There is a lot of hype around continuous improvements in today’s day and age. Many organizations have dedicated operational excellence teams responsible for improving the processes, reducing costs and increasing efficiency. In fact, it is hard not to come across a few Lean Six Sigma Black Belt positions while scrolling through the corporate job boards. While the intention behind forming these teams is noble, the big question is whether they are able to realize the benefits as they claim or not. Unfortunately, more often than not, these improvement initiatives fail to yield the desired results. To further complicate this situation, the improvement initiatives that do deliver the results continue to struggle with long-term adoption and sustainability. Here are the top three reasons for the failure of these initiatives:

Boiling the Ocean
It is not uncommon for stakeholders to want to do a lot with very little. Most improvement initiatives are sourced by burning issues in the organization that have existed for many years. Due to the complicated nature of these issues, they tend to be very large in scope involving many departments and interrelated processes. Just like any project, it is important to manage scope and build a strategy around fixing the issues in question. While these complex problems are great opportunities for continuous improvement teams to make their mark and showcase their viability to the business, they tend to overcommit and take on more work than they are able to realistically deliver. This results in compromises that prove fatal as the initiatives progress.

Tips: Understand the problem area; determine (with stakeholders) an appropriate strategy (‘big bang’ vs. ‘phased’) based on the nature of improvement and urgency; manage scope and expectations.

Lack of Team Member Involvement
The employees (‘doers of work’) are critical to any improvement initiative. The lack of focus on people, and overwhelming emphasis on statistical analysis of the process leads to catastrophic failure. Whether businesses like it or not, human beings are complex and they have an emotional component to them that impacts every action they take. While Lean Six Sigma toolkit (and statistical analysis) provides insightful data that is valuable in any improvement initiative, it is only means to an end. The human aspect to any process cannot be ignored because it shapes how a process is deployed and utilized. It is compelling for senior management to make decisions based on ‘statistically significant’ data because who doesn’t like “facts”? However, even the right decisions fail to yield results because people (employees / workers / team members) impacted by these decisions are not involved in the process. The improvements that follow this approach may see a positive surge for a limited amount of time due to the ‘mandatory’ nature of the decisions, but human nature will soon come in to play and things will revert back to their original state.

Tips: Gain an understanding of the process by involving the impacted team members; use statistical analysis tools to help compliment the findings and recommendations; involve impacted team members to gain agreement on process gaps, and more importantly, to address them. Remember, an average solution with full commitment will yield better results (100% of the time) than a perfect solution with no commitment.

Lack of Real Importance
Many organizations are forming dedicated operational excellence teams, and assigning sizeable budgets to these teams. This statement would argue that organizations see the importance of undertaking improvements and are willing to support them. However, the reality is a little bit different. Organizations fall short of solid commitment on these initiatives the second they touch on an area that is responsible for revenue generation. While there is a general agreement among business groups that they want to do better, they are not always willing to undergo a change that would cause a temporary dip in their performance due to diversion of resources to the change and the associated learning curve. In these cases, some of the common statements made are “the business as usual must not suffer”, “this is too critical a stage for the organization to introduce changes” and “we need to postpone the changes until next year so we don’t miss our year-end targets”. Consequently, the status quo wins because it guarantees a certain level of comfort and stability.

Tips: Build awareness and educate stakeholders on the nature of improvement initiatives. Ensure that they understand the expectations, and are committing to the entire improvement philosophy and not just the idea of it. Demonstrate success on smaller, low-risk initiatives to build support (if needed).

 

The main purpose of this article is to raise awareness on the top reasons for the failure of improvement initiatives. This is, in no way, intended to be an article on resolving these problems. In fact, one cannot do justice by providing an absolute solution (or set of solutions) that works in every situation. How do you get around these issues in your organization?