Hoshin Kanri is a Lean technique for strategic planning. The goal is to get everyone rowing in the same direction, at the same time, to achieve an organization’s breakthrough objectives in a 3-5 year timeframe. This is accomplished by aligning strategy, tactics, and daily operations.

Developing a strategy and effectively executing it are two very different things. In order to be successful with such a long-term proposition, leaders need access to the right tools. Every organization that uses Hoshin planning does so in a unique way, but we’ve found four Hoshin planning tools that are frequently used by teams that get results.

Strategy deployment, often known in Lean circles as Hoshin Kanri or Policy Deployment, is a technique for ensuring that the strategic goals and objectives are the drivers of every activity throughout the organization. Strategy deployment software supports this effort by serving as the management platform for projects related to the goals. This post covers the benefits and capabilities of the best strategy deployment solutions.

The Lean business management methodology prizes an optimized flow of value to the customer with as little waste as possible. Waste is defined as anything that the customer would not volunteer to pay for. Lean practitioners have identified eight types of waste and work tirelessly to find and minimize them.

Lean is a popular approach across many industries because it is easy to understand and effective at improving business results when it is properly executed. Lean got its start in manufacturing, but today is used in healthcare, construction, software development, retail, professional services, education, and other industries.

Specialized Lean project management software has been developed to help organizations dedicated to the approach get the most out of it. Every organization has its own reasons for investing in technology to support Lean, but most find three substantial advantages.

We just rolled the clocks back, so chances are you are either getting started or are well into your strategic planning exercises for 2019. Unfortunately, the chances of successfully deploying a strategy and achieving stated goals are low for most organizations. In their book The Balanced Scorecard, authors David Norton and Robert Kaplan note that 90 percent of organizations fail to execute their strategies successfully.

What accounts for a 90% failure rate? Why do so many companies put a ton of effort into developing a strategic plan, only to miss the mark?

In developing the KaiNexus platform for strategy deployment, we’ve had the chance to chat with leaders in many industries about the planning process. We’ve talked a lot about what works, but also about what doesn’t. When it comes to strategy deployment, there are some common pitfalls that our clients have learned to avoid. Here’s what not to do.

What does perseverance mean to you?

Six Sigma is a business methodology focused on improving the quality of goods or services an organization produces by reducing variance in the production process. Six Sigma leaders know that when a production process lacks the stability to create high-quality output consistently, it will continue producing defective products until someone intervenes and improves the process. Reducing variation requires constant monitoring and measurement as systems tend to erode if not kept in check. Over the years, Six Sigma practitioners have developed a set of tools and methods that address control, and problem-solving and improvement to eliminate defects and waste. Here are a few of the most essential.

Our standard answer when we get asked, “What kind of businesses need Lean software,” (which happens quite a lot), has always been that businesses in every industry including healthcare, construction, software, engineering, and even higher education benefit from Lean software. And that’s true, but the industry labels tell only part of the story. Lean is industry agnostic, but there are certain business conditions under which Lean software can have an enormous impact. So this post will look at the business attributes that signal an organization stands to make huge gains with Lean technology.

When we chat with people about how their organizations currently manage improvement work, the two most common answers are “We aren’t,” or “Excel.” We’ve written a lot about why it is essential to have some kind of technology to manage improvement projects. Excel might seem like an attractive option for a couple of reasons.

It’s free. Well, not exactly, but chances are everyone already has access to it.

Everyone knows how to use it. Again, not exactly - I mean, no one knows how to use every Excel feature, but people do know how to use it to make lists.

So why not just stick all of your improvement activities in a spreadsheet and track everything that way? The answer is that although it may seem cheap and easy, using Excel for improvement management could cost you. A lot.

We find that it is often the people closest to the problem who bring a software solution to the attention of leaders. In many cases, successfully securing the green light to move ahead with a software implementation requires a bit of “selling up.” After all, people who don’t directly feel the pain of a problem are less likely to get excited by the solution.

If you are tasked with deploying the strategic plan or managing improvement projects Hoshin Kanri Software probably seems like a fantastic idea. The challenge is getting everyone else to buy in.

We’ve got good news.

When presented with all of the essential information about Hoshin Kanri software, executives quickly recognize its value more often than not. Here’s an excellent approach to introducing the idea and getting the resources your implementation will need.

For more help getting the green light, download this free software comparison matrix.

We like to keep things positive in this blog, but once in a while, it makes sense to explore the roadblocks that organizations can face when trying to achieve continuous improvement. Recently, we’ve spoken to a few leaders who are disappointed with the results of their organization’s CI efforts. A quick triage of their continuous improvement goals usually uncovers one or more of these common mistakes.