Let's just get this out in the open; I am a free market conservative and one of the best tools in our arsenal to grow market share, innovate, and improve customer satisfaction is competition. We compete with people, teams, companies, and economies. We also have the innate ability to compete with ourselves.
As your organization travels your path you will have opportunities to grow and learn. It is up to you to decide what to do with this new found knowledge; let it sit or implement it into your Standard Work instructions. This new knowledge is not like wine that will get better with age. Each day you do not implement is lost productivity and this loss is one of the barriers to growth. You think, "we can't take on new work, we more than we can do right now", and you are right based on how you run the business today.
Excellence is a customer-based performance characteristic and you must compare your's to those you compete with. I'm not suggesting that you try to get a tour of their facilities and steal the metrics hanging on the walls, but look at their service offerings on their website or talk to your customers that you know use your competitor's services. You can also use your industry's benchmark. But you have to look at that gap analysis as opportunity to improve. Make sure you do not fall into the trap of rationalizing your poor performance by attributing your competition's success to luck or political alignments.
If you are not measuring your performance then you do not know what you do not know. Also do not use the "I have not been yelled at by the Boss lately" metric to gauge your performance, this is a lie your brain uses to avoid potential conflict. Using a Balanced Scorecard approach uses a series of questions and operational layers to determine what are the potential measures that would apply to your product or service, but is up to you to determine which to use. You should use some of the measures that relate to Safety, Quality, Cost, Delivery, and Morale that will should aggregate performance, but not a single metric due to the risk of sub-optimizing the process to improve just one characteristic at the risk of negatively impact the others.
As you create your dashboard you will be tempted to use some high-end measurement system with all manners of bells and whistles. I don't recommend this in the early phases of your measuring because you probably do not know what you need yet. Spreadsheets or home-grown tools created in something like SharePoint will be just fine to start with. As you develop your measures you must also determine how to respond. What do you do when you see the measures going off the track? Who is notified, how do you attack the problem, and how do you document the findings?
When you have your performance history documented and you see you are on your way to the top, think about comparing your current measures to past performance. This would be the same as watching the futbol tapes after a game to see lost opportunities or turn-overs. Where can the team improve performance by improving their skills?
What are you measuring in your office processes?
As your organization travels your path you will have opportunities to grow and learn. It is up to you to decide what to do with this new found knowledge; let it sit or implement it into your Standard Work instructions. This new knowledge is not like wine that will get better with age. Each day you do not implement is lost productivity and this loss is one of the barriers to growth. You think, "we can't take on new work, we more than we can do right now", and you are right based on how you run the business today.
Excellence is a customer-based performance characteristic and you must compare your's to those you compete with. I'm not suggesting that you try to get a tour of their facilities and steal the metrics hanging on the walls, but look at their service offerings on their website or talk to your customers that you know use your competitor's services. You can also use your industry's benchmark. But you have to look at that gap analysis as opportunity to improve. Make sure you do not fall into the trap of rationalizing your poor performance by attributing your competition's success to luck or political alignments.
If you are not measuring your performance then you do not know what you do not know. Also do not use the "I have not been yelled at by the Boss lately" metric to gauge your performance, this is a lie your brain uses to avoid potential conflict. Using a Balanced Scorecard approach uses a series of questions and operational layers to determine what are the potential measures that would apply to your product or service, but is up to you to determine which to use. You should use some of the measures that relate to Safety, Quality, Cost, Delivery, and Morale that will should aggregate performance, but not a single metric due to the risk of sub-optimizing the process to improve just one characteristic at the risk of negatively impact the others.
As you create your dashboard you will be tempted to use some high-end measurement system with all manners of bells and whistles. I don't recommend this in the early phases of your measuring because you probably do not know what you need yet. Spreadsheets or home-grown tools created in something like SharePoint will be just fine to start with. As you develop your measures you must also determine how to respond. What do you do when you see the measures going off the track? Who is notified, how do you attack the problem, and how do you document the findings?
When you have your performance history documented and you see you are on your way to the top, think about comparing your current measures to past performance. This would be the same as watching the futbol tapes after a game to see lost opportunities or turn-overs. Where can the team improve performance by improving their skills?
What are you measuring in your office processes?
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