Insight, opinion and commentary for the leaders of Lean Enterprise Transformation from some of the world's leading experts.Part 4 of 6 - How to Begin and Lead an Enterprise-wide Lean Transformation: Your Management System
October 30th, 2006 - by Mark EdmondsonBelow is an excerpt from an actual email (with names and company specifics removed) in reply to an inquiry by the president of a Fortune 500 company. She was newly appointed as the executive sponsor for her division’s “Lean Enterprise Transformation”, and asked us: “What’s critical for the success of our transformation?”
4. Look at your own management system. Just as your product value streams require brilliant processes to deliver value, your management team also requires a brilliant management process to lead effectively. Have a well defined performance management system in place so you can effectively lead and track your transformation. Here’s some questions to ask yourself about your management process:
a. Quick, where does your team stand with your three most important business objectives?
b. Does every individual on your team know what’s required of them today, this week, this month, this quarter and this year to achieve these objectives?
c. Do you have a process that links and tracks individual activities to your objectives to ensure your team will succeed?
d. Does your team know on a continuous basis if they are ahead, behind or on schedule?
You don’t need a complex and expensive software solution. A simple A3 based performance management process is a quick yet effective way to get started.
November 1st, 2006 at 9:50 am
We use these and they are very effective. At the business and next level (operations, engineering, commercial) are done monthly which in turn are fed weekly from the line managers. In parallel the Strategy deployment, which monitors YTD performance of CSF’s/KPI’s and main actions are also A3’d and reported monthly. Also each line management A3 has a summary table from the associated and relevant strategy deployment projects. The line management A3s are posted for the workforce to see.
I would recommend that you ignore any commercial software and just get one of your employees (who is good with excel) to set up a series of these A3’s, the real benefit comes from your regular weekly meetings with the line managers and then start root causing and bottoming issues, just start with one per week. As confidence grows you can then start to drop the time between these meetings, a good way to help drive Lean.