Free for the Asking
Why did TQM Fail?
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Employees take their cues from mgmt. more
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Executive & middle mgmt. oversights more
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Didn't integrate quality into organizational structure more
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Why do major change initiatives fail?
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Part 1: The eight major reasons for failure.
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Part 2: Consequences of these errors?
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Confessions of a shot messenger
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Developing a Common Language of "Process" & "Variation"
This session will show how to integrate quality into everyday work regardless of whether one is using it on management/administrative processes or manufacturing/production processes.
The overall purpose of this seminar is the creation of a common language to depersonalize longstanding issues. Its key is process-oriented thinking. It would also integrate concepts from the "balanced scorecard" philosophy, which would result in a more efficient use of data within the organization and create alignment around the new strategy.
Depending on the needs developed from the initial retreat, this could be a two to three day seminar for people at the level of middle management and higher, including the executive team. It may be prudent to invite informal leadership from the previous retreat who are especially interested and enthusiastic about participating.
With the help of the material learned in the previous retreat, organizational issues would be worked on during the session.
It will utilize Brian Joiner's Fundamentals of 4th Generation Management philosophy to emphasize:
- Nothing less than an organizational obsession with "quality" and deep understandings of "waste,"
- A "scientific approach" to solving everyday work problems (using data),
- An "all one team" atmosphere to facilitate the needed breaking down of barriers for better (internal and external) customer service.
This approach and "balanced scorecard" material will yield a hidden benefit, to quote Mark Graham Brown:
Coming up with a good solid set of metrics and actually
using it to manage will save thousands of hours of time wasted reviewing
charts and graphs in meetings and reading reports on statistics that
do not really matter... Armies of employees do nothing but collect,
summarize, and report data. Armies of managers and technical professionals
spend time reviewing these data and attempting to pull out something
meaningful from the mass of charts they receive each week...
You are the CEO and have gone on a three-month vacation. You are
allowed to look at four (financial, customer satisfaction, or whatever
category) graphs every month to tell you about the health of the company.
What would you want to see on those four graphs?
Brown also lists seven potential ways this immediate benefit could manifest itself, as observed in his consulting - These savings are what will allow the time to proceed with the effort:
- An 80 percent reduction in the volume of reports that were generated on a monthly basis by a corporate finance function,
- A more than 50 percent reduction in the amount of time spent in monthly senior management meetings,
- A 60 percent reduction in the pounds of reports that were printed each day, reporting performance data,
- An increased ability to focus on both the long- and short-term success of the organization,
- A better balance between meeting the needs of customers, shareholders, and employees,
- The elimination of up to an hour each day spent by managers reviewing and attempting to interpret unimportant performance data,
- A way to make the vision and values real to employees and to track progress toward achieving the vision and living the values.
It is not the intent to create a series of stiflingly formal "special projects." Rather, the intent is to align the entire organization towards one goal - meeting the needs of our customers - and simultaneously create a workplace of joy and excellence.
The bottom line will be to establish the following skills in the organization:
- Thinking in terms of processes - probably the most profound change in thinking of the seminar - and automatically blame processes, not people, when things go wrong,
- Identifying the unnecessary complexity and waste in current work processes that result in costs, but no added value, to customers,
- Using the Pareto Principle (the startling realization the 80% of job "heartburn" is due to only 20% of work processes), to better focus job improvement activity,
- Designing and using simple, efficient data collections to improve the effectiveness of processes,
- Communicating with a common language to depersonalize problems, break down current barriers between departments, and unify organizational quality efforts,
- Facilitating work teams to develop simple actions to study and prevent problems in everyday work that they currently and consistently find "frustrating as the devil."
"Only about 15 percent of [problems] can be traced to someone
who didn't care or wasn't conscientious enough. But the last person to
touch the process, pass the product, or deliver the service may have been
burned out by ceaseless [problem-solving]; overwhelmed with the volume
of work or problems; turned off by a "snoopervising" manager; out of touch
with who his or her team's customers are and what they value; unrewarded
and unrecognized for efforts to improve things; poorly trained; given
shoddy material, tools, or information to work with; not given feedback
on when and how products or services went wrong; measured (and rewarded
or punished) by management for results conflicting with his or her immediate
customer's needs; unsure of how to resolve issues and jointly fix a process
with other functions; trying to protect himself or herself or the team
from searches for the guilty; unaware of where to go for help. All this
lies within the system, processes, structure, or practices of the organization...
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[Jim Clemmer, Firing On All Cylinders]
For the final 2-4 hours of this seminar, once again, there will need to be a decision whether to continue with this philosophy. If so, it will be necessary to develop a plan for rolling out this education with the emphasis being on the previous six issues above.
The absence of blame through the utilization of process-oriented thinking, coupled with the language of variation and reducing waste will be a powerful catalyst in accelerating the philosophy in the organizational culture. There will also need to be discussion about management/ supervisory development education using key material from the initial retreat on emotional intelligence.
What Retreat is Next?
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