Course Title
6.4 Further Principles
Constancy of purpose
- Clarity about what are the most important long term objectives
- What do we need to focus on?
- Persistence direction influencing the behaviour
Respect for People
- All of the employees have the potential for innovation and creativity
- The input of an employee should not be disregarded because it results in passivity later
- Active participation, mentoring, coaching, collaborating
- Questioning the way we have always done it is respected and welcomed
- Humility: everyone must feel safe about sharing his/her ideas. Do not ridicule!
Continuous Improvement, Pursuit of Perfection
- We should see our job as: daily work, daily improvement
- Change is inescapable and even desirable, proactively meet challenges!
- Shift the tone from reactive firefighting to proactive problem solving
- Problem: people don’t like changes but like their comfort zone, old habits and patterns are difficult to change.
- Requires to become a learning organization
- Continuous development of people’s capabilities to understand complexity and to improve shared understanding
Proactive behaviour
- Merriam-Webster definition of proactive: “controlling a situation by making things happen or by preparing for possible future problems”
- take the opportunity to make a difference every day
- Time Management Matrix
- 1. Important, not urgent: proactive. Long term sustainable quality born here. Planning, prevention, preparation, new opportunities, learning, developing.
- 2. Important, urgent: reactive, demand. Firefighting, crisis, interruptions, rework, pressing problems.
- 3. Not important, urgent: deception, illusion. Questionable and misaligned tasks and objectives. Unproductive meetings, excessive emails, interruptions.
- 4. Not important, not urgent: waste, escape. Junk mail, escape activities, internet surfing, time wasters, excessive TV.
Figure 6.2: Time management matrix
We should try to follow the order: most of the times to be proactive, if needed be reactive but try to avoid to being illusive or wasting our time.
Voice of the customer
- To focus on the right issues you have to listen to the voice of your customer, regularly, continuously
- Who is your real customer? It is not so trivial sometimes…
- The domain expert who is your official contact or the external sales contact of the company, or the end user of a potential buyer?
Quality at the source
- Doing the things right for the first time
- Problem: we will fix it later approach is accepted and prevalent
- Best time to solve a problem when it appears
- The problem is understood
- The circumstances in which the problem can occur are available
- If we don’t fix it then further problems/side effects may also appear
- If we fix it now then it means much less extra work (documentation, communication, etc.)
- We can take steps to prevent the appearance of the same or similar problems in future
See the whole, Systems thinking
- See all of the processes, activities, tasks, work steps, etc. with all relationships between them in one big picture. Concentrate on the whole not on the small, locale parts.
- Avoid creating locally optimized solutions.
- Problem: we have a narrow focus on local parts of a big picture.
- Cross functional teams can ensure systems thinking (by their breadth expertise and understanding)
Flow, pull, Just In Time (JIT)
- Uninterrupted flow (progression) of everyday work, materials, services and information.
- Too much unfinished (and obsolete) tasks vs. flowing the tasks one by one.
- Problems: inventory of materials, paper, document (all have to be managed and tracked), tasks queue.
- Eliminate interruptions and delays by pulling the work if it is demanded
- The work is performed when the customer demand appears (Just In Time)
Culture
- The shared beliefs and values of an organization is the basis to build a culture
- beliefs and values are the building blocks of the attitude and behaviour of people
- people will be engaged and committed to the organization by the shared beliefs and values
- culture can create the shared capability of proactive problem discovering and solving