Starting to roll the wheel of Change
The recent recession paranoia followed by some of the highest price increases of raw materials served as the burning platform, accelerating the process of change
Identifying your highest cost center and selecting the projects which aligned to reducing those have greatly proved to show how we can reduce our cost and still maintain the profit margin despite the price increase. This is a good motivator, to tell each person how their efforts are contributing to the companies success. The intangible benefit of this is now you have highly motivated people who know exactly what to do thus starting to roll that wheel of change in the right direction.
Now you will think its all that easy you will get everything done, but you have very limited number of managers and so many projects. how to overcome this challenge?
This is about realizing how you can distribute right type of work to right type of people. Any organization has lots of challenges to be resolved. If you look at those challenges in more detail, they can be classified as one requiring very high level thinking and are very complex; second requiring mid level thinking and are some where in mid range of complexity, and third are simple challenges which may not necessarily require complex thinking .I think may be they can also be classified as:
1. Strategic level
2. Tactical level
3. Operational level
you will realise that there are very few challenges of the first type, some of the second type and lots of the third type. Thus it is critical to get the wheel rolling in the third kind without causing burden to your managers. A3 Storyboards is a good way to do this, where all the operators take control of all the small projects specific to their cell. Now there multiple projects running simultaneously without significantly burdening the managers, another advantage is now the operators own the change thus there is less resistance. The biggest advantage of this is the synergistic effect sets the wheel of change spinning in top gear.
