What it Means to Build Infrastructure for Your Performance Improvement Initiative

Embarking on a successful performance excellence initiative requires much more than simply scheduling training for belts - you need to think about building a foundation for your deployment that will guide it from front to finish. This “big picture” thinking means you need to consider what types of processes, procedures and plans you need to put into place to support your training and project activities.

Without this initial work, you risk making a number of costly mistakes in your deployment. For example, companies that conduct projects without first connecting with the finance team risk having the validity of their projects questioned later, which can ultimately lead to a lack of project support and eventual program failure.

For any company wondering whether it's time to do some infrastructure building work, here are some quick thoughts on how to tell where your weak spots may lie and what activities you may find most helpful.

Building infrastructure is so important to the overall success of a deployment that BMG considers it one of the top three critical success factors driving a program's ultimate success. The other two factors are executive level support and a commitment to full-time Black Belts.

Why Build Infrastructure?

To Lay the Foundation - Set an overall picture of what you are doing. To Plan for What is Coming - How and when will training happen, who will be affected and how? To Agree on and Understand the Big Picture - What do we hope to do with this work? How will we know when we succeed? To Clarify the Vision - What outcomes do we desire the most and what are the metrics? To Understand the Boundaries - What lies within and outside of what we hope to achieve? To Create and Honor the Processes - Do we understand and agree on what steps the business is taking?

What Infrastructure Building Does - Ensure Alignment
Think of a Rubik's Cube. You can work diligently to align a single side with the same color, but as soon as you start working on a second side, you inevitably jumble up the side you've already completed. To solve the puzzle completely, you need to consider the interdependencies between the sides and how they affect one another.

Like a Rubik's Cube, there are interdependencies across every organization that require concurrent consideration when making an organizational change. One group cannot effectively set project guidelines while another team is working independently on finance guidelines. Similarly, the communications team would be remiss in sending out a nomination request for new Black Belts without the human resources team first developing a job description for the role.

There are generally four primary areas that require alignment within the organization: the executive team, the employees, financial metrics and the program support infrastructure. Their interdependencies require they work together across functions to ensure true alignment. If you sense your company has this challenge, the smartest thing to do is start with a gap analysis that outlines the space between where your program is today and where you want it to be. Once complete, a gap analysis will give you an improved focus that will help you uncover burning platforms for change. Concepts to consider in your gap analysis:

• Executive Alignment - There needs to be a clear vision for the program and a uniform understanding of what your management team hopes to achieve. The vision should include measurable goals, accountability and timelines for achievement.
• Employee Alignment - This aspect involves human resources, internal and external communications, training departments and support teams. Employees need a clear understanding of the vision in order to eliminate their fear and anxiety about the changes that are happening across the organization.
• Financial Alignment - Finance and project personnel need to agree on what constitutes project success and have a clear process for tracking and measuring projects. Cross functional teams should work together on developing the guidelines and tools so that everyone has a sense of ownership and commitment.
• Support Alignment - Support includes not only developing a practitioner mentoring plan, but having a clear corporate technical support plan. As your deployment becomes more complex, it will require more sophisticated project tracking methods. Your Champions should play a critical role in determining the project review process and helping to set expectations in advance so that milestones can be reached accordingly.

Who Should be Involved in Building Infrastructure?

In BMG's experience, companies are best served by building infrastructure through the joint efforts of a cross-functional team committed to taking the executive deployment vision and putting the tactical detail behind it. Selecting the right people and getting them together to make the effort succeed can be a challenge. BMG recommends every deployment pull together a “core team” to make the critical infrastructure decisions and get the ball rolling. This core team should be a group of cross-functional leaders from specific areas of the company who are both high enough in the organization to set the guidelines and have a strategic perspective, yet low enough that they are willing to roll up their sleeves to do the work.

Infrastructure Building Activities

A core team should include your company's primary process excellence program leader, a process excellence executive, a geographic representative at the Champion level, and a representative from each of the business units at the Champion level. The core team does not typically include practitioners such as Black and Green Belts as the sensitivity of the discussions may not be appropriate for this group.

With the executive vision built, the next step is to put that vision into a structured action plan. This will require what BMG refers to as a “core team” of cross functional leaders whose role it will be to set the guidelines to match the executive vision and keep them in place for the long term. This core team should include 8-15 individuals and include members from human resources, communications, IT, finance and training as well as your deployment. It is this group's responsibility to think through all the aspects of your deployment and develop a working action plan for execution. For example, how many, who and what individuals will you train? How will results be tallied and reported? How much are you going to spend and how much do you hope to get in returns – and in what time frame? How will you determine the best projects?

The size of the core team depends on the size of the organization, but should never be larger than 20 individuals. In addition to key process excellence personnel, BMG recommends that the core team includes one or two members from each of these company areas:

• Communications - Include people who are responsible for internal communications throughout the organization and who have a corporate-wide perspective. These individuals will be responsible for helping plan the launch and ongoing communications strategies, as well as creating the brand for your deployment within the organization.
• Deployment team - This should be one or two “big picture” people who have the ear of the executive team and also understand the inner workings of your deployment. This is typically your process excellence program leader and the most senior quality or performance excellence executive.
• Financial - Individuals from the finance team will be ultimately responsible for creating the definitions, tools and processes that will allow projects to be consistently measured and validated. Their inclusion is critical if you desire their buy-in to the process.
• Human Resources - This department has a great amount of work to do in infrastructure building, as they ultimately support the new employee population with grading and benefit structures, career path guidelines, job descriptions, benefits and expectation setting.
• IT/Tech support - This team will help you plan for whatever necessary tools you need, making sure employees have the appropriate hardware and software to do their jobs, providing data sources and helping the company track project successes across the organization. In building infrastructure, invite the individual(s) that can be proactive in planning for these inevitabilities.

When is the Right Time to Build Infrastructure?
The best time to build infrastructure is just after your team has agreed to move forward with a performance excellence initiative, but before you have started any training or project work. For companies that have already completed training, it is not too late to get started. A simple gap analysis can help you outline the space between where your program is and where you want it to be. For anyone not familiar with a gap analysis, it is simply a study of the space between where your company is today and where you desire it to be. Once complete, a gap analysis will provide a clear outline of where your greatest challenges lie.

What is BMG's process for Building Infrastructure?
In BMG's experience, companies typically see significantly greater and faster results when they have professional guidance in building infrastructure. Our infrastructure building workshops typically involve three days of intensive discussion between the core team members where they make the tough decisions about the firm's goals, timelines, policies and procedures. To ensure the right topics are discussed and decisions are being made, we use a proprietary software tool called the eHandbook to guide the workshop. The eHandbook contains all the questions companies typically face during a deployment (as taken from our experience with over 200 deployments), and some sample answers. Companies use the eHandbook as a guide, working through the questions to personalize their own copy. Through this process, each company develops a unique plan for building infrastructure, and documents the plan for the entire company's reference. When the three days are up, the bulk of the work has been done and a solid foundation has been laid for your process excellence infrastructure.

For companies curious about the eHandbook, BMG offers a monthly online webinar that covers the specifics of this product and the initialization process. You can sign up online here. Or for more information or follow-up questions, contact Breakthrough Management Group, Inc., www.BMGi.com, or call 1-800-4-6-Sigma.

Upcoming BMG Training

Basic TRIZ (Denver) June 26 - 29  

Black Belt Training  (Denver) Starts July 10 - 13 

Champion Training (Denver) July 11 - 13 

Trend Prediction and Business Modeling Forecasting (Denver) July 11 

Green Belt Training (Philadelphia)  Starts Aug 14-18 

Product DFSS (Denver) July 17 - 21

Transactional ToolMaster (Philadelphia) July 31 - Aug 4

Transactional Lean (Philadelphia) Aug 7 - 10

Black Belt Training  (Atlanta) Starts Sept 11 - 14 

Black Belt Training  (London) Starts Sept 12 - 15 

Lean for  Manufacturing (Denver) Sept 18 - 21

Topic:  Building Infrastructure with the eHandbook

Read the article in this issue, "Why Build Infrastructure?" to learn why building Infrastructure for your deployment is key.  Then, join BMG for a Free Webinar and insiders look at the eHandbook, a powerful tool for designing and managing your performance excellence initiative.   

Date:  7/12/2006 or 8/9/2006

Time:  9:00 a.m. MST

Topic:  eLearning to Drive Culture Change

Is eLearning the solution for your company?  Find out how eLearning provides both flexibility and cost savings as mentioned in this issue's case study, "eLearning to Drive Culture Change".  View BMG's FREE live demos.

Date:  6/21/2006, 7/19/2006 or 8/16/2006

Time:  9:00 a.m. MST