Chapter 12 All Aboard for Best-Practice City Step Four: Implement Beyond the Future Best Practice This chapter completes a call to set objectives and plans to achieve well beyond the best of what someone will soon implement as tomorrow's best practice. It shows you how to set objectives way beyond tomorrow's best practice and implement this new target in a timely and cost-effective way. Once it has been identified, go as far ahead of the future best practice as you can and bring everyone in your organization up to the required new level of that practice in the critical areas. Successfully leapfrogging the future best practice calls for using your best change leaders to unify the effort. But everyone must be involved in order to implement beyond the future best practice in your organization. Leaders must be steadfast in the belief that implementing beyond the future best practices for your organization is a 2,000 percent solution for success. They must train everyone else so that achieving beyond the future best practices becomes part of the corporate culture. Capture the benefits of the combined activities that exceed future best practices as rapidly as possible for yourself or for your organization. Study without eventual implementation is ornamentation, without benefit. Knowing the future best practice, however, may not be enough to teach you how to implement beyond it. Those you assign to implement the new path must closely examine what your future-best-practice model organizations do in the various subprocesses. They should become equally comfortable with what the future level of best practice will be in those model organizations. You must train the implementers so they can adapt what your company does now to your new models of exceeding future best practice. Potential helpers in this process are high performers in your company, those who work with the processes in a hands-on way in the model companies, professors and consultants with expertise in these areas and with relevant experience at the model companies, and training experts. We discuss this point in more detail in Chapters 14 and 15, so be sure to look for this information when you implement these projects to exceed future best practice. Triage for Maximum Effect Organizations can succeed in making only a limited number of large changes at one time. Narrow your focus to a few areas of highest promise so that you do not water down your potential for results. Some aspects of change will be difficult because you have limited or scarce resources. Each change in a manufacturing process, for example, may require the time and attention of the same people, including the most capable manufacturing manager. These people also have to complete their regular, ongoing tasks. Budget to pay for the costs of the change can also be a limited resource. Further, testing the new process may require diverting some plant machinery to this use that is needed to make existing products. Another limitation is the difficulty of the task itself. People can learn how to do back flips, but they will be kept pretty busy learning how. Many new beyond-the-future best practices present the same degree of challenge. The concept of what is needed may be quite clear, but the details of successful implementation can be excruciatingly unforgiving of even tiny errors. You will also find that some tasks match up poorly relative to the skills and experience of your people and those you can hire to assist you. Yet another problem can come in the communication challenges of coordinating a process across several different functions (such as marketing, manufacturing, finance, and human resources). Such coordination may be critical and will also be time-consuming. This part of the process will surprise you: Just as the triage doctor or nurse prioritizes patients for treatment on a battlefield or in an emergency room, you need to first segment those aspects of exceeding future best practice into ones that: 1. Can be implemented almost immediately with little effort. 2. Can be implemented within two years with effort and attention. 3. Can be implemented over more than two years. In your triage agenda, you can probably do most things that fall into the first category easily, quickly, and with little help unless they stymie a high-priority item from the second category of activities. The challenge comes in selecting from the second and, especially, the third categories. You probably cannot make more than three or four changes at the same time that affect exactly the same people. Their ability to absorb change will be your limiting factor, rather than good ideas, time, or money. Create the best balance of near- and intermediate-term benefits, with the least strain on the people and the resources of your organization. Use outside resources as aggressively as you can and still get timely, cost-effective results. Organizations tend to become stalled if some of the benefits of change do not arrive quickly. A famous research project tested the ability of salespeople to concentrate by giving them the task of throwing wadded paper balls into a wastebasket. With the wastebasket too close, the salespeople lost interest because the task was too easy. With the wastebasket too far away, the salespeople lost interest because they succeeded so seldom. However, by putting the wastebasket where about one toss in three succeeded, the salespeople enjoyed themselves and wanted to keep playing. In many ways, organizations act like the salespeople in this example. Make a goal or task too difficult or distant, and interest soon disappears. Also, take into account which of the tasks your people will pursue with joy and which with foot-dragging. Joy works better. Give high priority to the items that will give you the most benefit over the next two years and beyond, while creating a balance so that some significant benefits will be realized every six months or so. Establish your future-best-practice priority for an action with initial benefits in six months if benefits from a project of greater value will not kick in for years. If you do not keep the change momentum going, you will never get to the deferred benefits you hope will occur. You also want to establish an environment of constant, major improvement as your organization's standard way of doing business. We're Almost Done--In Future-best-practice ideas with long time horizons often carry the seeds of their own destruction. This circumstance has proven to be a real hazard for many organizations that invest in computer systems that take more than two years to complete. In such cases, the winners are usually the consulting firms that produce these systems while the loser may be the organization that paid for the new system. A recent study of companies that used computer systems to successfully develop best practices shows that the benefits from the new systems were always partially activated in the first six months. The total project may have taken more than two years, but early benefits were being enjoyed in the meantime. Let us return to the shaving cream company example from Chapter 11 to show how this process of controlling timing and benefits works. We find that the product's freshness can be improved right away by making some chemical changes in the product and by using better mixing equipment. We also find that shaving quality can be improved a little by using new types of lubricants, captured in a physically altered form. Implementing this change takes longer because some custom equipment needs to be designed and built. Eighteen months will be required. Other shaving quality enhancements will have to wait until a new type of shaving can is developed, which can take more than three years. The aroma can be greatly improved with another chemical processing method that will take two years to develop. The physical appearance of the shaving cream can be upgraded in three months. The most important improvements in shaving quality will follow developing a genetically engineered beard softener that will probably take four years. A number of other opportunities exist. We can begin to establish priorities by constructing a table of projects, size of benefits, costs, scarce resources, and time involved, as shown in Exhibit 12-1. Based on the triage approach, improvements in "freshness," "appearance," and "other" probably belong in category 1; that is, they can be implemented almost immediately with little effort. Changes pertaining to the "shaving can" and "beard softener" are clearly in category 3; that is, they will be implemented over more than two years. "Lubricant" and "aroma" improvements belong in category 2; that is, they can be implemented within two years with effort and attention. As you can see, when to start category 2 and 3 projects becomes an issue because the beard softener project is expensive and will take a long time. You might delay the start for a year until profits grow from freshness, appearance, and other improvements. Because making changes in both freshness and lubricants is a strain on manufacturing people, you may decide to delay the start of work on the lubricants until freshness is done. Some might choose the opposite order by considering lubricants that are more valuable than freshness. The table lays out conflicts and optimization potential. Good judgment has to take it from there. Since we will consider adding in other tasks later on in the eight-step process, you may want to wait to see what all the alternatives are. You may find that some of the beyond-future-best-practice opportunities identified here are of a lower potential than the opportunities that unfold in Chapters 13 and 14. If developing the theoretical best practice that we discuss in Chapter 13 will take you longer than a few weeks, you may want to plunge ahead with the beyond-future-best-practice improvements anyway. In this case, our recommendation to you is that you reserve some change capacity (such as budget, time of key people, and analytical resources) beginning around the time that you will have some new projects to add. This may mean that you will choose to mine category 1 from the triage list more heavily than category 2. Outsourcing for Outstanding Possibilities The best way to determine how long it will take your company to implement the desired combinations of practices is to see how long it took the organizations where you found elements of the beyond future best practices to implement them. You will need to consider whether you will be a faster or slower learner and integrator than they were. You can cut off a lot of time and effort if you can hire the company you studied or some of its current or former employees (or someone else very capable) to outsource that part of the beyond-future-best-practice process you are pursuing that the other organization is expert in providing. The fact that you have found a great subprocess does not mean that it makes sense for you to become an expert in that area. You should decide if you want to outsource when you begin to find ways to exceed the future best practice, and you will find it efficient to know that you have the option to outsource through a contact you made during your studies. Go Where the Benefits Are Greatest At Thermopylae in 480 b.c., the Spartans fought a remarkable battle against the greatly superior Persian forces under Xerxes who were attempting to invade the Spartan homeland. In an open battle, the Greeks, with only 400 men, could only hope to last a short while against the 180,000-man Persian army. They needed circumstances in which they could turn the tables so that their small force could, in effect, outnumber the invaders. The narrow pass at Thermopylae provided this unique opportunity. It was the only way into Greece from the north, and it could be defended with a relative handful of men because only a few invaders could enter the 50-foot-wide pass at a time. The Spartans lasted until a treacherous Greek guided a Persian detachment over the mountains to overpower them from the rear. Nevertheless the Spartans, under Leonidas, were famous for their defense of the pass, which is a fine example of future best practice in military strategy in its day. Similarly, the United Nations' forces in the Gulf War did not confront the Iraqis head-on, which would have been to the advantage of the well-entrenched Iraqis. Instead, the U.N., seeking the greatest benefit, used a best-practice concept like the Persians used in attacking from the less well defended rear. The U.N. knew that if its forces could sweep laterally across the desert to thinly defended turf behind the Iraqi lines, they would not face the most effective force of the Iraqi army and could earn a relatively easy victory. In any effort to exceed the future best practice, go where the benefits are greatest by concentrating your resources where they will face the least resistance and be most effective. Stallbusters In this section, you will learn how to anticipate problems you may have with implementing beyond the future best practice, how to adjust for those potential problems, and how to create the highest likelihood of achieving a 2,000 percent solution. Capture Your Track Record for Implementing Beyond Future Best Practices Organizations vary widely in their ability to exceed future best practices by assembling best practices in new combinations from the various subprocesses. You need to understand your existing capacity to do this before choosing and organizing what you will implement. A common error is to overestimate the effectiveness of your organization in implementing ground-breaking new directions for your industry. First ask yourself: What significant attempts has your organization made to improve over the last five years? You will use what you learn to help you accurately describe the cost, time duration, and scarce resources involved in each potential project to exceed future best practices. Answer the following questions about those attempts: Which attempts achieved their purpose on budget and on schedule? Which attempts did not? What were the apparent causes of the two types of results based on discussions with those who were involved? How many successful implementations were key individuals able to work on at once? Finally, ask yourself: What could you do in the future to improve your organization's track record? Be sure to consider better planning, adding missing resources, better training, and so forth. Develop Your Plans for the Potential Beyond- Future-Best-Practice Projects to Pursue The ideas for which projects you want to consider will come from the various research efforts you put into determining what the best practices will be in the future for the various subprocesses. To begin to develop those plans, ask yourself: Which projects are reasonable to consider doing because the cost/benefit ratio is favorable, the total cost is not outlandish compared to your organization's resources, and there is a reasonable chance of success? You should then rely on the normal project-development process you use to develop the potential project plans, unless project development is the process that you are improving. Be sure the output of these project plans can be summarized in the manner shown by the shaving cream example in this chapter. Compare Your Plan to Past Results Which of these potential changes look like your successes of the past, and which seem like your past misses and messes? Be sure to adjust the project descriptions for the table used with the shaving cream project to reflect this perspective. If something is too risky, you should probably drop it unless you can redefine the project to be pursued in some much lower risk way that will still provide the right level of timely benefits. Do the opportunities to use your strengths in implementing beyond-future-best-practice changes provide you with enough benefit to exceed the future best practice? For many the answer will be no, and that should be clearly understood during the subsequent management efforts. If not, what are the simplest, most effective ways to enhance your organization's ability to provide or absorb more valuable improvements? Many who have been reluctant to do the necessary outsourcing of projects to exceed future best practice and normal internal activities will now see a logic in supplementing the internal resources where that outsourcing can be most easily done in order to accomplish more as a total organization. What is the risk of failing to succeed? In some cases, it is only lost money. In other cases, you may actually be worse off than if you had never started or you will also have missed other opportunities because scarce resources were involved. When survival is at stake, organizations surprise themselves with what they can do. If you stay within your current ability to change comfortably, will you be healthy and viable? If you can answer "yes," the solutions you have identified are probably okay to meet your needs. If not, you need to communicate the danger and get the support that survival instincts normally inspire. Good luck! Looking Ahead Remember to keep some time available to look at the opportunities that you will develop from considering Chapter 13. Ideally, you should pick projects needed to surpass future best practice to mesh with the projects that will come out of your work from Chapters 13 and 14. How to do that is described in Chapter 14. Completing your thinking about surpassing the future best practice is an essential element of integrating your implementation with what may be even better opportunities that you are about to uncover through using the remaining chapters. However, while you prepare for the considerable improvements attainable via the next two steps of the process, you must strive to capture the benefits of what you have just learned. Quotes / Reviews || Excerpt || About Us || Speaking for You || Services || Buy the Book || Master Process || Stall Reports || Newsletter || Job Search || E-Mail a Friend || Contact Us || Mitchell On Tour || 2000 Percent Puns || Home Copyright 1999, 2000 Mitchell and Company Mitchell and Company Developed and maintained by Interactive Media Advertising Group, Inc.