My Flexible Pencil

Human Capital Management and Lean Transformation Go Hand-in-Hand

Kaufman Global — Thu, 17 May 2012 09:05:49 +0000

A guest post from Eric Patz, Director, Recruiting and Human Resources at Kaufman Global.

There are two primary dimensions of managing your human capital―Strategic and Administrative. These same components also play an important role in Lean Transformation where skilled “people involvement” before, during and then ongoing can make a huge difference.

It’s common for organizations to begin their Lean journeys focusing on production, operations and Lean tools. It’s only after toiling at it for a couple of years that they realize they should’ve focused sooner on the human capital aspects of creating lasting change. Commonalities between operational improvement and managing involvement are significant, particularly with regard to three critical work streams often overseen by the Human Resources (HR) arm of human capital, notably:

Resource Management (People)
Process Understanding and Documentation
Internal / Employee Communications

Let’s discuss these.

Internal / Employee Communications | Throughout a transformational journey, you can’t do too much communicating. That’s right―you cannot over communicate. One of HR’s main responsibilities is to interact regularly with all talent, including leadership, management, staff and production. Strategic-minded organizations take advantage of the fact that HR is already a primary interface with people already inside the organization. HR can be a strong ally in getting the message out about what’s important to the organization. And, at the same time, they can evaluate how the message is being interpreted based on the feedback they receive.

HR plays an integral role in driving message consistency and feedback across the organization. Take advantage of this valuable resource by building them into your Lean plan.

Process Understanding and Documentation | The top three rules of HR (in order of priority) are to launch with documentation, continue to document and then close by documenting. As it turns out, factual documentation―especially process documentation―is a key ingredient in Lean transformation, as well. So, why not engage HR early on by doing some Lean projects and activities inside HR? This realizes several benefits, among them:

Awareness: It involves HR staff in a tangible way so that they get and can conveyinsights that are only achievable through direct, first-hand experience
Discipline: Those involved gain an understanding of and can better supportprocess documentation requirements expected of the entire organization as Lean efforts accelerate
Results: HR realizes meaningful improvement inside their own business processthat enable the rest of the organization. For an example, see our case study on Time to Hire.

HR can be more effective when they are directly involved in the real work of waste elimination.

Resource Management (People) | Lean is a people system above all else. Sure, Lean’s improvement techniques are compelling. Yet, at the end of the day, Lean is even more about predictably engaging your people in effective, sustainable waste elimination inside processes that they can influence and control. One of HR’s tasks deals with helping develop your organization’s most important asset―its people. Thus, HR can help with three aspects of managing human capital that are paramount for success:

Selecting the right people for key roles in the transformation effort:These are the change agents that will shape and guide your efforts. Initially, technical ability is less important than the ability to deal with people and manage change.
Integrating individual performance measures and the organization’s Lean objectives:This key driver is often not recognized until very late in the game—sometimes years later. Ultimately, organizations come to realize and apply the understanding that what gets measured gets fixed, even at the level of personal performance. Be sure to integrate personal goals and objectives for Lean inside your performance review process.
Understand when individuals are blocking the effort: Resistance is normal. Understanding and dealing with it directly will save you significant time and avoid resource-depleting false starts.

Select key people for attitude and train for ability. Keep objectives and measures in front of everyone. Lead change and don’t hesitate to quickly address uncertainty.

Remember the journey to creating a sustainable Lean culture starts and sustains with clear communication, process understanding and documentation, and, having the right resources onboard. It’s imperative to get your HR team involved upfront to accelerate your organization’s human capital performance, and with that, enjoy a more productive and harmonious Lean transformation.

About the author Kaufman Global (multiple authors)

Kaufman Global is a proven implementation partner that focuses on accelerating performance. For 20 years, we have worked with clients around the world to drive enterprise-wide change initiatives and cultural transformations. Leveraging Lean, Six Sigma and proprietary change management techniques, Kaufman Global delivers structured implementation and transformation projects that enable sustainable operational and financial results.

Everyone owns their own shop

David M. Kasprzak — Mon, 14 May 2012 09:05:20 +0000

curiosity shop by rudeone-d372lk5 on deviantart.com

Hail the shop owner. The relentless, never-ending driver of continuous improvement. The person who, with utter conviction and dedication, is constantly seeking a way to increase sales, improve quality, gain word-of-mouth, lower costs, retain staff and improve customer experience in every way.

These folks understand that value is what customers are after – and that the only obstacle between delivering that value and mucking around with sub-standard nonsense is their own pride of ownership. People who are proud of their shop always want to have that pride. They want it to sustain and grow. They never want to see their pride diminished.

In your workplace, do people act like shopowners? Do they do work extra hard to take care of the shop, own its processes, design its delivery of goods and services, and constantly seek out innovative ways to provide value? Are they looking for ways to grow the business, since that growth leads to both stability and prosperity?

Odds are, they are not. Most people are just trying to survive it all, in return for a paycheck and some sense of satisfaction, if it can be found at all. Most people have jobs and not purposes. That lack of purpose prevents the emergence of any kind of pride in the ability to do the job, grow the company, satisfy the customer or improve the quality of whatever it is they are selling. Instead, pride gets twisted until it becomes not pride of ownership, but pride of survival.

People are very proud of their ability to survive their jobs – they will tell great, lengthy stories about putting out fires and putting up with bosses & co-workers. Very few people, however, are able to talk about what they’ve accomplished in terms of business growth, customer satisfaction, or quality improvement. In fact, having to focus on those things is often seen as a burden since it takes away from the focus on pure survivability.

Such a reaction is not unreasonable, however. With the way things are in most places, people are expected to simply show activity and not, necessarily, show results or competency. As a result, there is suspicion and a lack of trust, and no one in their right minds would dare challenge the status quo when all the social and professional pressure within the organization says that maintaining the status quo for as long as possible is the correct way to go.

In order to have people work on improving the business, they must feel a prideful connection to the success of the business. If not, then they are only working to achieve their own sense of satisfaction, which might come about through activities that take away from the health of the organization. No shop owner would throw away their investment on frivolous, unimportant activities or projects that contribute nothing to the value of the business.

About the author David M. Kasprzak

I am a seasoned project and management analyst with over 14 years of experience as a trusted advisor to all levels on planning, measuring and analyzing activities. From small-scale internal projects to multi-year development efforts supporting enterprise-wide initiatives at the C-level, I “get geeky” seeing great management practices yield great outcomes. I am a fierce & vocal advocate for learning, collaborative approaches to work and pursuing Operational Excellence through challenging the status quo and fostering management innovation

Work on Fewer Projects and Get More Done

Kaufman Global — Thu, 10 May 2012 09:15:56 +0000

A guest post by Garry Vosahlik, CFO of Kaufman Global

Good Intent Unintentionally Sabotaged – Have you observed this in your organization? Each year the Leadership Team goes through a planning process. With good intention, they launch a number of initiatives to achieve stretch goals. Work begins with great enthusiasm but soon becomes mired down. Reality hits, priorities are diluted and the rhythm of bureaucracy sets in.

“Idea darlings” are aggressively pursued by the Leadership Team and move to the front of the queue. The rest of the projects languish … or worse. Sure, as time permits they’re continually worked on. Yet they’re not predictably getting done. And perhaps worse, execution effectiveness drops off as expected organizational learning is lost and then repeatedly must be regained.

It is not uncommon for organizations to underperform on project intent. Many times there are simply too many things being worked on at once, consuming attention and resources, and giving rise to increasing conflicts and bottlenecks. Perhaps some of these situations sound familiar to you?

When the business plan was being developed no consideration was given to projects and initiatives already active in the organization
The year progressed, things changed. New projects were launched at multiple levels in the organization but there was no reliable process to terminate old projects and free up people and resources to work on the new one
The same core group of people is called on over and over again
There is no such thing as a “not to do” list to maintain organizational sanity

For a moment, let’s assume that most organizational projects arise from an important business need. If the project is successfully completed, the organization receives the benefit right? Well, let’s see…

Company Alpha has an idea for a hot new invention. Faster product development = faster time to market and recognition of a new profit stream. Given the opportunity, it makes sense to commit a focused team to complete the work. BUT… many organizations run numerous projects at a time, perhaps more than they are aware of, with their people and resources diluted across a broad spectrum. Think about yourbottom line. Is it better to execute ten good projects and start delivering benefits as quickly as possible or run 4x of them concurrently — with all achieving various stages of completion and few reaching closure?

Given that choice, the better path forward is clear. So, even though at times it may seem counterintuitive, the better answer is invariably to work on fewer projects in order to get more done. So, what’s a way to simplify and clarify the project portfolio you ask?

Conduct an Initiatives Inventory.

This is a structured and eye-opening activity that enables the organization to learn what’s really being worked on, see the decisions they need to keep momentum, and, gain insight into leadership’s role in making project teams more effective. How does it work? Simple…

The Leadership Team and functional managers (two to three levels down in the organization) identify all of the projects and initiatives consuming time and resources.
A project and required resource list is created, and we ensure we dig deep enough into the organization to capture all of the projects as told by the people who are leading and working on them.
We establish a scoring system to rank the amount of time people are involved in the project. For example, A= over a month, B= two weeks, C = supervision and meetings, etc.

When the inventory is summarized in this way it offers insights into a common hazard revealing those who may be overloaded and can bottleneck progress. Now we can rationalize based on current priorities!

Leaders are facilitated through the thorny decisions to rank the highest value projects while terminating or deferring those of lesser value. Additional screens are created as needed to thin the list. From this point the Leadership Team can now assess the organization’s internal capability and decide on a small list of critical projects that can be active concurrently.

Finally, we put into a place a process to control new project starts (and the intended or unintended commitment of resources) at all levels. This allows the Leadership Team to rationally manage projects to closure while introducing new work when active projects are completed and resources are freed up for reassignment.

So, working on a fewer projects at a time enables you to get high impact projects completed timely and effectively. This accelerates the start of the benefit streams and drives your bottom line.

About the author Kaufman Global (multiple authors)

Raising awareness of ROWE and Lean, redux

David M. Kasprzak — Tue, 08 May 2012 08:44:03 +0000

Upon_Reflection_by_Cynnalia on deviantart.com

It has been some time since I’ve written about ROWE and Lean, thanks to some personal ups and downs and the need to sit back and reflect a little on what I learned after bringing the ROWE and Lean communities together. So, I thought it time to re-visit the situation and report on what I’ve learned so far.

In my investigation of ROWE and Lean, I initiated the process with the belief that ROWE could help Lean. My conlcusion is a firm and definite…..maybe.

ROWE has shortcomings. They are well explained here, via a blog by Scott Rutherford. ROWE, if left alone and perceived as the end goal, leads only to suboptimization. The approach is incomplete. It might help get Lean off the ground, but that realization only solidifes ROWE’s role as a launchpad, not as an overall management philosophy, which Lean is.

In his comments on a recent post to his site, Dan Markovitz stated “Respect without tools leads to feel-good mediocrity.” Which serves as a warning that ROWE, without an overarching framework for continuous improvement, does not have the ooomph! to prevent or rescue failing organiztions. ROWE is incomplete.

That’s not to say it is without its merits. ROWE can create engagement, but there’s a lot of care needed to make sure that engagement is for the right reasons, not the wrong ones. Taking the day off due to burnout is good. Taking the day off because I’m sick and tired of dealing with bullshit is not. Fixing the problem, or learning how to influence the problem, or experimenting with methods for identifying problems, is a much better result for everyone than disappearing for the afternoon because there’s “nothing to do.”

Where ROWE is cool, and I mean really, really cool – is when it acknowledges the people side of things – that there are concerns outside of work that might keep me from being in the office, and if you let me take care of those things when I need to, I will pay you back with interest. THAT is a good thing. But when the people that do the work are left entirely on their own to organize themselves, without anyone to oversee the process, that is not good management – that is the acceptance of bad management as some kind of innate, inevitable truth. Yes, we need to be much more centered on allowing people the freedom to perform without paternalistic, demeaning oversight. Even the best of flocks need shepherds to guide and direct the herd, though. When the humanistic approach gets elevated, everyone wins. When it gets glorified, everyone loses.

Look at this post called Go the F**k home, courtesy of Tim McMahon’s blog. I don’t want people who get fed up and go home. I want people who are so fed up they begin to investigate the means of identifying mura and muri, and the countermeasures for reducing and eliminating waste, to the point that no one ever is so overburdened that they NEED to work late, or want to just to keep up appearances.

Yes, everyone would like to work where they want, when they want, to be known as a responsible agent capable of determining their own impact on the organization and entrusted with the responsibility for doing what is right or needs to be done. Unfortunately, it’s an all-too-well-known reality of problem solving that a person has to exist outside of the process that created the problem in order to truly see where the errors occur. That means a wizened and experienced group of people have to be monitoring that process and the system within which those processes occur. This means LEADERSHIP. The real problem we seen in so many organizations, however, is that leadership is absent or weak, and defines itself as the ability to push people around rather than push obstacles out of people’s way. We are left, instead, with a caste of managers whose greatest wish is to never have to deal with their staff on a personal level or report a problem upwards…which is the antithesis of leadership.

With good leadership, any approach can be successful. Without it, any approach is doomed. The question, then, is which is likely to produce good leaders – ROWE or Lean? If the situations at Best Buy and Toyota are taken as examples, the answer to that question is obvious.

ROWE is enticing, as are any other arrangements that promise more freedom, respect, responsibility and control. Unfortunately, too many of those things leads only to under-performance and, at the extremes…chaos or stagnation. Direction and organization are mandatory, too, and they often can’t take place without a good, swift kick in the butt taking place.

ROWE, at its best, might be able to point out Fake Lean and help Lean initiatives get off the ground, but that only highlights that embarking upon a Lean journey ought to focus on True Lean from the outset. Doing so would invoke the same concern for individuals, in all respects, that ROWE focuses on anyway.

In the end, my conclusion is this – ROWE is, clearly, the way people want to work. Lean is, equally clearly, the way that they should.

About the author David M. Kasprzak

Metrics are Scary and Should be Avoided at All Costs (Not)

Kaufman Global — Thu, 03 May 2012 09:15:24 +0000

A guest post from Jerry Timpson, President and Principal at Kaufman Global.

Metrics are such an important element of continuous improvement. Wait…Metrics might be the most important element of continuous improvement. Why? Because continuous improvement by definition is the measurement of improvement — and if you aren’t measuring, how will the organization know how far it has come or where it needs to go?

Most organizations struggle mightily with the topic of metrics and sometimes it’s surprising just how much. I think it happens for a number of reasons:

Difficulty Connecting the Top to the Bottom: The metrics that executives are familiar with such as return on net assets, profitability, cost, etc. are at such a high level that the people actually doing the work often don’t know how to make the connection between what they do day-to-day and how that can impact the bottom line.
We Might get our Budgets Cut: If an improvement is stated at a departmental level, such as productivity or yield or throughput, then it might actually result in a budget reduction – and no one (at least no one in the department), wants this.
Uncertainty About Where to Start: Sometimes the fear of measuring the wrong thing will keep people from starting at all. After all, we already measure so much, what more can possibly be piled on?

These three could just be the tip of the iceberg for an organization that’s conflicted about this topic, but let’s address the ones at hand. The fact is, these issues can and must be overcome.

First, we should recognize that it is often difficult to connect the top and bottom. Just as the organization evolves and matures in its CI journey, so will its metrics. It takes time for improvements to show up at the headquarter level. Results will ultimately show up, but many organizations don’t have the 4 or more quarterly accounting cycles worth of patience to wait this long. That’s exactly why we plan for and achieve short term wins and measure them in ways that are closer to the operation – like cycle time productivity), yield (quality) and inventory.

It is important to relate some (but not all) of the improvements to actual budgets – this keeps our priorities aligned. That’s exactly why the finance community needs to be attached to any CI work in some way. Productivity, yield and throughput improvements can have near-term immediate budget impact. In order for this to happen, Finance needs to be involved and the organization must not be too aggressive in its estimates. Finance involvement and budget impacts are one sure way of keeping the organization honest about the level of improvement – it’s better to be conservative and have a real impact than to alienate the organization by overstating results that don’t translate to the bottom (or top) line.

Finally, let’s face it – too many things are measured. People often realize this along with the fact that the wrong things are being measured. Metrics, especially as you get closer to the operation, are not static and are expected to evolve over time. Introduce new and better metrics and then throw out the ones that are obsolete or not working for you. If you’re in doubt about what to measure, go for a good solid time-based metric. After all, time is the common denominator of all continuous improvement. If we can cycle through a process faster (and keep service quality and product integrity the same or better), then we have eliminated some form of waste! Most importantly, at the workgroup level pick metrics that can be controlled by that group. Metrics that don’t follow this rule are ineffective at best.

About the author Kaufman Global (multiple authors)

What if what’s in their best interest……doesn’t interest them?

David M. Kasprzak — Tue, 01 May 2012 04:23:33 +0000

Salad by digitalminds on deviantart.com

A very good post appeared on the FastCompany site yesterday, in which author Ginny Whitelaw declared, “Empathy is the most powerful leadership tool.”

There’s not a lot to disagree with in the article. It is, essentially, about Covey’s “seek first to understand” and represents both a practical, and I would say moralistic, way to approach your interactions with others. Seeing things from their point of view is a good thing, of course. It helps you to understand the other person better, so that you can align your message with their concerns. It’s a practical exercise for influencing others in any walks of life where negotiation, compromise, and change are necessary. It also indicates that you have a measure of respect for the other person’s thoughts, feelings, beliefs and opinions.

Unfortunately, there are times when people simply don’t act in a way that is consistent with what is in their best interests. Especially not in the long term. It’s as simple as David Meister’s Fat Smoker principle – you have to go through something difficult to get to something good, so change is hard and rarely happens.

Short-term thinking has a psychological basis. Ronald Riggio wrote a post on his blog last year, linking the economic crisis to “short-termism:”

There is considerable evidence that short-term thinking in business, and in regard to the economy, is disastrous. It is our search for immediate gratification that fuels short-term thinking. Much of the economic meltdown was related to the pursuit of immediate rewards – whether it was the lenders trying to reap profits from questionable loans, or the homeowners who were buying property that was beyond their means.

Here are the danger signs that you are falling prey to short-term thinking.

1. No plan. Companies that don’t engage in long-term planning are prone to failure.

2. Trying for the quick score. Fads and trends come and go, and many businesses and investors that cashed in on the quick score are often gone because they don’t plan for what to do when the fad is gone.

3. Lack of analysis. All too often, what seemed like a good idea at the time, will only turn out to be a bad idea through careful analysis. A lot of terrific business ideas and inventions aren’t successful because the originator didn’t analyze how to get the product made, marketed, and/or delivered.

Having done the planning, analyzing and monitoring of budgets for initiatives at one level or another in my career, I have seen each of those three things occur all too often.

Analytics necessitate patience – they require that you take a little longer and examine a feel-good situation to make sure it’s not a long-term disaster in the making. Unfortunately, we tend to be fat smokers when it comes to planning. We want the rush of the good stuff first, only to (and often quite intentionally) push the messy, difficult stuff to some later point in time. Essentially, we want dessert first and we push the broccoli and cauliflower to the end of the meal. Of course, that just leaves a bad taste in our mouths when we’re done.

So, what can we do to overcome the problem? I think it’s simple – just as a person who needs to eat better and exercise more will find a way to mix in a little bit of the things they don’t like with the things that they do, so must a business. Both must learn a simply, but not easy, habit: saying no.

Saying no to the slice of apple crisp and walking away from the table is much like saying no to what seems like a great investment, but hasn’t been analyzed. Give yourself time to contemplate and reflect upon the consequences of what you are about to do. If you are bad at doing that for yourself, put people in place around you who are specifically selected for their ability to disagree with you and make sure you make healthy choices and focus on the longer-term.

About the author David M. Kasprzak

Project Management & Measurement gamed

David M. Kasprzak — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 05:05:51 +0000

Measurement_ by spacesuitcatalyst on deviantart.com

In a recent article on his blog, Dan Markovitz offered this statement:

“One problem with stretch goals, I believe, is that they focus on outcome metrics, and can therefore be gamed.”

That got me thinking about how we analyze and measure progress on business projects. All too often, I have seen project leads engage in gaming metrics as if their ability to adjust the numbers was the real purpose of their jobs. As I indicated in my comments on Dan’s article, “How do we make these numbers look better” is an operational question, not a spreadsheet exercise.

Yet, project management tends to be all about outcome metrics. Tracking costs vs. plan, Earned Value, Cost and Schedule Performance Indices, consumed slack – all are about what happened. Granted, there’s an effort inherent to those practices that says the future can be predicted by understanding the past, however, that approach also seems to indicate that errors are acceptable. Especially if we read a bunch of charts and graphs and variance analyses to tell us that we had a problem some number of days, or weeks, ago.

Somehow, that doesn’t seem good enough.

I’ve seen far too many managers who are completely distant from the day-to-day operations of the projects and processes that ought to be occurring right under their noses but, unfortunately, have become dependent upon analyst-manipulated reports to convey information. This reality only seems to point out the importance of applying concepts such as leader standard work to project management and controls. Simply put – leaders need to have an understanding of not just the outcomes and results of their team’s efforts, but to be inherently familiar with the mechanisms and processes by which that work gets done.

When those processes are not measured, analyzed and understood – all that’s left is a pile of reports measuring the outcomes. When those metrics don’t show things as expected, then there’s a loose interpretation of the inputs that goes on – in order to justify the manipulation of numbers before they get passed on to the next level of review. ”The data doesn’t reflect reality” or “we need to make an adjustment to the numbers” is heard all too often. If the data is so easily, and subjectively, corrected then its method of collection can also be easily corrected, too so that good information is passed along, not manually tweaked information that results in nothing more than watermelon reporting (the phenomenon by which red projects get greener as the reporting moves higher up).

The best way out of this? Understanding the way in which the metrics are compiled is one. The better solution, however, is to be involved. Know who is working on the team, and why, and how they work, and what they are working on. Engage in the human elements and be aware of not only what is going on, but what should be going on. This places a premium on good planning and strong servant leadership.

The worst project & program managers I’ve ever worked with very often never looked at the reports that were provided to them. They simply didn’t understand the information and/or believed that force of personality was sufficient to effect positive outcomes. Some of the best I’ve worked with didn’t read the reports, either – because there was nothing in all that data that they did not know already.

About the author David M. Kasprzak

Position Yourself for Performance Transformation through a Fact-based Plan

Kaufman Global — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 07:15:50 +0000

A guest post from Sean Wright, Executive Vice President and Principal at KaufmanGlobal.

We Don’t Need No Stinking Assessment | By the time we meet most organizations, they want to get going with their transformation immediately. They often want to rush to implementation without a roadmap, resulting in the classic gotcha of “activity vs. action.” However, without clear direction, activity often swamps out action and fritters away resources fast. Few then remain to make a positive difference, and no lasting benefits accrue. To be effective, organizations need an implementation approach that predictably advances what their enterprise should be doing. In that, the following questions must be answered:

How is the work performed today? What’s working and where are improvements needed?
What’s our real “book of business”? What should we improve because it’s what we do?

Why Are the Basics Neglected? | Many believe taking time to map as-is throughto-be isn’t worth it. We often hear things like “an assessment sounds resource intensive,” or “it’s hard to value work that doesn’t appear change-oriented.”

Yet, it’s vital to analyze where an organization’s at and then create a robust change plan from that point-of-view. Crafting that roadmap never fails to deliver greater ROI and yield a sustainable improvement framework. Why? Because it:

Ensures an understanding of the starting line, sets targets to close gaps and creates progress expectations
Details a visible, potent and predictable implementation sequence to achieve the objectives, and,
Defines organizational mobilization with ample buy-in, as the organization actively helps build the plan

Model it Right | Neglecting the proper planning efforts can often diminish a transformation investment. As an example, one of our clients, a well-known global manufacturer, sought to apply 100% of what it learned about improvement in one location to all of its sites. The assumption was that an improvement anywhere should be the entitlement everywhere. However, in actuality, local reality must influence implementation design. HQ-sponsors overlooked the fact that their facilities:

made different products
had different customers
were in different locations
were made up of a highly diverse workforce with embedded local cultures

They would soon understand that these particulars make a world of difference.

Off and Running | In its initial location (the model site)—arguably their best facility—the company pursued a deep-dive to understand the “as-is” and envision the “to be.” Our joint team worked to:

Establish a clear performance baseline contrasted against industry benchmarks
Capture / assess ongoing improvements and rationalize the existing improvement portfolio
Target objectives and seize them through a structured implementation project led by active steering and employee involvement

As a result of this effort, model site results were impressive, with double-digit percentage gains in most quality, cost and delivery metrics. Thorny problems disappeared, as workers now had a voice and role in improvement.

The Beat Goes On | The next wave was at several complex, dispersed facilities, where HQ hoped to duplicate the success of its first location. To accelerate progress, leadership specified compact “delta-assessments” at each site and moved quickly to implementation. In spite of different customers, geography, products and cultural factors impacting the results, there was some success. However, when compared to the model site, advances fell short in number and velocity. Improvements were less culturally embedded and required far more energy to sustain.

One Size Does Not Fit All | In order to further speed company-wide change, the next site deployment wave demanded only a “coaching model,” where they merelyinformed additional locations about prior achievements via an extensive action list. There was no local baseline, no detailed plan and an underprepared steering team. You can probably guess the outcome—underwhelming. A defective project premise was in play:

You can achieve equal / greater performance transformation results in more challenging locations without facts, adequate preparation and informed involvement.

The assessment and planning activities often omitted in order to “speed results” are in fact the same factors that assure beneficial implementation outcomes and reduce its overall cost. So, what’s the lesson to be learned? Don’t rush to one-size-fits-all implementation without completing a fact-based plan. Use a system, yes. But, embrace a change approach that is agile enough to reflect your organizational diversity. You’ll then execute predictably and reap possibly the greatest reward of all—a sustainable culture of ongoing performance improvement.

About the author Kaufman Global (multiple authors)

You are at the mercy of your analysts (and you don’t even know it)

David M. Kasprzak — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 04:44:18 +0000

Analysis by 0HerMajesty0 on deviantart.com

I have a question for all those in leadership positions, who spend some amount of time on a weekly, monthly, quarterly or annual basis reviewing reports and presentations to get a handle on their business. My question is this – For all the data you review – how was it put together?

I am of the opinion that the vast, overwhelming majority of those who review charts and graphs have no idea how the data was collected, downloaded, analyzed and ultimately converted into a presentation. How much fudging, adjusting, hide this, don’t show that – goes on?

Here’s a fundamental truth: If you do not know how the number was constructed, you do not understand the number.

Anyone who has worked for any amount of time doing staff-level analytic work invariably knows that, when reports are presented, people will glance over the numbers looking for anomalies but never bother to understand the computation leading to what is in that report. Any attempt to explain the methodology results in blank stares, glassy eyes and, in many cases, utter disdain for wasting time explaining the math.

Unfortunately, what matters more than the number is the methodology. Information can be excluded and massaged. It can be changed to put a positive spin on the situation. As such, acting on information you don’t fully understand can lead to a disaster.

You can’t just focus on the “results” – meaning the data that you are presented in some pre-formatted set of documents. Focus, instead, on the process that gets the results, the planning that creates the process, the knowledge and experience that develop the plan, the personalities that shape the knowledge and experience…..this is where the foundation for the performance you hope to see begins anyway. The complex interplay of personalities is what drives team and group performance. If you have the wrong mix, or a homgenous no-mix-at-all situation, then you’re clearly never going to get to a sustainable good result.

Instead, what you will get is a hodge-podge of suboptimal processes and broken business operations. You’ll never know it, however, because the way the data surrounding those deficiencies is presented will be mashed into presentable form by an army of analysts, and that process will result in truly useful information being obscured, eliminated and misinterpreted.

About the author David M. Kasprzak

Broken glass, broke and hungry, Broken hearts and broken bones

David M. Kasprzak — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 09:05:53 +0000

broken by laFada on deviantart.com

Last Saturday, my older son fell off the swing in the backyard and broke both his wrists.

I spent each day at home with him, logging in to work on my laptop just a few times when I could, in between administering doses of medicine, running him to the doctors, feeding him, dressing him, helping him go to the bathroom or even simply shift positions in his chair. With both arms banged up, he couldn’t even push himself up when he started to slouch.

I’m absolutely exhausted. He’s on the mend, but the whole episode over the past several days has revealed so much that we all tend to take for granted, I think.

The most important lesson over the past week has been this: We should all lose ourselves in something completely and totally selfless from time to time. Parenting, as depicted above, can be one of those things. There’s great value in doing something that has little or no rationality behind it. No personal benefit, no altruistic higher purpose for which we believe we can gain good Karma points, just plain old long, dreary, difficult work for the benefit of someone else, even if they never thank us or show any outward signs of appreciation.

I think we hear similar stories from charity workers, social workers, firefighters, soldiers and others who are there because they believe in something bigger than themselves. Perhaps those notions have been romanticized in film and fiction, though. No matter, because what I found by helping my son this week was what all those possibly unrealistic, yet nonetheless wonderful, depictions of people working hard for so little in return already know = sometime you do your best work out of a sense of duty.

That is a concept that gets lost in the discussions of creating a better, more well-managed, more easily facilitated and enjoyable workplace. The sense of raw, exhausting effort put forth because we signed up to give our best no matter what the conditions. Today, we see people encouraged to walk away, or play politics, or manage and influence others – but we don’t often advise them to uphold their duty.

It seems a dirty word, doesn’t it? (Interesting that it is a four-letter word, too.) Perhaps we’ve simply matured – we’ve overcome our naivete and discovered that putting forth our best effort isn’t rewarded. Therefore, we employ a rational choice – we do just enough to earn the reward. Anything over and above that simply doesn’t provide a strong return on our investment of time & energy. On the other hand, maybe we’ve become spoiled – we expect to be given something in return for minimal effort and, therefore, don’t feel the need to expend the maximum possible. The end result, either way, feels like something that might be a bit conceited – we don’t owe others our best anymore, they owe us theirs. A generation ago, it used to be that if everyone simply did their best and kept to themselves, everything would be fine. Now, it is a matter of everyone receiving the outputs of everyone else doing their best, and being as vocal as possible when they do not.

I will confess, I’m in the latter camp. This blog is pretty clear evidence of that. Somewhere, the world flipped. Hopefully for the better, however, in thinking about my own personal sense of duty and obligations to my family, it does give me reason to pause, reflect, and consider that I just might be wrong about a few things, too. That, of course, is why taking a moment to reflect and ponder is so vital, and so very often leads to a nagging sense of regret, stupidity, and…eventually…..wisdom.

Of course, there are always more lessons to learn, and my younger son provided that, too. Most importantly, this one:

Innocence is bliss. The older son, age 7, and his brother, age 2, were both on the swings when the older one fell. The little one was strapped into his toddler swing, and left to hang there for a few minutes while we got his older brother some ice and rushed him into the car. As Mom took big brother to the Emergency Room, crying his eyes out the whole way, the little guy simply said his brother was “sad” and then looked at me and demanded, “Push.”