DailyKaizen

As I mentioned last week we had our final Hoshin Planning retreat this last Friday for the Model Line.  It was a challanging, sometime frustrating, but overall exciting day.  At the conclusion of the day we had a single plan that all of the leaders support and is ready for deployment.  Being our first year we are very green and have many gaps in our process and our knowledge.  For example, we have decided to only play catchball one level down in leadership, we did not have a formal reflection process this year, and our ability to get useful process metrics is lacking.  Yet, everyone in the room would agree that it was the most useful planning process they have ever been through.  

 We have also agreed as a team that for the 2008 planning and management process we would continue to evolve and expand the process.  For 2008 we plan on conducting a formal reflection process.  We plan on playing catchball down to the manager level and we plan on bringing in leaders from other division to help with our goal setting process.  Our goal is to get better each year and to continue to build our planning and deployment skills at all levels.  We cannot claim success until our planning and deployment process transcends the entire organization creating a line of site all the way to the associate level.  In this spirit here is my quote of the week from Shoichiro Toyoda about Policy Deployment:

“It’s also important that the system proceed on the basis of shared views between the team determining objectives and actions above and the individual units or individuals below.  That’s why, at Toyoda, we decide these things through exhaustive discussions in study sessions or off-site retreats.  Merely communicating through documents will give you a kind of policy deployment in form only, long on work and short on results.”

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