All organizations are trying to improve their performance one way or another.
However, this is a challenging thing to do and invariably there are competing views as to what the problems are and what should be done about them. Despite the daunting complexity of organizations, we believe there are always three fundamental drivers of high performance - i.e. the day to day management of: resources, priorities and stakeholders - what we call the underlying ‘reason codes’.
The problem is that people genuinely believe that uncontrollable external factors prevent them from getting things done. Our approach deals with this issue head on by systematically testing this assumption. Enabling teams to truly understand that they can affect many more outomes than they believe...
What are the key benefits?
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Increased sales, profits and cash
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Less misaligned or wasteful activity, ensuring critical resources are focused in the right areas
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More productive people across the business increasing the capacity to do more
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Increased performance in all areas including sales and marketing, new product development, operations, finance, HR etc.
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A common management system throughout the business, with greater visibility, communication and control
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More consistent and predictable results.
Gather & Organise Team Opinions for Why There is a Performance Gap
The first step is to clearly document all the team’s hypotheses with regard to what they think stops them getting things done – e.g. what is stopping us from obtaining new customers or achieving on-time delivery. These sessions are not just simple brainstorming exercises, they involve documenting precisely what the strength of the cause and effect relationships are thought to be.
Examples of opinions: “My priorities keep being changed”, “I don’t have enough people”, “The computer system needs upgrading”, “ My suppliers let me down”...
Set up Data Collection Within the Process to Collect ‘The Reason Codes’
Set up systematic data collection for work elements done/not done with standard reason code feedback reporting based around the team's opinions. Performance often improves markedly at this stage through greater focus alone.
The data collection system is designed by the team & is much more than a ‘one off’ uncontrolled 'data mining' exercise performed by specialists where every failure is regarded as having special circumstances.
Test Team Opinions
The team then narrows the field by eliminating some of their theories by examining their impact on performance data by comparing different groups or individuals within the organization.
This process is not simply a team voting exercise, but genuine hypothesis testing by the team, using data collected by the team.
Establish Systemic ‘Reason Codes’
Once a significant sample of data is available, the team identifies the things that are stopping them most often using variety of logic based techniques and problem solving methods to gain a thorough understanding of systematic root causes.
At the end of the phase, the team quantify the root causes by priority of impact on the end objectives. This helps prioritise the improvement effort.
Improve the System
The team arrives at a much higher level of understanding about what drives high performance and we now focus on improving the management system - People and Process Improvement. This also means looking at the existing improvements taking place in the business, redirecting some, adding others, and strengthening the support to the critical and validated few. This phase always involves implementing daily management practices to ensure that managers (and staff) continue to manage the root causes in the future.
Start Again & Keep on Repeating the Process
Embed process as a standard management system to align behaviours & drive performance, the ultimate embodiment of Demming’s ‘Plan, Do, Check, Act’ cycle.
