A Roadmap to Operational Excellence

As a management advisor, I often get asked what a roadmap to Operational Excellence would look like.

Here is a high-level answer:

1. Avoid beginning with a scope that’s too large. You’re often better off rolling out a first Operational Excellence initiative that targets a tiny scope (for example, fully preventing defects of a given type in a given site) and using it to create momentum, learn lessons, and build experience before planning a larger Operational Excellence initiative.
2. Everything you want the initiative to achieve should be described as habit standards. Not (just) abstract values, not just outcome standards, but standards of habits. “These are the habits we need to operate excellently…”
3. The next step is to ensure that those habit standards are relevant for each worker you want the initiative to reach. If one of the habits is “we always analyze the root cause,” you want to spell out what it means for each role impacted. For example, “for warehouse workers, it means that we analyze the root cause of each safety incident, including forklift ones, and the root cause of any delay…”
4. The following step is to formulate each of these habit standards so that it’s explicit that they are meant to be followed not just when doing so is easy but also when it’s hard. For example, “we analyze the root cause of each safety incident, not just when someone got injured but also near misses, and not just when we have time but also when we’re tired or rushed.”
5. Now that you have a set of concrete and specific habit standards, give yourself a pat on the back. The first part of the roadmap is done. Next comes implementation.
6. The first step is to plan a communication initiative that ensures each affected worker receives concrete instructions on what specific habit standards they are expected to exhibit – not the usual generic email from the CEO mentioning something abstract.
7. Next, and this step is critical, follow-up must immediately cascade top down. If the day after the operational excellence initiative is communicated, nothing changes, and no one seems to care that nothing changed, workers will mentally classify the initiative as “another piece of corporate-speak that won’t change things,” and things won’t change. Instead, the day after the initiative is first communicated, or ideally hours later, leaders should already start demanding proof of its implementation. For example, “Did any incident happen, and if so, did you perform a root cause analysis?”

There is much more to say about how to roll out Operational Excellence in an organization, and I  discuss this topic in much greater detail in my book “Best Practices for Operational Excellence,” but I hope that this article gave you some perspective on some important and often-neglected points.

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