Fixes That Last - The Executive's Guide To Fix It Or Lose It Management

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Contents

Dedication....................................................................................................vForward.......................................................................................................viiSection I: The Front Office...................................................................................1Chapter 1 Strategic Planning - What do you want to do?........................................................3Chapter 2 Position Descriptions - Who does what and what's in it for them.....................................21Chapter 3 Teams vs. Managers - Which are More Accountable.....................................................29Chapter 4 Metrics and Measures of Effectiveness...............................................................33Chapter 5 Benchmarking - How Bad off are you?.................................................................37Chapter 6 Material and Non-Material Solutions - You May not Need that New Gismo after all.....................43Chapter 7 Synergy vs. Innovation..............................................................................51Chapter 8 Cost - Benefit Analysis.............................................................................57Chapter 9 Risk Management - Disciplined Subjectivity..........................................................61Chapter 10 Courses of Action..................................................................................75Chapter 11 Corporate Responsibility Management - A Good Company and a Good Neighbor...........................81Chapter 12 Internal Auditing - Expect what you Inspect........................................................89Chapter 13 Due Diligence - Just "Due" It......................................................................103Section II: The Front Lines...................................................................................109Chapter 14 A Quality Management System for Your Organization..................................................111Chapter 15 Environmental Management...........................................................................117Section III Contracts and Contractors.........................................................................127Chapter 16 Bringing in Management Consultants - Agree on what you want........................................129Chapter 17 Contract Management................................................................................131Chapter 18 Contractor Management - Are You Paying Twice for the Same Product?.................................141Chapter 19 Summary............................................................................................145Appendix Checklists to Get Going and Keep Going...............................................................173References....................................................................................................255About the Author..............................................................................................257

Chapter One

CEO Note: A critical consideration in the strategic planning process is the selection of (line and staff) participants; the greater degree of participation, the greater the degree of acceptance and ease of implementation. Also, you need to establish milestones and keep to them. Finally, ensure that your organization is ready for change.

There have been many excellent books written on the subject of strategic planning, and just as many that are trendy rather than excellent, and many consultants have been made rich covering somebody else's conference room walls with butcher paper and ink from magic markers. It is not the purpose of this book to repeat or contradict any of them. Neither is it to recommend your optimal approach to strategic planning (e.g., planning officers/staffs, teams, top down - bottom up). You decide the best approach; just ensure that:

You have a clearly defined mission for your organization

You have a vision of how you want your organization to look to the outside world in general and your stakeholders in particular.

You have identified your gaps.

Then, after identifying your gaps, ensure that you develop:

Goals for your organization covering all pertinent areas of the mission and all areas in which gaps have been identified.

Objectives, in which each of the identified goals is quantified in accordance with established metrics.

A Plan of Action and Milestones (POA&M) from the objectives, assigning personnel/divisions by name and tracking progress.

It goes without saying (so why am I saying it?) that all of this requires buy-in from your stakeholders. The Strategic Plan must belong to them as well as to you.

Who are the Stakeholders and What makes them happy?

The first thing that we need to do is to define "stakeholders". For our purposes, stakeholders are those individuals or groups who have tangible interests in the continued well-being of the organization. They include not only shareholders and employees, but also:

The Board of Directors

Customers and clients

Suppliers and subcontractors

The community

The general public

Regulatory bodies (as applicable)

The Environment.

You may not have thought about some of the above before, and some may not really apply to your organization. However, you should not dismiss any out of hand. Rather, satisfy yourself that whatever interaction you have (with the community for instance) neither harms nor potentially threatens it. We talk more later about being a good neighbor.

Organizations are obligated to discharge their duties to the stakeholders in a responsible manner. Failure to do so is not only bad business but bad citizenship and being a bad neighbor.

Moreover, poor performance eventually limits (or ends) the organization's ability to create or add a value that keeps it in business. At the high end, organizations that pursue excellence in safety and health, environment, and community relations enhance their internal and external success and contribution.

Vision and Mission Statements - Where are you going

"Where there is no vision, the people perish." Proverbs Chapter 29

An organization's vision statement sets its broad outlines and boundaries, and describes what the organization wants to look like to the rest of the world. Some planners suggest that a vision statement should go out ten years. While general in nature, vision statements should still be clear and robust.

Like a clothes closet, the vision must adequately contain and boundary its contents, but not so tightly as to cram the contents together, rubbing some pieces against each other, damaging some, and allowing others to be lost in the back or on the floor. As the closet contains the clothing for all seasons, so must the vision suitably provide for the changing conditions of the organization. To end the analogy, as the clothes closet reflects variety, so should the vision. A narrow or restrictive vision statement would be like a clothes closet with only blue suits, white shirts, solid red ties, and black shoes. The narrow or restrictive vision statement concomitantly limits the mission statement, and the goals and objectives. There is simply no choice.

Narrow vision statements tend to become self-fulfilling prophesies when they:

State what the boss wants;

Leave little or no room for variance or innovation;

Remain safe in their loftiness (e.g., "To be the best ..."); and

Pose neither threat nor challenge to the stakeholders.

As such, they become useless and only serve to decorate lobbies and annoy employees; something else for the Janitor to clean, or break. Your stakeholders do not need to like what comes out of your clothes closet (although it helps), but they must not only like your vision but it needs to align with their own.

Mission statements are concise, internally focused statements of the reason for the organizations' existence. They contain the basic purpose toward which activities are directed and the values that guide the activities of the employees.

Vision and mission statements chart the general course for the organizations. They help align the stakeholders with what the organization expects to achieve. With these two complimentary and mutually-supportive statements created and understood, the organization's "organizers" can move on to overseeing the development of goals and objectives.

Here is a good mission statement by people who mean it.

Vision Statement: "By making quality a global priority, an organizational imperative, and a personal ethic, The American Society for Quality becomes the community for everyone who seeks quality technology concepts or tools to improve themselves and the world." www.asq.org

Goals and Objectives - How do you intend to get there?

Now, it's time to take your vision and mission statements and use them to create your goals and objectives. You have the skeleton and the flesh, now it's time to add the muscle.

ISO 14001:2004, the International Environmental Management Standard, requires organizations to include practical and actionable environmental goals and objectives in their strategic plans in order to become certified to the Standard by an accredited registrar.

Goals and objectives allow organizations to do (among many other things) the following:

Stay in business

Grow and develop in a sustainable manner

Create or revises processes that create products, services, or (in some other way) value.

Reduce costs

Manage competition

Manage risk

Maintain credibility with stakeholders.

Read the last bullet again. Your stakeholders need to believe that this is really your strategic plan and that those are really your objectives. The best way to ensure that the objectives will continue to receive attention and corrective action when required is to go to the last step in the planning process, and create the Plan of Action and Milestones, or POA&M.

Plans of Action and Milestones (POA&M) - Who's responsible for what and by when?

The POA&M is your working document. Below, we take a sample objective and use it to create a section of a POA&M. This is where the rubber meets the road; where you legitimize your lofty goals for the organization in a matter that can be understood by the stakeholders.

The POA&M is where the goal is converted into actionable objectives, and the objectives are assigned:

Action steps

Metrics and/or schemes to measure the progress of the action steps

Responsible individuals or departments

Milestone or completion dates, at which time some measurable objective is to be reached.

Ideally, the POA&M should be a product of stakeholder participation. The Assembly Manager, for example, needs to be part of the process that says he/she will reduce HAZWASTE by 10% by 31 December, and each quarter thereafter.

This is also where you lay out your approach to executing your strategic plan. After making many of these for myself and others, I know that developing the POA&M structures your thought and planning processes. Putting the POA&M on paper (or on the screen) forces the CEO to analyze the requirements and to map out how to meet them practically, logically, and measurably.

Again, it's important to enlist the support and participation of stakeholders, especially those whose livelihood hangs in the balance. Employees need to understand that, while you want their support and involvement, the strategic plan is going forward because you have an obligation to all stakeholders to develop and execute one. They can both meaningfully support the effort and contribute to it, or they can risk not being part of it.

Putting together a Business Plan

A potential client once "emailed" me that she needed to submit a business plan in order to get a loan, and asked if I would write it for her. Suspecting that there was little already there by way of documentation, I called on her. I suggested to her (as I am now doing to you) that a business plan is little more that selected pieces of the Strategic Plan and selected other meaningful operating documents. My suspicions were confirmed - I was being asked to showcase a non-existent strategy, which I could only do by creating something that had no basis in fact and in no way represented the actual intentions of the potential client or operations of the organization. Instead, I prepared the following checklist and left it with her, suggesting that if she did everything it specified, she would eventually have the foundation of a credible business plan, a more robust organization, and no immediate need to hire a consultant. I did not tell her that she was attempting to violate my personal code of ethics, because I don't think that she realized it.

At any rate, you are invited to refer to this checklist for help creating your own business plan.

Does that look like a lot? This book will give you everything you need, in order to credibly and professionally present your organization to existing and potential stakeholders.

Feedback, Follow-up, and Accountability - Three Musketeers or Three Stooges

CEO Note: Most people already know The Three Musketeers and everybody knows The Three Stooges. Both have been the source of unique management training for CEOs for many years. Or at least, it sure looks that way sometimes.

Organizations need feedback, follow-up, and accountability, in order to effectively execute their strategic plans. But what are they and how is each attained?

If you don't hear a good rumor by 10: AM, start one." Old Navy expression

Feedback is communication (in whatever form) that you receive regarding some action that your organization is planning to take, or has already taken. It is an indispensable part of the decision-making process - whether in strategic planning or in day-to-day operations. Ideally, it is continuous information on performance against standards.

However, before you can expect meaningful feedback, you need to first properly craft your outgoing message. Think about these:

Your message should be clearly stated, in writing

Whatever you wanted done may not get done, if there is no feedback system in existence. Ensure therefore, that feedback mechanisms exist. If there is no established feedback system in place, or will you need to create something, even if it's only temporary.

Feedback is two-way; your employees need to know the findings of the feedback process as much as you do, so ensure they know the findings too.

Be alert for unexpected obstacles or surprises.

Your message, because of its content, may become obsolete soon. You may need to get it out quickly, and you may have to go out and collect the feedback in person. Personal observation goes back thousands of years in both management and military history, and is always a good choice.

The greatest fertilizer is the footprint of the overseer. Anonymous

Meaningful feedback, in whatever form, requires effective two-way communication throughout the organization, allowing information to flow unimpeded in both directions. Feedback can be formal or informal, written or unwritten. It may also be a combination of all four, since it is usually best to document communication about important subjects.

For purposes of our discussion of the strategic planning process, we should state categorically that formal, written feedback is most effective and therefore most highly recommended. Whenever possible, documented feedback should have its own internal documentation and reference authority, in order to be both credible and useful. Long term planning suffers when feedback becomes a deluge of unsubstantiated opinions, beliefs, and prejudices. Meaningless feedback includes statements such as:

I don't like it;

It's all messed up;

We've never tried it before; or

We have tried it (or something like it) before and it didn't work.

Groundless (and sometimes nasty) feedback with no basis in evidence squanders time, depletes enthusiasm, and can really sabotage your project. You should encourage open (but finite) discussion and dissention. Dissenters should be welcomed, but they need to provide solid, replicable evidence to support their dissention; the more quantifiable, the better. Similarly, positive feedback should also contain hard facts and objectivity. Whenever possible, metrics that characterize both the old and new processes (e.g., gallons of water saved) should be included to better communicate the new process' impact on the organization.

Requiring a formal and quantifiable feedback process denies people the pleasure of suffering in silence, complaining, or just going with the flow. Additionally, mandated feedback is a guaranteed source of two-way communication. Employees need to know and understand what is going on and if they don't, they should ask. If they have it wrong, you need to straighten them out. The remark about rumors is not as flippant as it may appear. People will listen to whoever is talking and some of us just love being the source of juicy information - the crazier the juicier.

Informal, oral, or otherwise unsubstantiated communication and feedback also opens the door to "perception" and causes us to screen or filter what we thought was said, in order to come up with something partially or entirely wrong.

Knowing how to communicate, and even being able to do it eloquently, does not guarantee that your message will get across to everybody that you intended to get it. Here are a few additional techniques for optimizing feedback:

Obtain feedback in more than one form and from more than one source

Establish multiple communications channels

Personally talk to people to see how the message was received

Determine the sensitivity of those who will receive your message

Reinforce words with actions or presentations.

Feedback on employee performance, like other examples of feedback, is a continuous process against an established standard. However, unlike feedback mechanisms discussed previously, this feedback is personal, and improvement is the responsibility of the employee. We won't spend too much time on this. Nonetheless, CEOs need to ensure that a mechanism exists by which employees understand:

The standard with which they are being measured;

Their actual performance against the standard, as seen by their superiors;

That they are expected to meet or exceed that standard without the need for external praise or criticism;

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Fixes That Last - The Executive's Guide To Fix It Or Lose It Managementby Eugene A. Razzetti Copyright © 2010 by Eugene A. Razzetti. Excerpted by permission.
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