Align Your Time Management with Your Goals

At the end of a busy day, sometimes it’s hard to figure out where the time went. The following excerpt from the book Getting Work Done provides a simple process for you to prioritize your work and understand how you’re actually using your time.

What goals are you aiming for in your work? Does the way that you are spending your time actually correlate to those goals? Without answers to these questions, you won’t know how the many tasks on your list should be prioritized, organized, and ultimately accomplished.

List your goals

Ideally, you and your manager should meet at the start of each year to formulate a set of performance goals. From your discussion, you should understand how those goals tie into the company’s aims and mission. You likely also have your own personal career goals. Together, these may look something like, “Improve people-management skills. Manage six new products. Handle contracts for all of the department’s new products. Develop vendor-management skills.”

Revisiting them now, write these goals down—on paper or in a note-taking app if you prefer. You will use these goals in two ways: first, to prioritize your daily work; and second, to gauge your progress (in other words, to benchmark what you’re accomplishing and whether the changes you make as a result of this book are effective for you). By referring back to this list regularly, you’ll be able to identify which tasks are most important for you to tackle so you can plan accordingly.

Track your time

Once you’ve identified your goals, it’s time to examine how you’re currently spending your time. Are you working on the things you should be doing—the things that will allow you to reach those goals—or are you getting bogged down by unrelated tasks or unexpected crises?

In order to truly understand where you are spending your time and to identify whether you should adjust your workload, track your work for two weeks by completing the following exercise. You may discover that your results don’t align with your goals. The point is to uncover where that misalignment occurs so you can correct it.

First, write down your activities. Consider this a brain dump, and leave no stone unturned. List all of the tasks you perform, meetings you attend, and even the time you spend socializing or procrastinating at work. It can help to look back over your calendar for the last week or two to get a sense of your range of activities. Once you have a full list, break it down into broad categories so you can track the amount of time you spend doing tasks in each category. Some categories to consider include:

• Core responsibilities: day-to-day tasks that make up the crux of your job.
• Personal growth: activities and projects that you find meaningful and valuable, but may not be part of your everyday responsibilities.
• Managing people: your work with others, including direct reports, colleagues, and even your superiors.
• Crises and fires: interruptions and urgent matters that arise occasionally and unexpectedly.
• Free time: lunch breaks and time spent writing personal e-mails, browsing the web, or checking social media.
• Administrative tasks: necessary tasks that you perform each day, such as approving time sheets or invoices, or putting together expense reports.

Seeing your work broken into categories like this will help you visualize how you’re really spending your time, and you may already be getting a sense of whether this lines up with the goals you identified.

Then, track your time. Once you have your categories established, begin tracking how much time you spend doing tasks in each. You can estimate by the hour, or if you want to dig deeper into your habits, you can get more granular. To record your results, use either an online time-tracking tool or a standard calendar; to analyze those results, use a spreadsheet like the one depicted below. List each category in its own column, and write the days of the week in each row. Calculate the time you spend on each task for each category for the next two weeks and put the totals in the corresponding categories.

At this point, you may be thinking, I’m busy; I don’t have time to log everything I do. It’s true: This system does require an up-front investment of time and effort.

But logging your tasks and how long it takes to complete them will let you clearly see where you’re spending too much time and where you need to begin to reallocate time to achieve your goals. If you want to improve your people management skills, for example, you may realize that devoting 10 hours a week is not enough; perhaps you need to offload some administrative tasks so you have the additional time you need for that goal. By making small, deliberate shifts in how you spend your day, you’ll ensure that you’re investing the right amount of time on the tasks that matter most, making you more efficient at achieving your goals.

SOURCE: Harvard Business Review

Business Process Management BPM. Improve business processes.

Harmon on BPM: KPIs and Stakeholders

If there is a missing piece in most process redesign projects, it's a clear and comprehensive set of performance measures. In many cases the redesign team focuses on analysis and seems to ignore the definition of good measures. In other cases the team comes up with a mixed bag of measures, some derived from organizational strategic concerns, some from current organizational initiatives, some from an analysis of customer concerns and some from the internal workings of the process itself. Popular books on performance measures aren't always helpful, since they often reflect the same confusion or they focus only on one subset of measures. One book, for example will describe how to derive and align performance measures with organizational strategic concerns. Another book will describe the vital role of analyzing customer needs when definingperformance measures. I have known a number of process teams that focused on customer objectives only to find that management was much more interest in the ROI of the new process.

In this Column I'd like to briefly describe the approach to performance measures that is used in the BPTrends Process Redesign Methodology. The approach represents a comprehensive approach designed to derive a balanced set of measures.

The first step, as you might imagine, given that it's a process-oriented approach, is to define the business process you are concerned with. Graphically, we present the resulting definition by drawing a process box and labeling it. We also show the input that initiates the process and the output that concludes it. Thus, for example, we might be concerned with a photocopying business, and specifically with a business process that makes copies for customers. The process begins when a customer requests copies and presents a manuscript to be copied. It ends when the customer has paid and original manuscript and the finished copies are presented to the customer. We always name processes with a combination of a verb and a noun, and emphasize the outcome, thus, we term this process “Make Copies.” (See Figure 1)

Figure 1. Make Copies process.

Once we have defined the process we are going to focus on, we next ask about the stakeholders of the process. In this case, a stakeholder is anyone who cares whether the process succeeds or fails. One obvious stakeholder is the customer, who depends on the process to achieve some goal. In the case of the Make Copies process, the customer needs copies and depends on the process to prepare those copies. Another key stakeholder is the management of the copy store. They depend on the process to generate the income that the store was established to generate. To keep track of the stakeholders of a given process we often create a diagram that pictures the process and shows stakeholders and what they derive from the given process. Figure 2 pictures the Make Copies process with two stakeholders.

Figure 2. Make Copies Stakeholder diagram

It's in the nature of process work that processes can be very large and comprehensive sets of activities – as, for example, avalue chain that flows across multiple departments and produces a major line of products or services – or something rather small and mundane – as a process that resided many levels down in an auto production process would be. Stakeholders concerns vary, depending on the nature and location of a given process. Thus, if the Make Copies process was a value chain that produced the main product of a photocopying store, management would be very concerned with the ROI (Return on Investment) of the process. If, on the other hand, there was a copying process located several layers down within a value chain designed to produce and sell life insurance policies, management might not care much about the process, simply regarding it as a utility. Similarly, the customer for the photocopy store's Make Copies value chain would be the primary customers of the organization, while the customer for the copying process buried within a life insurance sales process might simply be another rather modest process. None of this changes how one develops performance measures for processes, but it reminds us that the interface concerns for “Management” and “Customer” can vary quite a bit, depending on the process we are describing.

Let's return to our copies example, and to management's concerns. In the case we are looking at, the process is a value chain for a small copyshop. Thus, the management of the organization might well have a strategy, and the management team might well adopt a set of initiatives, depending on their goals and the nature of the market. Thus, for example, the management team might have an initiative to reduce costs by 10%. Similarly, they might have an initiative to comply with some new tax regulation that required a new type of report on employee earnings each quarter. In effect, both of these concerns would be incorporated into our diagram as things management was concerned with.

Figure 3. Stakeholder diagram incorporating management initiatives and goals.

Let's consider some other possible stakeholders. Common stakeholders include business partners who supply or receive outputs from the process, government agencies that receive reports on income from the process (sometimes stated as independent stakeholders if the process generates the payment, but otherwise added as a management concern), and employees. The copy shop, for example, may use an outside company to clean its premises at night, it may lease equipment from a copy machine manufacturer and expect that manufacturer to provide services and so forth. The copy shop may think its employees are easy to replace and may not place a high premium on retaining them. Although, in fact, if they are concerned with reducing costs, then retaining employees rather than going to the expense of hiring and training new employees is probably important to the copy store. A software game company that competes for key employees, however, might think about the matter very differently, and be very concerned with the happiness of its game designers.

Figure 4. Make Copies with More Stakeholders Shown

With a little work, a business team can usually define a process and then generate a good list of important interactions. Once one has done this, defining Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) follows naturally. One knows a process is successful if it satisfies it stakeholders. The list of things that are required to satisfy stakeholders can easily be converted into a set of measures that one can use to evaluate the success of a process.

There is also some confusion about how one uses terms. Most process people use the term “key performance indicator” to indicate a rather vague goal. In that case they usually associate KPI's with specific “objectives” which they quantify, specifying the item to be measured, the appropriate target, and a time criterion. Thus, one of the customers KPIs might be “copies delivered when promised.” We could then translate this into the objective “95% of orders ready at the time promised.” Similarly, a management KPI might be to “Meet cost reduction goals,” while the objective might be “Reduce costs by 10% by the end of the 1st quarter.”

Figure 5. Portion of a Process Performance Measures Worksheet

When BPTrends trains new process teams, we teach the teams to define the process they are going to focus on, and then to create a Stakeholder Diagram for the process. Once the diagram is complete, we go on to develop a worksheet. In essence, the team lists each stakeholder, the key concerns of each stakeholder, and then creates formal KPIs and Objectives for each stakeholder concern.

One might object at this point that we have only considered “external” measures, and not considered “internal” measures – as for example how many hours employees worked, or the waste generated by specific subprocesses. If one was really focused on reducing costs, for example, one would probably want to measure several “internal” measures. Our response is that, at this point, we are only focused on external measures. External measures tell you what the process is accomplishing. They are the only sound basis for KPIs. At the same time, however, if you want to improve a process, or even manage it effectively, you will probably need a number of internal measures that correlate with the external measures or at least give you a good idea of the likelihood of achieving the external measures. Deriving internal measures from external measures is a separate process that depends on an analysis of the internal structure of the process, and which won't be discussed here for lack of time and space. Our goal here has been to assure that we have a complete set of external measures to use in monitoring the performance of a given process.

The development of the Stakeholder Diagram assures that the process team has a clear set of goals for the process redesign effort. Moreover, done as we have suggested, with an equal emphasis on Customers, Management and other key stakeholders, it generates a complete list of measures for a process. It also provides the foundation for the derivation of more precise internal measures that are used when one tries to improve a process.

SOURCE:  BPTrends

6 Key Traits of a Lean Leader

Research states that ‘46% of all improvement initiatives fail due to lack of leadership’1. Taken with other evidence, clearly more work is needed to develop lean leaders. But what is a ‘Lean Leader’? What makes a Lean Leader different from a ‘normal’ leader? What special competencies are required to be considered a Lean Leader? This article, by John S. Hamalian, will explore the topic of Lean Leadership: a critical - and often neglected - element in business management and improvement.

 

Much has already been written on Lean Leadership. Jim Womack and John Shook at the Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI) describe the evolution of leadership models as going from ‘Do it my way’ (old Dictator style) to ‘Do it your way’ (1980s Empowerment style) to ‘Follow me … and let’s figure this out together’ (Lean style). Michael Balle talks about the ‘Lean Attitude’ of Methodology, Obsessiveness and Practicality. Toyota legend Fujio Cho summed up Lean Leadership in three simple phrases: ‘Go and See’, ‘Ask Why’, ‘Show Respect’.

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I have had the honor to witness several fine lean leaders throughout my career, and would like to share with you my perspectives on Lean Leadership, which are inspired by and I believe quite aligned with the existing literature.

 

6 Key Traits of a Lean Leader:

Trait #1: Journey Embracement

 

Lean is a Journey. It is not a quick fix nor a Program of the Month. Far from being a mere operational tactic, Lean should be an integral part of the overall business strategy. Only after identifying ‘True North’ and a strong sense of purpose can an organization understand how to apply Lean to enhance performance through the increase of value. All of this requires long-term thinking, patience and asustainability mindset. An interviewer of former IBM CEO Sam Palmisano noted he ‘is as focused on the next 10 years as he is on the next quarter’. Another key leadership behavior related to this trait is the ability to perform Hansei, Japanese for ‘reflection’, often referring to critical self-reflection. Only when we deeply reflect on our mistakes and opportunities can we attempt to move forward in our journey towards perfection.

 

Trait #2: Relentless Pursuit of Perfection

 

This trait is the very essence of Kaizen thinking. The absolute embracement of continuous improvement and utter rejection of the status quo. The Lean Leader believes that ‘good enough’ is never enough! Fitness expert Jack La Lane once said “The job is never done. So long as we live, we must work on ourselves”. Burning inside the heart and soul of every Lean Leader lies a fundamental belief that everything can be made better and that we must constantly strive to achieve perfection, knowing full well that pure perfection can never actually be obtained. A key leadership behavior to enable this trait is Insatiable Curiosity. In order to improve one must be curious about possibilities and alternatives, as well as embrace the key concept of ‘Learning, not Knowing’. The Lean Leader constantly strives to improve themselves, and thus their organization, and never thinks they know everything.

 

Trait #3: Fanatical Customer Focus

 

In Lean, the Customer is at the beginning and end of everything. Without an intense focus on the customer and an understanding of what they value, a leader will not know where to focus their improvement efforts and may actually end up inadvertently carving out value from the organization (as Jeffrey Likert says, this is not lean, this is emaciated). Hyundai Motors Chairman Chung Mong-Koo had the Quality department report directly to him, likely the first major automaker to do so, and this move provided great returns in terms of reputation, revenue and market share. A key leadership behavior to support trait #3 is the ability to create a Problem Solving Culture – an environment where problems are readily surfaced (note the Toyota saying of “’No Problem’ is Problem!”) and subsequently solved by the teams closest to where the work is being performed. Without a near-fanatical priority on customer value, the customer journey and a problem solving culture, it will be nearly impossible to meet or exceed the customer's expectations.

 

Trait #4: Champion of Simplicity

 

Leonardo Da Vinci once said “Simplicity is the Ultimate Sophistication”. Most organizational processes and structures are much too complicated and the lure of efficiencies through complex IT systems sometimes makes matters worse. The Lean Leader needs to possess a daily mantra of Simplify and develop an eye for finding waste. ‘Learning to See’ (as LEI describes it) non-valuable activities is a skill that leaders can and must develop in order to cultivate a lean culture. An accompanying leadership behavior is Living Modestly. How can a leader be a Lean Leader if they personally engage in wasteful endeavors? Pope Francis has been an amazing role model to drive out waste and reduce excessive living habits from his organization. Joel Ewanick, a GM Marketing Chief, was once given a lavish $50,000 budget to furnish his personal office – instead he went to IKEA and paid only $2,000. This is leading by example, lean style.   

 

Trait #5: Living the Gemba Style

 

Gemba is a Japanese word that means ‘workplace’, or in practical use ‘where value is created’. Leaders need to spend less time in the office or conference room and more time at the real touch points impacting the customer and the employees. Only then will they truly understand the real situation so that they can take effective actions to improve performance. The Lean Leader Manages by Gemba instead of Managing by Powerpoint by proactively scheduling ‘point of impact’ walks where they can actively engage with the people closest to the customer, instead of relying on 3rd party reports and only going to the workplace when there is a problem. When the boss only shows up during a crisis, how willing will the employees be to openly communicate the real situation? Lean Leaders provide continual coaching at the gemba versus giving orders from the office, fully exhibiting the critical behavior ofActive Questioning & Listening to constantly develop and challenge the minds of their people.

 

Trait #6: Authentic, Upstanding & Respectful

 

Could Confucius have been Confucius without being authentic in his words, upstanding in his deeds and respectful to all those around him? These are the traits of any great leader, but they are particularly relevant to the Lean Leader. Since the main role of the Lean Leader is to be a coach and a people developer, they must inherently Lead By Example. Leading by example is not possible without being genuine and acting with high integrity.

 

The Toyota concept of Respect for People rings loudly for Trait #6, because it is only when employees and other stakeholders are respected can they be enabled to think, learn and improve. The President of a large US corporation announced a plan that would eliminate 45,000 jobs yet did not share in the struggles, even refusing to live in the headquarters city of Detroit and took a private jet every week from a faraway state. He was richly rewarded with annual payment of USD5.6 million. Confucius said ‘Above all Be Virtuous’ and ‘Rule Wisely and Fairly’ – that executive should have been ashamed at how he led. 

 

These 6 Traits are by no means exhaustive, but I believe they do capture many of the behaviors that we have come to associate with Lean Leadership. They are generally distinct from the general leadership qualities and should thus be considered ‘additional’ traits above and beyond the foundational ones. It is important to cultivate these leadership expectations by institutionalizing them in the HR practices for leader development. But most importantly, leaders must build a lean culture by themselves adhering to the principles of lean leadership on a daily basis, thus generating the repeatable behaviors in the organization that will result in a high level of performance. As John Shook says, ‘Act your way to the thinking you want’ --- Lean Leadership is the Act.

 

I have shared with you some of my perspectives on Lean Leadership - as always, your inputs are very valuable and highly appreciated.

 

John S. Hamalian

 

johnhamalian@gmail.com

SOURCE: processexcellencenetwork

Dynacore | Process Automation

Building A Customer-Obsessed Operating Model

Empowered customers, armed with ever-increasing digital capability, increasingly expect any information, any service, at their moment of need. We call this the age of the customer. Innovative brands, from Delta to Southwest, T-Mobile to Verizon, Home Depot to Walgreens, and Caterpillar to Rolls Royce, are sharing with Forrester how they are disrupting the way they work to meet their empowered customers’ needs, to become customer-obsessed. Becoming customer-obsessed gives you, the CIO, an unprecedented opportunity: to overcome the nagging frustration of IT gravity that suppresses your and your team’s ability to influence the direction of your business, to build new competitive advantage. But you have to be willing to change the way you work.  

You’re in an enviable position and are more essential to your firm’s success than ever. Together with your CMO, you have the best overall knowledge of your customers and the technology know-how to deliver a superior customer experience and drive growth.

We’ve begun to identify how leading firms change their operating models to deliver more value and become truly customer-obsessed. Much of that change falls on the CIO to drive. This research is ongoing, but the actions leaders take to shape their customer-obsessed operating model — focused on customer loyalty, innovation, and most importantly, growth, and fueled by customer insight — are becoming clear:

• Investing in new skills. Software and data are central to how you deliver value. We believe customer-obsessed firms cultivate software engineering, analytics, and customer experience design competencies to meet and exceed customer experience expectations.
• Disrupting processes. Your customers get value-added services and capabilities from other firms they do business with almost daily. We know yearlong, or even quarterly, delivery cycles can’t keep pace. And we believe you have to rethink your processes with your end customers — not just your business stakeholders — in mind. We believe you have to be agile, at scale, and not just within your teams but across the entire organization. That includes marketing, finance, and business units designing, funding, and delivering to your customers’ moments of need.
• Re-engineering systems. Monolithic systems once served a purpose. Today, you have to deliver to your customers’ moments of need. That moment may be digital, but it may also be when they’re on the phone with a customer service representative or talking directly to one of your sales representatives. We know leaders constantly re-engineer their systems to deliver capabilities and micro-services that can be assembled into moments of need defined by customers’ journeys.
• Assembling new teams. Leaders define their organizations to drive greater collaboration around customer needs and growth. These firms abandon functional models in favor of centers of excellence and teams that come together on shared goals and outcomes.
• Modifying governance. From the top down, these leading firms put customer insight at the center of their decision-making and governance. ROI and contributions to EBIDTA still matter, but leaders use new metrics, like our own Customer Experience Index, to drive project investment strategies and measure outcomes. Failure is also tolerated, so long as failure happens quickly.
• Transforming culture. Corporate cultures can no longer be rigid. Leaders embrace purpose-driven, customer-focused cultures. They also value insight-driven decisions, showing low tolerance for decisions based on assumptions that cannot be backed up by data. Leaders drive this culture by changing how people are goaled and measured and supported by more continuous learning for employees to help them become more tolerant of change.

Now is the time to become customer-obsessed and focus your strategy and budgets on the business technology agenda — technologies, systems, and processes to win, serve, and retain customers. Doing so doesn’t just help you deliver better customer experiences, deliver innovative products and services, or accelerate your path to a digital business future. Doing so helps your firm create new competitive advantage — if you’re willing to change.

Stay tuned for more on our research in these key areas of the customer-obsessed operating model. And reach out to me if you have questions or ideas on what we may be missing at kmcnabb@forrester.com.

SOURCE: Forrester

The three C’s of successful process change - Kuno Brodersen