AVT Professor Nils Randrup: How to avoid sliding back to old routines

What happens after the project ends? Many organizations experience that, within a short time after the conclusion of an improvement project or effort, slowly but surely the process and people involved loose interest or focus.

So the initiative goes from in focus to being out of focus, the improvement activities are put on the backburner vs. other pressing issues, and the good intentions become just that again, good intentions.

Can we prevent the inevitable? Is it at all possible to make changes stick when the spotlight is gone, and people have left the theater?

A live case story

I once worked for a large international industrial company, which produce and sell important components to the food industry across the world. Their CEO had identified the need for significant improvements in the offer handling and sales processes, since there were huge problems with on-time delivery of offers, hit-rate and waste of resources.

A project group was quickly established, and I was invited to help the project manager (a VP of sales) to lead a project with the purpose of streamlining the offer and order processes. During two months, the project group met regularly and we developed a good and solid proposal for how to change the working processes in such a way, that offers were developed much quicker and with the use of fewer resources, leading to shorter lead-time, higher hit rates and without as much waste of resources.

We used the basic techniques from Lean Six Sigma and created three offer flows to accomplish this. At the conclusion of the project, the CEO signed off on the improvements and the revised lead-to-order sales process. The Sales department was asked to implement the improvement swiftly, which was kicked off one Monday morning. All employees in the Sales department were informed about the improvement during the morning meeting (1/2 hour), where the sales manager in general terms announced, that the company was now improving the sales process. He gave a brief description on how things would be in the future.

No visible changes a month later

When I came back a month later, the proposed improvement was not visible in the sales activities and processes any longer. I confronted the Sales Manager with this, during a coffee break, and he said that he had informed everyone about the changes, and it seemed like they had understood what they needed to do. He thought the new processes worked better now. When pressed for the proof of this, he admitted that they had not really monitored the offer time, nor the resources usage per offer after the project ended, but had observed that they did not get as many complaints from customers about missing offers as before.

What I saw was that the order and structure the improvement project had created, as well as the significant improvement in effectiveness and efficiency, has slipped back almost to the way things were, and only a little of the value created initially was now being harvested.

The Executional Performance Gap

We call this dilemma “The Executional Performance Gap” (see graph below). When the CEO got involved, he was not surprisingly disappointed. The big issue now was to find out why things had gone backwards and slipped, slowly – but surely back towards how things were, before the improvement.

My experience is not unique. Many colleagues of mine from within the consulting business, both smaller outfits like Magnificent and ROI Consulting and larger outfits like McKinsey, CSC, and Accenture, have many of the same stories to tell.

When meeting up to tell “war stories” this is a common theme for us. And we have all in our own way tried different tips, tricks, and procedures for how to make changes stick. What is perhaps more interesting, different of my friends, who are CEOs in companies from different industries, also have the same insights and have a slightly different set of tricks for how they have tried to secure that improvement based change becomes permanent.

Executional Performance Gap illustrate the problem with sustaining improvements after the improvement have been initially developed as part of an improvement project, where employee knowledge and motivation to change, decrease after the project is finished and therefore impact the adoption and continuous use of the improvement principles and tools.

Based on this pool of practical experience and knowledge, the five most common reasons for why “shit happens”, and also how we can make sure that improvements for the better will stick, are listed below.

Five steps to implementation of improvements

The bottom-line is therefore that good improvement projects often fail in the execution. To prevent this, executives should:

• Make someone on the operational side directly responsible for the improvement
• Ensure a proper description of Standard Operating procedure and policy
• Create motivation through participation in the development of the improvement
• Develop a communication plan that impact the heart and mind of people
• Secure competence development and training for those people who need this to be able to execute their changed role effectively.