Operational excellence cannot be assigned or delegated down. Operational excellence is predicated on how the organisation is lead, managed, enabled, and empowered, so that everyone executes well. Executives, managers, and process owners should all focus on executing well to gain and sustain competitive advantage.
Their key role is the focus on running a successful enterprise so that it executes better, faster, and cheaper in delivering value to customers. Operational excellence is not something extra. It isn’t a label or a specific job, it is a way of operating that should be integrated into all work related to the business. It should be part of the organisation’s DNA.
The following are key roles of executives, managers, and process owners.
- Embrace and encourage the right mindset and behaviors so that everybody wants to and is able to be operationally excellent.
- Ensure that metrics, targets, performance goals, reward and recognition encourage these behaviors. Talk is cheap. You need to ensure and reward the right performance.
- For ongoing day-to-day operations, ensure that employees are capable, have the right skills and training. Enable employees to excel by providing them with the means to know what’s important, what to do, when to take action, and what actions to take in order to deliver value to customers.
- Ensure they have sufficient authority that’s consistent with their responsibility and personal accountability.
There will be some processes that are poorly designed and/or performed inconsistently. For these, improve or redesign them by selecting and launching appropriate projects. But not every project should be pursued, only the ones that achieve strategic and annual goals. So be selective.
Executives and senior managers should:
- View projects as a means to achieve strategic and annual goals.
- Establish project selection criteria to ensure alignment of projects with those goals,
- Review proposed projects, evaluate, and select projects.
- Assign executives or senior managers to be project champions.
- Review updates from champions and provide resources as needed.
What is a project champion and why have project champions? The project champion is the management team’s point person who is tasked with ensuring project success. It is also management’s way of making it very clear that they want to see the project succeed.
It would be great to improve everything, but you have limited resources, so you need to prioritize and be selective. The project champion should be an executive or senior manager who has enough clout and respect to remove roadblocks and to ensure that a project is given priority and has the right resources it needs to succeed.
For employees selected for projects, reallocate their duties to others, so as to free them up with sufficient time to carry out project work. Recognise individual contribution to project success in the performance appraisals.
Provide resources and training in the relevant operational excellence tools and techniques. For example:
- For design projects: it’s Design for Six Sigma.
- For improvement projects: Six Sigma and Lean.
- And for control, it’s process management or value stream management.
Finally, executives, managers, and process owners should ensure that all decisions and policies are consistent with and supportive of the strategies and priorities of the enterprise. Such alignment should be enterprise-wide, across different functions, and up and down all levels of the organization. This consistency will drive the right behaviors and results.