Delivery Excellence a new approach

When any organization thinks about “Delivery Excellence”, it is always a top down approach and using a guiding framework like ISO, CMMI, ITIL, Malcom Baldridge, Deming’s principles, etc. Many a times a special department or authority is created to run this program. This authority creates all the necessary processes and supporting templates and tools. These are implemented through training, coaching, and auditing to ensure uniform progress and results across the organization. There are several measurement criteria defined to measure the progress along the way to final destination. There are external audits/ assessments carried out to understand the progress made and results achieved through an unbiased view. The whole structure works like a uniform machine and each person knows the expectation from him/her and performs to that expectation in anticipation of good results. I have observed that organizations try to maintain the highest level of certification/ assessment throughout and it is herculean effort on both employees and organization every 3/5 years to undergo an external audit. There is no roadmap beyond this certification for further improvement, there are still stray cases where things fall through the cracks but the life goes on.

In my earlier blog on Delivery Excellence on Auto Pilot*, I had discussed how to make this top down process more effective and lasting in terms of results. However I am going to discuss a different approach here which will remove all the pitfalls of the top down approach and provide a fresh outlook to achieve the delivery excellence.

Organization is made up of people. Each person is responsible for several activities and part of several teams for whom these activities are performed. These teams are also part of some larger teams and so on. Finally all the teams form one team at organization level which is responsible to achieve organizational excellence. In this new bottoms-up approach we keep the definition of excellence in mind i.e. “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” and encourage each person to the following; we are sure to have a positive result

• Self Question* the way he/she is doing a specific activity and see how it can be done better and how it can help the team he/she is working for to achieve its objective
• Experiment* with new way of operation and see the results. If the results are encouraging, then implement the new way of working and share this improved way of working along with results with others in team. A new and improved way of doing a specific activity has been found and registered in the repository for reference by others in the organization. A small step in achieving delivery excellence has been taken and multiple such steps create a momentum necessary for big result
• Repeat this process from individual level to team levels up the hierarchy

One question comes to mind; - If everyone in the organization starts thinking and implementing his/her own improvements then will it not be chaotic and uncontrolled delivery?  The answer is NO

The definition of excellence guides the individuals that their improvement actions are required to achieve better results than their current level and thus all the new improvements will direct the results in positive direction. We can build a common high level metrics for each team (which we already have) and performance be measured based on the same. As long as we are able to measure the performance through these metrics, the teams can have freedom to do their improvement journey as per their thought process. Building certain individual metrics like Say-do ratio* and Ownership Quotient* will help teams to monitor themselves on regular basis. In the beginning, the process may look un controlled as there is a significant level of freedom available to the teams on ground, however it enables teams to contribute better in achieving overall results. Allowing people to perform* provides a great motivation and ensures results.

*- There are separate blogs for each of the idea mentioned here and can be referred for detailed information