Operational Excellence & Culture

OpEx and culture go ‘hand in hand’

If you train a bunch of people in operational excellence, lean or six sigma techniques, what do you get? Depending on the culture of the business you either get a) a bunch of people who have had a nice day out on a training course or b) people who are empowered with the tools and techniques they will apply on a daily basis, on various sized projects or, to consistently make lots of small incremental improvements delivering value to your business. What’s the difference between a and b? It’s culture of course.

OpEx and Marginal Gains

In a culture of continuous improvement everyone feels empowered to put forward, suggest and even make improvements, large and small. Larger projects are great and can deliver significant impact to the business via improvement in service, cost, quality and more. However, did you know that if a team of 50 people performed just 0.1% better every day, after 1 year, the increase in performance would be the equivalent of an additional 15 people? Incredible. Thats the power of marginal gains otherwise known as consistent, small improvements.

Creating a Culture of continuous improvement

So, how do you do it? Changing culture does not happen overnight and to create the culture you want, you need to follow a structured and methodical approach, with a healthy dose of creativity, just like you might approach any project you take on. Create a vision. Understand where you are now and where you want to get to. Align with stakeholders, get buy in and communicate your intentions in a way that inspires and creates excitement. How will you get everyone on board?

You need to educate. Cover everyone. Some people will need a lot and some people will need a little but be purposeful and well thought out in your approach. Recruit change agents. Align governance processes to the culture that you want to create. What gets talked about gets gone.

Make sure that people are empowered and supported to make change. This might mean showing them what is expected and giving them the time and resources (such as templates) to do it. Then as the movement starts to grow and early adopters start to make positive changes, you’ll want to share and celebrate the wins. That means you are rewarding the right behaviour and creating a little FOMO - fear of missing out - people start to think ‘I want a piece of this!!’

Sustaining your OpEx culture

If you don’t actively work to sustain your OpEx culture it will start to drift away, and probably not in the direction you want it to! Ensure your governance processes include discussions on progress vs target, what’s working well and what’s working not so well, so that you can make changes and tweak the program as you go. Continue to reward the right behaviours and continue to make time for improvement work.

This is a very quick overview of a vast subject, for a little more insight watch a recent LinkedIn Live I hosted on this subject here