Process Excellence Through Measurable Management

Many thanks to my colleague Dennis Bixenman who emailed me today with his thoughts on Process Excellence and the difficulties that Process Excellence Teams face in engaging their fellow workers. What follows is lifted directly from his email and your thoughts and comments are invited.

"I love that Measurable Management is a perfect vehicle for engaging all the team leaders throughout the organization in process excellence as opposed to just the black belts and experts.

It is not uncommon in today's organizations to see process excellence initiatives led by process improvement experts (such as black belts), only to see a very small percentage of the workforce actually engaged in the process excellence efforts.

If you are not on a process improvement team or lean six sigma, you are probably not engaged in improving the processes you own. Process excellence initiatives are very worthwhile and will help the company save money and reduce waste, but your rate of improvement will be slow if you cannot engage the entire leadership team in the process. It will take years to make a lot of change happen, and it will be a constant struggle to sustain your improvement initiatives.

Process experts can lead the effort but most likely, you will end up with only small segments of sustained excellence. Your success will still be dependent on the team leadership skills of your people and they are not trained in nor engaged in the process excellence initiative...someone else owns it. The biggest problem is that this approach sends the message..."If you are not on a process improvement team, you are not responsible for process improvement. One of the key things that hold back process improvement initiatives is the fact that in most organizations, only a small percentage of their leaders are actually taught to use process improvement tools. We are not taught how to use these tools in our formal education.

There is often resistance to team leaders permitting their reports to participate in process excellence events led by someone outside their team. The team leaders often do not foster a team culture that supports process excellence initiatives. Measurable Management engages all your leaders to use process improvement tools".

I think you have hit the nail on the head Denny. This is precisely what we mean when we say that Measurable Management adds momentum and is like adding a turbo-charger to your Process Excellence initiative.