Change Management Part V ? accountingcpd's blog

Brian Plowman continues his series of blogs on change management, this week looking at accelerating continuous improvement.

By Brian Plowman

The conventional wisdom is that change management requires time and patience. Patience is not easy to maintain when competitors are snapping round your ankles.

Many companies are locked into a vicious circle. Often as much as 70 per cent of managers? time is spent on firefighting. And up to 50% of staff time is working in undocumented processes, the workarounds, designed by the staff to overcome the process failures they suffer every day. It takes precious time to break out into the virtuous circle of continuous improvement.

There are ways of making time. One is to involve people across the organisation in a concerted effort to identify the causes of waste and inefficiency. This provides the twin benefits of extensive participation, and a chance to take the heat off hard-pressed managers and staff.

How is this achieved? One simple, but effective approach has impact across a broad front. It aims to:

involve everyone, but particularly non-managerial staff, in generating proposals for improving processes; encourage managers at all levels to take on their new role as leaders of change management; give managers experience of helping their people to analyse their working processes and suggest improvements; achieve improvements in capability, by rebalancing resources across the organisation ? the right level of resource in the right places, with the right systems and procedures ? to allow people to do their work right first time; establish credibility by winning short term benefits, such as waste elimination, improved customer service and enhanced teamwork across functional boundaries.

The aim is to establish a momentum and build credibility. The main focus is the elimination of waste and other unnecessary activity. This frees up resources that can be redeployed into critical improvement areas: enhancing customer service, developing new products or services, and so on; thereby improving competitiveness. These aims are achieved by means of a two-stage process.

Stage 1 ? Finding the opportunities

During the impact study, people identify activities which hamper or fail to add value. These activities typically represent between 20 and 40 per cent of the cost of sales. Other information, such as customer surveys, provides an external perspective.

People examine the main causes of process delays and disruptions, the gaps and deficiencies in customer service and the barriers to improvement. They identify opportunities to improve customer service and efficiency. All this is done by the people who work in the heart of the business processes ? those who have the least authority to make changes, but whose knowledge must be tapped if the right changes are to be made.

The impact study prompts the behavioural changes required for change management. Both managers and staff perform unfamiliar roles. Staff think about their work in a new way, questioning, often for the first time, why things are done as they are. Managers observe and encourage, allowing staff to draw conclusions from their own data and experience.

Stage 2 ? Making the improvements

Improvement begins as a process of enhancing the partnerships between external and internal suppliers and internal and external customers: building an organisation in which everyone treats others as they would wish to be treated themselves.

It also addresses the need of each work group to have the right resources ? people, systems, procedures and training ? to do a quality job. Defining quality by the standard of external customers is of course an iterative process. Improvement provides the first opportunity for everyone to participate in the debate and to see their ideas evaluated and implemented.

Staff think about what needs to change to enable them to improve processes and to provide good service. The impact study provides focus on the areas of greatest opportunity. Overall, wasted effort is reduced; firefighting diminishes; managers find they have time to support, develop and encourage further continuous improvement activity. The net effect is a dramatic improvement in cost-effectiveness and customer service.

What about managers?

Throughout the process, managers find themselves in an unfamiliar position. For much of the time, they have to take a back seat, allowing their people the freedom to speak their minds about a traditional management preserve ? namely the way work is organised.

Managers watch as remedies for longstanding process problems are proposed by people generally credited with limited capability or power of creative thought; they see functional barriers overcome by the simple device of letting people talk to each other about the difficulties they have in common. Some managers, themselves the victims of internal barriers and destructive competition, take delight in the energy and enthusiasm displayed by their people.

When the time comes for decision-making, they perform their role with enthusiasm, adding the benefits of their breadth of experience and vision. Others may feel uncomfortable. Some of their hard-earned management skills are no longer prized. New skills ? coaching, and facilitating ? require a frame of mind that some managers, more used to telling people what to do, find difficult to master.

Encouraging behavioural change

The impact of improvement is quickly felt. Many of the ideas for improvement can be actioned immediately. People feel proud when they see their ideas accepted. They start to believe that managers are serious about listening to what staff have to say. Managers become aware of the untapped potential in the minds of the people reporting to them. They realise they can rely on staff to take more responsibility for solving problems and satisfying customers, and begin to realise that they have an infinitely more satisfying role to play.

Potential customers visiting the UK factory of an engineering group are directed straight to the shop floor, where a representative from one of the manufacturing cells explains what people are doing.

The customer is then passed on to the next cell, where the same process is repeated. All the cells are self-directing. Managers are nowhere to be seen. They have total confidence in their people.

Brian will bring you his penultimate blog on change management next week when he looks at overcoming resistance to change.

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Source: http://blog.accountingcpd.net/2012/10/16/change-management-part-v/

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