Live from Delphi - Using Process Improvement Tools to Drive Organizational Culture Change

I am attending the Delphi Business and Process Innovation Summit this week and blogging as I go.

Next up James Heideman on Using Process Improvement Tools to Drive Organizational Culture Change. James spoke about adopting a "Six Sigma"-like process at Nissan. "Nothing endures but change" - at Nissan culture change was key and much harder and more of a challenge than expected. Change is certain and yet hard to cope with - triggers "corporate immune system". The same tools for issue resolution can be effective to improve the change process itself. James felt the program at Nissan succeeded because of 6 elements

Integrate

Improvement process is part of the organization - don't separate out from rest of corporation.
Made process leaders part-time, kept some organizational responsibilities and then assigned them issues relevant to their day-to-day job and that worked better.
Key to success was reporting early wins and the impact of them.
Avoid the bureaucracy and build a steering committee that is broad and deep so can break logjams.
Embrace believers, convert others
Did regular stakeholder analysis regularly - measure their interest, assess impact etc.

Focus on essential training - don't use 2-3 months of full time training for everything but train on essentials and then develop more skills as they improve.
Get to work on real issues that hold back the organization not on the process improvement process itself
Used a Six-Sigma chart (Pareto Chart) to assess tools being used in improvement projects and focused on training those tools, not less-used ones. Found that many of the soft-skills, group interaction skills mattered far more than e.g. statistics

The Right People

Cross-functional teams
Need a steering committee to get the people you need - want people who are strong not the weaker ones
Availability is not desirability! Used focused interviews to explain issue to managers and find who would be the right team member (and get the manager bought in to providing them)
People must be involved, knowledgeable and willing to be frank and honest so as to avoid group-think

The Right Projects

Managers have their own ideas for projects
Succeed early and often! Find the right projects
Match team skills to project
Two wrong projects for example - Politically charged issues can be problematic. Small projects can burn goodwill.

Fact-based decisions

Management sometimes does not recognize that issues exist
Must gather facts to show problem
Match accuracy to the size of problem - perfect accuracy is not usually required.