignment

I believe that 80 percent or more of the success of any organization comes down to our ability to develop and empower people to support its vision. It’s top management’s job to say where we are going and what that looks like when we get there in measured terms. It’s the organizations’ people who must figure out the how. For them to do that it is necessary to share information, provide training on how processes work (classic LSS and BPR tools), and provide adequate support for them to own and make the necessary changes.

For this to succeed we must make sure expectations are set and we have aligned all stakeholders to buying in to the vision. It seems really simple — answering the “what’s in it for me?” (WIIFM) for each group of stakeholders, but in practice, it is devilishly hard to do. The bigger and more complex the organization, the harder it is.

This problem is exactly why the traditional BRP approach is the default — especially in turn-around situations when there is no time to on-board the stakeholders. Experts design the new processes and tell everyone what they will now do. Then later wonder why no one will support the changes and results wither. Consider this: which do people like better, doing stuff to them, or with them? Doing it to them is lazy and likely to fail. Doing it with them is much harder, but promised the best possible chance for success.

In the next issue of this column I will continue the explanation.

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