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Performance management: Tired of playing blind man’s bluff? A guide for operational excellence pilots

Performance management: a guide to excellence

Your mission is clear: drive the company’s performance with various levers such as operational excellence action plans, transformation projects and innovative projects. Easy to say.

These concerns impact all levels of the organization, not just your team (when you have one). This means knowing how to create commitment and follow through on the actions to be taken. When you are 10 in the team, it seems feasible. When you are 1,500 in a multisite company with numerous processes, the game becomes more complicated.

Performance indicators expected by top management

Top management rightly wants to have an overall view, with simple-to-follow global indicators to ensure that everything is progressing in line with the set strategy. However, getting this global view often requires numerous mechanisms organized in an apparent disorder that sometimes escapes top management.

We often avoid showing the four days spent gathering information from different people, retrieving various Excel files and other media to try and consolidate all this information into an ephemeral PowerPoint document, intended solely for presentation to the Management Committee. At best, these four days of intense work are known to top management, but are considered a “necessary evil”.

All this painstaking work creates a presentable whole with color codes and succinct numerical data: indicators. These indicators are essential for decision-making. However, it’s difficult to “dig” deep enough to understand what’s behind a given figure, which forces us to trust the numbers. And since it’s unpleasant to be the bearer of bad news, we often present shades of green, from olive green to dark green, with the occasional touch of pale orange to indicate that all is going relatively well.

We call these “watermelon indicators”: a beautiful green exterior that hides red and pips when scratched.

The key role of the Operational Excellence Manager

To maximize performance and optimize the key performance indicators expected by top management, a lot of hard work goes on behind the scenes!

The person in charge of reporting the KPIs is the Operational Excellence Manager. Like a maestro, he orchestrates this symphony of productivity, efficiency and quality.

Their mission? Harmonize a multitude of initiatives – from simple ideas to large-scale projects – while managing a diversity of interlocutors who are often absorbed by other tasks. Especially since all these people do not necessarily share a hierarchical relationship. In this context, he or she needs to combine several soft skills, not to say superpowers! Moreover, they often have to deal with limited resources such as Excel, PowerPoint and Teams. The lucky ones will have a trainee.

The PMO’s first task is to meticulously gather and consolidate data scattered across a tangle of Excel files, to prepare essential periodic reviews. Necessary but often disorganized, these reviews quickly become inadequate to deal with day-to-day emergencies. Despite everyone’s commitment, they become a rush for information and limit collaboration. They are seen and felt as a constraint, even though their purpose is to facilitate everyone’s involvement.

Operational Excellence Pilots quickly find themselves overwhelmed, wasting precious time. As a result, even the most competent are hampered by this organizational chaos and limited by the tools at their disposal.

Recognize yourself? No surprise there. Although it may sound like something out of fiction, this rather gloomy observation actually describes the very real situation in many companies. The damage caused by this disorganization doesn’t stop there. Under your management, your operational teams are also affected by the challenges imposed by these disorganized processes.

The operational to-do list, or the never-ending meteor shower

Commonly referred to as “the to-do list”, behind office doors the to-do list becomes a meteor shower, or hot potatoes.

Working on action plans feels like being under a meteor shower?

These terms refer to all those tasks that are suddenly imposed on teams, marked by a sense of urgency and often without sufficient explanation. Even more frustrating, these meteors don’t always fall within their primary responsibilities. Imagine additional, unsolicited, poorly explained work to be managed in excel file number 12, on lines 34 and 128. It’s hard to get teams on board… And very often, this only leads to even more inefficiency within the organization!

Many employees, full of good intentions, are naturally ready to contribute and help for the common good. However, when calendars are already overflowing, tasks are unclear, and neither their origin nor their purpose is understood: meteor number 15 can be difficult to accept.

The most obstinate will be determined to try and do everything, and will hold out as long as possible before exhaustion sets in. Others will choose to tackle only those tasks that please or suit them, often without regard to priorities or urgency.

Finally, the last will simply wait for the next reminder from the PMO: “the file was blocked”, “I didn’t know”, “how soon is it due again?” …

How to give power back to the PMO and operational teams?

Yes, there is a way to satisfy top management with meaningful indicators, without overloading PMOs and operational teams! And it’s called the G.T.R. strategy.

Don’t think of it as a fruity energy drink. It’s simply the 3 essential components identified to support your progress initiatives. These components have been tried and tested in numerous organizations.Our customers know that they are essential to meeting the requirements of innovation, continuous improvement and transformation processes.

1. Governance

If top management wants indicators, it’s to make sure that everything is going well and evolving according to the set strategy. If you want to take 1,500 people “on a journey” towards this strategic objective, you will need to define the rules of the game.

Where are we going? Why this destination? How do we get there? What do we need to get there?

If you ask your teams to climb a mountain when all they’ve brought with them are flip-flops, it’s going to be a tough climb!

In practice, governance:

  • Gives meaning to actions: why certain actions need to be taken.
  • Ensures legitimacy: aligns objectives with individual responsibilities.
  • And establishes priorities.

It aims to avoid overloading employees with too many simultaneous subjects, to clarify expectations and to communicate actively when these expectations change. It is through governance that we create an environment that fosters success and the commitment of all participants.

To sum up, governance:

  • Plays an essential role in the leadership and embodiment of the approach.
  • Guarantees the availability of the resources required for program execution.

3 essential dimensions to drive your program to success

2. Tool

These progress initiatives affect everyone in the organization. Information must therefore be shared and easily accessible.But it’s not just a question of communication: it’s necessary to move forward, and everyone needs to be able to easily find out what needs to be done, and when.

Even though social networks and e-mail allow us to communicate, they don’t make it easy to find out who’s doing what, what the latest decision was, etc. All this generates a lot of agitation that’s hard to keep track of. Excel, on the other hand, is a very effective spreadsheet program for making calculations and creating tables, but it’s not a suitable collaborative tool.

To effectively involve everyone in cross-functional processes, you need to adopt a very simple approach, especially in an environment where management applications are fragmented and everyone uses different tools. It makes sense to use tools that are already available on computers, but that’s like treating everything like a nail because you’ve got a hammer!

If I’m involved in the decision-making process, I feel committed to the implementation.

The tool must facilitate everyone’s work. Operational staff need to be “in the loop” from the very start of an initiative. The meteor doesn’t land unexpectedly: the subject is known, discussed and opinions have been taken into account.

Streamline your initiative management with IDhall

3. Rituals

Once governance has been established and the right tools are in place, the animation rituals can be deployed.

Now that the pilot no longer spends time chasing information, it’s possible to ensure that everything is going well on a day-to-day basis, and above all to have the time and perspective to re-evaluate certain initiatives in the light of ongoing actions and established priorities.

Meetings become more frequent, but they are brief, extremely efficient and don’t require long hours of preparation. Communication flows smoothly, decisions are taken more easily, and we stay on course. Projects are no longer launched without proper coordination.

Pilots, you now have the G.T.R. key to controlling performance management!

Governance, Tools, Animation: these three components are indissociable, like the three legs of a stool. Remove or shorten any one of them, and the whole balance is compromised. In short, this G.T.R. approach brings meaning to the whole. Sharing projects and initiatives, making decisions with an overall view (Governance), knowing how to prioritize to stop operational staff running around (Animation). Sometimes it’s manageable without tools, but very often it’s not!

Humanperf has developed the IDhall tool precisely based on these concepts, to give you the power to work better together.

IDhall enables top management to avoid watermelon indicators, the PMO to carry out its mission, and employees to be involved and committed.

Need more details? Read our customer testimonials.

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