12 Days of PEXmas, Day 9: Prioritizing process within your organization

Back on Day 1, we touched upon the link between Process Excellence and business-critical strategy, now, with Day 9, we take this one step further by looking at level of priority a business affords your process efforts.

Interestingly, though, the priority level that an organization assigns to process excellence does not appear to have any correlation at all to how long an organization has been practicing process excellence. (see the chart below). At 0-2 years, for instance, 68.49% of survey respondents report that process excellence is either one of the top priorities or the top priority, a number which remains relatively consistent across all maturity levels. Indeed, a slightly smaller percentage (65.96%) of companies that have been doing process excellence for 10+ years report that process excellence is either one of the top priorities or the top priority (although moderately more report that it is a "top priority" than any of the other maturity levels).

These results indicate that support for process excellence remains relatively constant over the course of a deployment. In fact, at the beginning of a process excellence deployment it could be that support is moderately stronger, if the organization has a "burning platform", which it believes employing process excellence methodologies will help resolve.

There is a risk, though, that if process improvement only is associated with solving a specific problem at a specific point in time, that it becomes something that burns brightly initially but quickly burns itself out.

"If you start everything with a big bang then people either expects a lot or they expect it to blow over," says Ulf Pettersson, WCM Manager at Tarkett Ronneby. "If you start on a small scale and pilot in a small area you’re creating a pool for the need for other departments to follow. If you are able to show results, people want to know how it was achieved and they become interested."

A great place to find out more information about how to implement your process strategies, and refine existing strategies to properly manage company expectations is PEX Week 2015 this January in Orlando. Download the agenda below for more information.

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