Clear Direction: Drive the Right Change in the Right Way - Softcover

Heathcote, Rose

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0620622520 ISBN 13: 9780620622523

Publisher: Heathcote & Associates, 2014

Synopsis

The journey to Operational Excellence is not a challenge for the feint hearted and can deter even the bravest of organisations from achieving their true potential. To be a world-class, sustainable enterprise means becoming the best at what you do and delivering value to your customers and shareholders. 
Clear Direction is the first book in the 5P Series and provides a practical road map, based on years of consulting experience in the developing world, which will smooth the ride of your improvement journey and significantly increase your chances of success. It will guide you step-by-step through:  

• Diagnosing the issues facing your business, deciding what to solve and how to go about it 
• Articulating the issues and engaging people to help you solve them
• Driving the change to get the right things done in the right way.

It contains the theory, templates, examples and assessments you will use to create your own Clear Direction and bring Purpose to your Improvement Strategy. The chapters included in this book cover similar topics to many of the books available on the subject of Operational Excellence. The principles are not new, and the author fervently believes in going back to basics and respecting first principles provided by the thought leaders of today and past generations. The key differentiator of this book, however, is how these existing philosophies, systems, tools, techniques and methods have been packaged into a management system and presented as a 'how-to guide' for you, the reader. It is a time-consuming process to digest the plethora of material out there in Operational Excellence, in order to define your own 'road map', and it is the goal of this series to demystify this process for you. The theme of the series of books falls under the banner of Operational Excellence and uses the principles of Lean Thinking coupled with important concepts from Six Sigma, Theory of Constraints and Best Practice that cannot be ignored. By adding the rest of the series to your collection, you start to see the Management System for Operational Excellence emerge. Browse through the content, and start creating your own structured improvement journey.

About this title

From the Author

PART I: CONDUCT A BUSINESS DIAGNOSTIC
Discover The Current Performance And True Potential

Embarking on an improvement journey can be overwhelming. Of course, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it and it would not be a competitive advantage. So rest assured, this process is meant to be challenging and take you out of your comfort zone. 

PART I of this book is designed to give you a comprehensive guideline to understanding your current business and how to recognise opportunity aligned to your business goals. It covers tools, techniques and principles from Lean Thinking, and important concepts from Constraint Management, Six Sigma and Best Practice. The use of this material requires the support of a sensei and should be tackled by a multi-disciplinary group to ensure system's thinking drives the improvement logic.

The book begins with an evaluation of the North Star and how to set clear direction for the assessments that follow. By starting with this section, you will uncover potential that is important to your business and its customers. Thereafter, we take you through a comprehensive Best Practice Evaluation, which will help define the Current State and target condition for each of the 5P people practices. Best Practice is as important as achieving results, and it will help you define the changes in habit that will create the right culture for continuous improvement in your business.

Understanding the key business processes, using the Value Stream Evaluation follows, and from this, you can map and visualise your current state of flow and develop a Future State condition to meet speed, flexibility and flow requirements.

The next step is linking improvements to the bottom line and this is critical for leadership buy-in and ensuring a positive impact on the profitability of your business. The Basic Cash Loss Evaluation will help you assess the cost drivers in your business and leverage points to tackle in the roll-out.

The final step in PART I is consolidation. Results from each of the evaluations are merged to create a road map for change. The objective is to develop an integrated and clear Future State Road Map with metrics to track performance. The road map will form a major input to the Change Plan in Part II.

PART II: DEVELOP A CHANGE PLAN
A Clear, Compelling Plan to Raise Performance

Equipped with clear direction and the gaps identified in best practice and performance, you will now be able to develop a plan that will steer the leadership of your company and its employees through the journey of improved performance.

PART II of this book is designed to give you a practical guideline to the critical elements your change effort must consider before proceeding. It binds this information into one manageable pack to be used as the guiding star and with this in hand, you and the rest of the senior team, will provide clear direction to the employees impacted by the change. More notably, you will be better prepared for the challenges that lie ahead by the questions you will need to answer.

This section of the book begins by summarising the Improvement Focus. Improvement focus will help you conclude the business Purpose and why the change is necessary. It will also confirm the direction that needs to be taken to meet the objectives and it will define how success is tracked and measured throughout the process, at various levels in the business.  

Thereafter, you can consider important factors of the Change Management Strategy, how to develop, enthuse and engage employees to support the change effort, and how to maintain it along the way.  

Developing a learning strategy relevant to your improvement objectives follows. This helps quality assure all the time, money and effort spent on learning and development, resulting in true benefit to the business and the achievement of goals.  

Finally, we introduce the principles of execution required to turn your strategy into results, although these will be covered in more detail in PART III. We summarise the Future Project Plan and milestones and discuss the benefits of creating A3 one-page summaries to concisely depict how the strategy has been formulated and will be deployed.

This part of the book should be treated as a generic approach that can be improved upon once you have gained your first round of experience.

PART III: DEPLOY THE CHANGE PLAN
Channel Activities Towards Effective Execution

With a comprehensive Change Plan in hand, you are ready to design how the goals will be cascaded through the layers of management and the improvements will be executed in a structured, sustainable way. Perfect goals do not make deployment happen, however, a system designed to maintain focus and direction in times of chaos or uncertainty, will.

PART III provides practical guidelines to implement the Change Plan. It begins by addressing the deployment enablers required for execution. We revisit Clear Direction and the management system to ensure direction is set and agreed habits of best practice lay a foundation for the journey. From there, we look at leadership styles, review current mental models in play and plan how leadership should progress to support the new way of doing business.

Once enablers for success have been attended to, the book focuses on the execution system and developing structures to drive a culture of Plan, Do, Check and Adjust (PDCA). We commence with a clear idea on what is to be done, how, by whom and when. This guides the activities taking place in implementation and maintains alignment to the North Star. It is captured on one page according to the principles of A3 Thinking, and the implementation plan is visualised. We then cascade the high level plan down to each level, developing subsequent A3 summaries to provide clarity in priorities and responsibilities through the ranks.

With sufficient progress in planning and how the work will be deployed, the attention shifts to verifying results from the action. You will develop review cycles and structures to ensure that what was agreed is achieved, and appropriate action is taken for problems and successes.

This part of the book encourages shared decision making and consensus building. We believe a collaborative approach will bring you closer to creating thinking people who can continue to drive improvement forward. Aim to achieve 80 percent implementation supported and driven by the majority of employees, rather than 100 percent actioned by a select few. Supporting this thinking with organisation-wide PDCA, as a scientific structure for follow-through, is therefore a primary goal in execution. PDCA is a powerful mental model that can set the scene for collaborative problem solving and execution through the organisation, regardless of the nature of the improvement.

Finally, we remind you that delivering value to the customer remains at the heart of Operational Excellence and is the ultimate objective. If deployment of value is initiated from the highest level in the organisation, it will succeed and be sustained. If it is driven only by the lower levels, you will see benefits but they may have a limited life span.

This book cannot give you all the answers but it can send you on a journey of discovery. If you are brave enough to ask the tough questions, you will be rewarded with a new perspective in the way you do business.

Rose Heathcote

About the Author

As an improvement enthusiast, author and consultant, Rose Heathcote has focused on raising the performance of enterprises through the principles of Lean Thinking, Advanced Problem Solving and Best Practice in most industry sectors in Africa, the Middle East, the United Kingdom and Indian subcontinent. During her 17-year career, Rose has been privileged to work with more than 100 organisations, from micro enterprises to large multinationals, bringing to them expertise in the strategy, execution methodologies and learning of Operational Excellence. 

As a proud South African, Rose's philosophy on improvement has always been centred around keeping it simple. She understands that problems faced by organisations are complicated enough and that the methods to address them, need to be presented in a way that can be used in the most challenging of settings. Rose has spent years testing a multitude of philosophies, methods, tools and techniques in a variety of environments, to consolidate a proven and successful approach that can be effectively used in emerging and developing economies, particularly in Africa. 

Rose is the founder of Thinking People South Africa, a consultancy that specialises in delivering an integrated approach to Operational Excellence. She has a background in industrial engineering and business management, where she continues to research new ways of achieving excellence through first principles.

Edition details

• Publisher: Heathcote & Associates
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0620622520
• ISBN 13: 9780620622523
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 442
• Editor: Saunderson Jennifer