As an organization we are still living with a slight hangover from our long history of Management by Objective (MBO).  One of the areas that this is most visible is in the mental models that we still all hold about how to bring about improvement.   This is a subject I have often brought up in the past so you can tell it is one that on a daily basis I see the organization struggling with.  I decided to write about it again this week after having conversations with several of my team members who are trying to teach leaders how to break out of the mentality that “all improvement is done in projects and most improvement is led by project managers.”

One does not need to look very hard to make this challenge visible.  One glance at our strategic plan and you can see numerous projects underway within the organization.  Most of these projects are point interventions where a small group of people have identified where a process or system needs to be added or changed and now they are working hard through change management issues to get these changes adopted by the operating units.  As you can imagine this creates all sorts of challenges including:

  • Difficulty identifying cause and effect.  By taking a project as opposed to process improvement approach it is very hard to make performance visible and understand the effect improvement interventions are having or will have.
  • Projects are typically point improvements that can often lead to sub-optimization, because we do not understand the impact the change will have on the entire process.
  • Projects have a start and end date while the processs is always there.  Teams that get accustomed to improvement through projects often view improvement as an “addition to the job” as opposed to teams that are focused on process and the improvement of the process on a continious basis. 
  • Projects are typically managed and implemented by people outside of the areas that are impacted.  This means that often there is strong resistance and little ownership for long-term sustainability and improvement.   This is a dangerous challenge for an organization, because it creates a system where only a small group of specialist are responsible for improvement.  Everyone else needs to do their job.

I am sure many of you can add additional bullets to this list.  As we move forward with and organization and teach people how to see their processes it will be important that we move away from these mental models.  This will be a long-term change…