Enhancing Steerability in Process Improvement

The driver may encounter some steerability challenges down the road. What could possibly go wrong? AI generated picture.

Being effective means that you are doing the right things. Consequently, improvement effectiveness means that you are improving the right issues. That's simple, isn't it? Well, sort of. To fully understand what improvement effectiveness means requires that you keep in mind that your company does not operate in a static world, but in a dynamic one. The short- and long-term changes, good or bad, cover all internal and external issues. Everything changes in the end, it's just a matter of the time frame. Adapting to changes requires steerability in your operations, also in the improvement efforts. This is why the process improvement performance and the steerability of improvement efforts matter. In less static settings more.

A process is the interaction of people, technology, information and materials to produce a desired output. Improving this interaction better than the rest should be in the DNA of your company as means to responding properly to the changes. This capability can and should be applied to any output your company produces, or wish to produce. One built-in area within high-performance process improvement (HPPI) should be highlighted in this regards, namely the steerability of the improvement efforts. Let's consider this issue in more detail.

First of all, we need to identify the key aspects related to the concept of steering the company improvement efforts. Here we can make a distinction between the substance that should provide the guidelines to the direction and actions (incl. selection of speed), and the mechanism for attaching the substance to the real-life work. After all, work is conducted in different settings and at different levels in an organization, and the steering impact should affect everyone in the company, at least to some degree.

Basically, the substance includes the improvement mission and vision, and the improvement plan (strategy) for specific (key) processes (cp. the VISTALIZER Report), and the implementation plan (usually based on the suggestion in the process improvement plan). The related documents to these disciplines need to be harmonized and managed sufficiently well so that the cause-and-effect chain remain sound from the mission to the Act phase of the implementation.

The mechanism, on the other hand, contains the deployment logic and the improvement logic (the PDCA circle). Here, it is important to notice that running the improvement efforts according to the HPPI criteria requires that the substance (data, information, knowledge) used in the mechanism is collected, cultivated and prioritized using dedicated HPPI methods and solutions. This set-up assures that the improvement efforts are run according to required time, quality (process improvement yield) and costs.

For the company's improvement efforts to be steerable, we need to consider many issues. Here we can benefit from one of the analogies used in the HPPI theory, namely the car or motoring analogy (cp. the app VISTALIZER for Enterprises / Car Analogy Module). For a car to be steerable there have to be some technical things working properly. Not only the steering mechanism itself, but also e.g. the windscreen and lights, the wheels, brakes and shock absorbers need to be up to the task. Also, the concept of steerability includes also the driving conditions and applicable speed as these may have a major impact on the steerability. From a more philosophical point of view, also the end result (the destination), and how the end-result was achieved, are part of the steerability concept. Thus, one could argue that the steerability was bad, if you end up in the wrong destination, although everything else went nicely. Likewise, you could make a case of the situation where the destination was indeed reached, but it came at a price that was not beneficial to one or more stakeholders (high fuel or energy costs, damaged car, loss of time, lost nerves, etc.). The same applies for the improvement efforts.

The undisclosed problem many companies or organizations have is that the integration between the different parts required to achieve a sufficient steerability is bad, besides that the parts themselves are badly managed (incl. change resistance). Steerability implies that there is an expected response to the steering activity (turning the steering wheel, applying the brakes, the use of the accelerator). How direct, fast or good this steering response is, boils down to the quality of the improvement methods used, and to the achieved and sustained process improvement yield level. But everyone likes a good steering, and a good steering response when driving, wouldn't you agree? Why should the improvement efforts in be any different?