Delivery Excellence on Auto Pilot

“Delivery Excellence” is the essential buzzword for every company. It becomes more prominent in the IT industry but also manifests in different format in other industries with industry specific definition of “Delivery”. Every organization is claiming to be working towards achieving Delivery excellence. There are multiple models built by various industry bodies, universities, governments like ISO, CMMi, Malcom Baldridge Award, Shingo Prize, etc. which are used by corporates to achieve and project delivery excellence to the external world. Many large corporations have built their own Delivery Excellence frameworks based on some of best practices of these models and their experience of delivering to customers. The whole idea of these initiatives is to build a framework within the organization which will help “auto-pilot” delivery excellence. The framework is a comprehensive set of Policies, Procedures, forms and templates which define what should be considerations while doing a specific work, how to do it, what are the tools available for doing the same and how to monitor its progress, etc. However, if one observes keenly across the spectrum of organizations, the aim of “auto-piloting Delivery Excellence” is not really seen to be successful. Corporations are not really able to achieve excellence, which is defines as “Excellence is the commitment one makes with one self to continuously do better than what one has done previously in the entire activities one performs on personal and professional life.  The benchmark is oneself and it is continuously moving upwards. There is not end as to final level of excellence”, in their delivery function. The corporates do not admit this but continuously refine the framework and do several other things to achieve the same. They set up a focus group to ensure that the organization continues to march on the “Excellence” path.

When one observes corporations / groups within the corporations who seem to be successful in achieving delivery excellence over a longer period of time and those who struggle or show intermittent success, we see a few points which make all the difference. These are  

1                     Has the team on the ground understood the Spirit of framework?

Many a times it is seen that a corporation has nice and comprehensive framework, it is available easily to every one to refer, there is a constant communication about need of its usage and team also uses it to the letter, there are no non conformity found in the audits but we do not see Delivery Excellence. The prime reason for this is the team does not understand the spirit behind each step in the framework. They really do not think deeply about why they are doing a specific step and what the business benefits are likely to be achieved by doing a specific step. The result is blindly following the steps mentioned in the manual. Over a period of time the team totally forgets why and just follows the framework to its letter. So it is critical for every organization to device means to ensure that the spirit of the delivery excellence framework is understood correctly by the team. This could be done by devising training programs which are more focused on deeper understanding and its relevance to business rather than overview. More and more case studies of benefits could be shared in discussion mode. The best method of keeping this journey of excellence perpetual is significant participation of senior and middle management.   

2                     Involvement of Senior and Middle Management

When an organization is building up a culture, then deep, convincing and demonstrated involvement of Senior management is mandatory. When organization observes keen interest and actions in specific tenets of culture or values demonstrated through actions; it starts adopting the same as their culture and their values. So it becomes critical that Senior management visibly demonstrate through their actions that they want a culture of delivery excellence in the organization. Many a times we see that Senior management sets the parameters predominantly on financial aspects, talk a lot about the same in various meetings, set up review process around it. There is not much of discussion on HOW portion of those achievements. The HOW aspects are directly linked with things like Delivery Excellence, which are vehicles to achieve financial goals. Clear and visible interest in these in terms of setting goals for their direct reports and reviewing of the same in meetings sets the right tone. When Senior management connects the comprehensive framework which has been built by the organization to business goals the cascade effect is a positive spiral. Taking cue from the senior management team, the middle management is critical in terms of implementation of this values system and if organization sees sincerity in the actions, their belief in what senior management is preaching strengthens. Is the middle management allowing the team to go through the full life cycle of any activity or they are looking for some shortcuts from the team. This speaks volumes to the team about real value system. Thus the joint effort helps in converting the delivery excellence framework to auto pilot mode. Simple things like how the middle management or senior management reacts to the mistakes made as well as defects conveys a lot to the organization in terms of what values the organization really cares for.  

3                     How defects and defect generator is treated? 

It is critical for success of any framework that there is an encouragement to make mistakes, learn from them and improve continuously. If the defects are not treated well and defect generator is punished without giving opportunity to improve or actions are taken on personal basis rather than on issue basis; the tendency to hide the mistakes increases also culture of “Passing the Buck” or “Save Ones Back” takes front stage. This encourages team to play safe and follow the framework to the letter (not to spirit). Also many a times defect finder is not considered a good team member by the team, which slowly gives rise to a culture of “I scratch your back and you scratch mine” i.e. “I will find nominal mistakes in your work and you find nominal mistakes from my work”. So the process is followed, there are defects, there will be some Root Cause Analysis, some actions for correction and prevention will be taken. However there is a high chance that we have overlooked the real opportunity for improvement and which shows up as a blot in the customer feedback.  

4                     Is the customer party to the excellence process?

Another way to give a clear message to the organization is to involve customer as a partner in your Delivery Excellence process. There is a tendency in the organization to showcase only the end product to the customer and not the entire process. Many a times companies like to wow the customer or they do not want customer to understand the realities on the ground or companies want to continuously improve and keep most of the gains from improvement to themselves. Many times customers also will have their own Delivery Excellence processes and gives rise to conflict in terms of which framework to follow. If the corporation successfully sales the idea and benefits of the delivery framework it has and excites customer to participate in the same, be open with the customer about all the efforts teams are taking. This really gets the team pumped up as they see the importance of the framework and since customer is directly involved in to this, the WHY portion of the framework is addressed meaningfully giving a better chance to auto pilot the framework.

So if Senior management sponsors the delivery excellence framework and participates in to it actively coupled with appropriate implementation at middle management through a positive improvement oriented approach the chance for auto-piloting delivery excellence increases. If customer participates in using the delivery excellence framework then chances of auto piloting increase exponentially.