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.

You may or may not know that we host a regular webinar series, with topics ranging from employee engagement and the ROI of continuous improvement to A3 Thinking and improvement software demos.

You can see what's coming up next here.

My favorite part of the webinars is that they give us a chance to listen to the audience; to see what questions people are asking, what topics resonate with them, and what their struggles are.

For example, one of the attendees in our webinar produced in partnership with Gemba Academy called "Congratulations, You Have Lots of Employee Ideas. Now What?" asked this question: 

“We have successfully implemented a Quick and Easy Kaizen program where all our staff identify a problem, improve the problem, and submit the improvement for tracking. The problem I run into is in the submitting the problem and tracking the savings.  Is it common for employees to say how much time they save for each of their ideas?  And do organization often tie a dollar amount to the time savings? Are there pitfalls I should be aware of? (Example: Sally makes $12.00 an hour.  She improved her process by one hour a day, so the total time savings is $12.00 an hour with an annual savings of $12.00 x number of work days left in the year.)  Are there different ways to calculate the savings?”

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.

The internet is full of free templates for creating Kanban boards in Excel. That’s not surprising because the format of a Kanban board can be very simple, and Excel is attractive because most people know how to use its base features and everyone in the company probably already has access to it. Setting up a Kanban board in Excel and emailing it out to everyone is easy. That’s why we aren’t surprised that so many organizations start out on this road.

Very few, however, reach their goals with this approach. Here’s why.

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.

I’m going to do something that everyone who writes a business blog knows is a dangerous idea. I’m going to talk about the 2016 American election.

(Calm down, PR team, it’s going to be OK.)

Specifically, I want to talk about the 108,600,056 people who did not vote in the 2016 election. That’s 46.9% of eligible voters choosing to sit that one out. Not only did those folks decide not to weigh in on two dramatically different presidential candidates they also didn’t have a voice in who will represent them at the local and state level, nor on any ballot measures that the voters were asked to decide.

Continuous quality management (CQM) does not look the same in every organization. Some practice CQM as part of a business management philosophy like Lean or Six Sigma, while others implement it on its own. There are a bunch of tools and techniques that support CQM such as Gemba Walks, Catchball, and DMAIC that may or may not be used. However, there are some core principles that tie successful continuous quality management organizations together. They form the basis for the approach and are indispensable.

Quality Management is About Process Management

When you break it down, organizations are made up of hundreds, if not thousands of interlocking processes. The quality of the products or services that are delivered to external and internal customers alike is dependent on the quality of those processes. The financial health of the organization is dependent to a large extent on the efficiency of those processes. If you focus on the processes one at a time, you can fundamentally change the game and deal with the challenges facing your organization.

Quality management is not about placing blame on people. W. Edwards Deming believed that the system was responsible for 97% of the problems. The downside to simply blaming a person when quality standards are not met is that it prevents leaders investigating a bit more to find a root cause finding solutions that improve the performance of all the workers. If a worker makes a mistake, it is essential to ask why and find the process conditions that made the error possible.

Visual management tools surround us - although they are so ubiquitous, we might not even think about them. When your car is about to run out of gas, a light will alert you to the problem. You’ve probably got a message waiting indicator on your desk phone. Your fitness app may even show you how close you are to your daily goal. Your brain can quickly process these visual clues and use the information to make decisions.

The Lean business approach takes advantage of this fact and leverages several powerful tools for management and improvement. You don’t have to be all in on Lean to take advantage of them. Any organization striving for continuous improvement can benefit.

As the end of 2018 quickly approaches, many management teams are somewhere in the process of preparing the plan for 2019. Regardless of where you are in that process, this is a good time to reflect on whether or not your 2018 strategy came to fruition. Did your organization achieve the goals it set out for itself? Was adequate progress made toward your long-term objectives? Was progress assessed adequately and frequently enough?

If your results were disappointing, you are not alone. Effective strategy deployment is a struggle for many organizations; it's common to start the year off with excellent intentions but struggle to align the origination around the strategy. Communication, feedback, and measurement all take hard work and constant attention - which is tough with the day-to-day firefighting most businesses are faced with.

The good news is that there are some ways to integrate strategic planning and management into the daily rhythm of your organization.

What does perseverance mean to you?