subject: Want To Learn Lessons From Those Who Have Struggled And Succeeded With Organisational Effectiveness? [print this page] Striving to address organisational effectiveness can be a desperately slow process. Best practice suggests use of internal improvement teams and use of the continuous improvement principle. These teams take time to get up to speed. Solutions can be found. Savings can be made. But progress is often hard won. In even a modest sized organisation there are myriad problems to be solved. It all takes time, and that is something that the organisation's stakeholders are not always ready to concede.
It doesn't have to be that way though. In this article I ask what learning can be incorporated from the experience of others that will make our own effectiveness programme more effective.
Improvement Processes
Your organisation is not likely to be very different from many other organisations. You personally will have your own ideas as to how your organisation can improve its effectiveness, and if you do, so too will many of your colleagues. It is those home spun ideas, stimulated by the evidence of what you see going on around you and that become owned and acted on by the organisation itself, which set the improvement chain into motion.
There is a limit however, to what can be achieved entirely from internal resources, and certainly a limit to the rate of progress if that approach has to be taken. To make real progress we need to build on the experience of others, and work at improving our improvement processes.
Improving Improvement
There are a number of ways in which external resources can be brought to bear to leverage benefit from your improvement processes. Here's a checklist of areas that you might like to think about.
*Use proven improvement methods and toolkits. Don't be tempted to reinvent the wheel.
*Use an experienced change manager to inject the right degree of rigour, challenge and pace into your programme.
*Make sure your employees are fully trained in improvement techniques.
*But they can't become instantly effective, so consider use of a coach who will help them to apply the improvement techniques successfully in your workplace.
*Benchmark the effectiveness of your improvement process against other similar organisations.
*You will need to stimulate some creative ideas to come up with better solutions. Your own employees may not have all the answers, so hire external experts who will stimulate your brainstorming processes.
The purpose of addressing your improvement process is twofold. Firstly you want to generate as much benefit as possible, and secondly you want it to happen as quickly and as effectively as possible. If you reflect on the suggestions that are listed above, you may be able to see how that could be possible. If you do set out to improve the way that you make your organisation more effective, as you ascend the improvement ladders, watch out for the snakes!
*Don't loose what you gain by negating the value of the internal contribution.
*Your own employees know what goes wrong on a day by day basis, and may well know what needs to be done to put it right.
*You need your employees to support any changes and sustain the benefits when any external experts have gone away.
*Being involved in improving the lot of their own organisation is genuinely motivating for those employees who are involved.
Your role
What is required from you as the manager? You should create an environment that allows your employees to be as effective as possible at improving your organisational effectiveness.
