Why Commitment to Excellence is So Important? And How to Achieve that?

Top leaders in any organization should not only be passionately committed to excellence but also have a strong and sustained focus on driving continuous improvement in policies, processes and tools across the entire organization. Commitment has to be real and running deep down their hearts.

Why is excellence so important? Excellence is a very powerful weapon in the armory of any organization to create and sustain competitive edge in the market. Continuous improvement in policies, processes and tools across the entire organization helps the organization to become increasingly efficient, productive and cost-effective.

The truth in many organizations is however far removed from the above situation. Such organizations would display following characteristics:

• Some top leaders and most middle-level leaders have a narrow, operational view and engaged in excessive and constant firefighting. On the other hand some top leaders have a complete hands-off approach and hence fail to provide strategic perspective to the operational aspects of the business
• Hiring in such organizations is transactional with focus on execution of current business needs with no long term strategy and hence no focus on improvement. Awards and rewards are given to those people who recover projects from the brink of disaster conveniently ignoring why they led them there in the first place

Excellence will find it difficult to take roots in such organizations. The top leaders would form a closed knit group where no one will have the courage to question the status quo as well as understanding of where they would like the organization to move towards towards and how.

All the above challenges can be overcome provided the top leaders, and if not the topmost leader, is truly committed to excellence and committed to challenging everyone to continuously improve  policies, processes and tools across the entire organization.

This is certainly a tough calling and that's why many organizations struggle at the margins and never become world class. If these organizations want to change this, there is a clear choice in front of them - at the minimum, change the topmost leader and desirably, all or most top leaders. The boards of such organizations have a crucial role to play in this change.

Process Excellence Using Lean and Six Sigma

Organizations, big and small, across the business world need to constantly improve their business processes spanning across various business groups and functional areas. The purpose is to continuously improvise the way business is conducted so that business operations become more and more effective and efficient.

Business Processes

Business processes are everywhere in an organization - in marketing (launching a new advertisement, carrying out a market survey), sales (signing a contract, preparing a proposal), operations (delivering the product/services, developing a new offering), human resources (hiring a candidate, running employee engagement and satisfaction programs), finance (generating an invoice, filing taxes), administration (coordinating employee transportation, preventive maintenance of facilities), purchase (procuring supplies, handling customs), quality (handling process change requests, guiding improvement initiatives).

Process Excellence 

Since business processes play an important role in the eventual success of the organization the upkeep, maintenance and improvement of business processes is very important. Moreover, business needs and constraints are dynamic and hence business processes need to be changed to keep them aligned with the changed business realities. Even if business realities do not undergo significant changes, performance expectations from business processes keep on increasing gradually. This sets the stage for process excellence to come into play.

Process excellence essentially dwells upon the approach and methods used by an organization to keep its business processes aligned with changing business needs and to constantly improve and improvise them to ensure business operations are effective and efficient in serving the customers in the best possible manner. It is important to note that only selected business processes will be customer-interfacing however the customer-interfacing business processes are tightly coupled with and heavily depend on the internal processes in ensuring the overall system works seamlessly and as intended.

Leveraging Lean and Six Sigma

The successful adoption of Lean and Six Sigma in the recent decades is a testimony to two facts - first, process excellence is an important lever for organizations to improve their performance and second, Lean and Six Sigma offer tools and techniques that when used in an appropriate manner contribute towards process excellence.

Lean and Six Sigma and the combined approach, Lean Six Sigma, can be applied to any business process in any situation. The trick is to be able to correctly identify the target process (which is being studied for improvement) and identify the CTXs (where X could be Quality, Cost, Customer, Business, etc.). Thereafter it is easy, selecting a certain CTX to take for further investigation, computing its current performance (UCL/CL/LCL) and determining the sigma level using the desired performance (USL/Target/LSL) will generally reveal the problem statement as a natural end consequence.

Six Sigma DMAIC and DFSS approach provide a comprehensive framework to plan and perform projects for improving an existing product/service/process and for developing a new product/service/process. DMAIC or DFSS as the underlying approach and thoughtful integrated use of typical Six Sigma tools (MSA, RPN, SIPOC, Pareto) and typical Lean tools (like VSM, 5S, Kaizen, Kanban, Poka-yoke, Ishikawa Diagram, Jidoka, JIT) are very helpful in any improvement project. For process improvement, DMAIC approach can be used with appropriate Lean Tools being applied at various stages right throughout the DMAIC cycle.

Not Much Value from Process Investments? Blame the Sponsors

Many organizations realize that they haven't been able to realize much value from their process investments. An immediate reaction is to blame the model - "it doesn't work that well". This situation is a sad reality in many organizations.

It must be noted that all improvement models are passive entities that spring to life when adopted by an organization. The deployment of an improvement model takes its own hues and colours based on the "cultures" and "sub-cultures" present in the organization.

In all such analysis and discussion, the role of sponsor needs to be looked at carefully. Sponsors can make or break the value from a process investment. If the sponsor is purely certification-oriented then the value is naturally bound to be diminished. Some of the statement one would get to hear from such sponsors could be somthing like:

• "I want us to be certified by dd-mmm-yyyy". There is generally a weak logic behind this date and in almost all cases decided based on utter ignorance of ground realities. Someone challenging the date or suggesting its extension becomes the "bad guy" for the sponsor. The certification does happen by the suggested (sic) date but the organization doesn't get the time to absorb the changes in a natural manner resulting in challenges with sustaining the changes thereafter.
• "What happened to the meeting that I had suggested to be started between these two groups?". The real message from the Sponsor is actually "you better start those meetings or else". There is no discussion on alternative mechanisms to achieve the real purpose. In fact most of the times the Sponsor is clueless about the purpose. The meetings do get started but with a lesser effectiveness than what were actually possible.
• "You should invite him also to the meeting" where him refers to someone who is a "yes sir" guy for the Sponsor. The person leading the process initiative is made to report into the "yes sir" guy and in case the person leading the process initiative disagrees the Sponsor would force it through his throat via the "yes sir" guy
• "He should be taken in the team driving the process initiative". The Sponsor pushes a person into the team driving the process initiative without any valid reason or explanation. There is no concern to competency, fitment or need and with utter disregard to the fact that every position needs to be filled with the best candidate. And this is unfortunately done while the Sponsor brags about "we have the best people practices and let's do something to mature them further".
• "I want the Moon, the Stars and yes the Sun also", this is what the Sponsor tells at the end to the person managing the process initiatives. This is done with along with the above points. It is obvious why such organizations are not able to realize much value from their process investments.

Such situations are less prevalent in professional organizations. However in pseudo-professional organizations this is highly rampant. Pseudo-professional organizations are those where founders are in the CEO/MD roles or founders are always micro-managing the CEO/MD and in either case nano-managing the person leading the process initiative on all crucial decisions.