You’re probably getting the results your processes are designed to deliver.

I see it every day, in all walks of life – good people giving their all but not producing the kind of outcomes they, or anyone else, wants. Are they happy in their work? Of course not, most carry on and do their best simply because they care; they achieve what they do in spite of, not because of “the system”.

Adding insult to injury are those who, when looking for changes, focus on people – often by adding more targets and measures and then castigating those who “fail” to achieve them. The system is sacrosanct, “we have always done it this way” or “that is the way it has been decided”. People, however, are not responsible for the system in which they work, if the system is not fit for purpose then they cannot succeed. Deming1 summed it up nicely;

“A bad system will beat a good person every time”

Managing risks and controlling costs, it’s a question of culture.

Risk, according to one dictionary definition, is

“The possibility of suffering harm or loss”.

Failing to manage risk hits the bottom line; contrary to widely held opinion there is no conflict between managing safety and quality and maintaining profitability. Relying on regulation, supervision and box ticking is extremely expensive and is not wholly effective; it is the decisions that people take “at the coal face” that affect results, and corporate culture and management behaviours influence those decisions. As Aristotle succinctly observed in 300BC,

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit”

Why driving change is hard work

How many times do you hear or read the term “driving change”? It’s a very assertive message, the intent to make it happen no matter what, but I wonder if the concept of driving is the root cause of many initiatives failing to deliver on expectations.

Driving, it seems, implies forcing others to go in a direction they don’t want to; little wonder then that, as soon as the driving force is removed, they revert back to what they feel happiest with. Driving change, then, is hard work and demands constant ongoing effort from the driver.

Life would be perfect were it not for the customers!

Many years ago I formed the opinion that, once an organisation reaches a certain size, it develops the ability to remain busy, no matter what the level of sales. By that stage, responding to customers’ requirements almost becomes a disruption; customers, in fact, only provide the cash to keep the mechanism turning!

Be careful what you ask for

How efficient is your organisation? Do you have efficiency measures for everything that is going on? You do? Then stop it, right now, and read on.

Maximising the efficiency of every aspect of a business will probably have a negative impact on overall performance. That is not to say that measuring efficiency is a bad thing, it is just not useful if the measuring is not effective. Just to make it clear;

Efficient is doing things right

Effective is doing the right things.

The importance of Mission

I was once charged with turning round a business that was in financial difficulties, one of my first tasks was to understand what made its customers keep coming back. I discovered that over 30% of the added value our customers benefited from was our expertise, and we were giving it away; the customers were getting a free service. Furthermore, there were no processes or systems in place that enabled part of the service to be measured or charged for; the challenge was therefore made more difficult because, apart from plugging the operational gap, the customer had got used to the free service and saw no reason to suddenly start paying for it.

You can’t change history

Another tax year has come to an end and, for many, it is time to take stock of the last year’s results. What will they tell you and what will you do with them?

Results are about history; we can’t go back and change what happened. What they tell us is about how well the business performed last year, and those results impact all kinds of decisions by all kinds of stakeholders The real value of results is not what they tell us about the past, what we learn from them to make a better future.

There is a simple cycle that enables organisations to become ever more successful; it is called PCDA, or plan-do-check-act. It is a principle that quality practitioners know well; it is most effective when used organisation-wide, an approach known as TQM (Total Quality Management).

Kpi’s are not targets, targets are not kpi’s

If you read my last rant you will know how the wrong use of words gets me going (well, I’ve lived long enough to have earned the right to be grumpy)! Having clarified the difference between equal and the same I now move on to explain why not understanding the difference between targets and kpi’s is downright dangerous.

We live in a target-driven society. Government ministers love targets; they don’t understand them but they love to invent them, move them and change them. They symbolise assertiveness; it is a very useful ploy, setting ill-conceived targets creates so much confusion and waste that they can distract attention from what really matters until it is time to blame someone else for the mess. (Oh dear, there goes Mr Grumpy again). Seriously though, it is a real pity when organisations don’t get it right; it gives the whole subject of setting targets and kpi’s a negative image, it makes setting out to do it right so much more difficult.

So, what is the difference between a target and a kpi, and what does it take to make them valid and useful? The answer is simple, I’ll explain with a simple analogy.

Does work drive you mad?

We have probably all tried some magic fix at some point; a training course to learn new skills, a smart piece of software that will make everything better. The road to ruin is paved with such good intentions; pretty soon going back and working the same old process gets in the way of doing things differently. The cost of the initiative is lost and no benefits are realised and we default to engrained habits.

When the going gets difficult we batten down the hatches and do what we always did, but work harder at doing it. In most cases, doing what we always did got us in to difficulty in the first place and working harder never fixes the problem; at best it enables us to weather the storm until the problem arises again.

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.

Albert Einstein

The only real way to realise sustained improvements is to develop effective processes and good habits, and that involves identifying and managing what really matters. Setting and using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is an essential step; having KPIs is, however, of no value unless they are used to support and encourage those good habits. What adds value is not the act of measuring, but the adoption of an intelligent approach, one that uses the right measures to develop a continuous improvement culture and to eliminate wasted management effort.

A good kpi system does not cover walls with obscure charts, or simply present the same data as a flashy dashboard, but makes achieving excellent results easier and faster. Qualitin’s ICG approach does that; it drives ownership and accountability throughout an organisation, it empowers and obliges everyone to focus on what matters to customers and stakeholders and it saves significant management time; that is why I’m an enthusiastic Qualitin Partner.