Operational Excellence is doing what you said and know needs to get done, when it needs to be done (to meet customer requirements). It is about planning and executional excellence. There are strategic and tactical components.
Recommendation: Instill accountability and focus by establishing an annual, quarterly and monthly review process with your board and staff centered on a set of key documents. With practice, you should be able to conduct the review in less than an hour.
- Annual Review and Renewal: What are your choices with regards to Strategy, Action Plan, Metrics and Organization Design and Processes?
- Renew Mission and Strategies. You want these to be long-lasting (3+ years) but year-to-year you might make a few adjustments with an occasional overhaul.
- Develop Dashboard with Goals. Reconfirm that you are tracking the right metrics and add monthly goals. Focus on the few things that you are serious about and committed to improving.
- Develop Masterplan (or Action Plans). Identify the key actions, owners and target dates to drive your desired results.
- Renew Work Process Masterplan. This is a short version of the “best practices” you want to focus on.
- Update Organization Design. An organization is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. If you want to change the results, you must consider a change in the design.
- Monthly Review: Did you do what you said would get done? Involve your staff.
- Review Masterplan (or Action Plans) and Process Masterplan. Update the status of each assigned item (color code each item green, yellow or red). Have the owner report on progress and address reasons for delays (yellows or reds). Use the “greens” to acknowledge accomplishments.
- Review Dashboard and Goal Status. Do a gap analysis of results that significantly deviate from goal.
- Review Follow-Up List. This captures agreed-to follow-up items and serves to help the “group memory”.
- Quarterly Review: Are you working on the right things? Are you on-track to achieve the annual goals? Involve your staff and board.
- Review Masterplan and Process Masterplan. In addition to the above Monthly Review work, ask if you are still working on the right things to drive needed metrics. Make adjustments to the documents.
- Review Dashboard and Goal Status. Same as Monthly Review.
Further Discussion:
- Keep the annual, quarterly and monthly review documents simple, ideally to single pages. The format doesn’t matter but some examples are attached. Each organization will have its preferences.
- Don’t track too many things on the Scorecard. It takes time to gather the data. The Dashboard should reflect the needs of the Board for a high-level update.
- The Masterplan or Action Plan is likely comprised of various projects. Don’t use the Monthly Review to do a Project Review. Project Reviews should be scheduled separately and led by the Project Leader.
Open the document and download here:
[dg order=”DESC” columns=”1″ new_window=”true” ids=”2436″]
Dig Deeper
Read more about Operational Excellence on these pages.