FACILITATING CHANGE

Introduction
Fantus Technologies is a group of senior management consultants that have facilitated successful change across many organizations internationally.

Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither was your performance management process. Many projects start small and develop gradually over time. Perhaps, like many, your organization started monitoring performance with metrics, using familiar technology such as Microsoft Access and Excel, or maybe someone in your IT department built a special program for the task. Many such solutions work well early on when a small number of people are involved in defining, populating, and commenting on the metrics. However, as your performance management program begins to scale, perhaps you have begun to feel the limits of your original home-grown system. Making use of the Introspect Suite of Performance and Quality Applications such as the DuQuars MIS system and the Action Tracker, you will learn to recognize and overcome some of the limitations of home-grown systems, such as:

• What essentials may be missing

• The true costs of operating this kind of system

• How accurate and reliable?

• And therefore usefulness? quickly diminish

• Whether you are just planning your performance management system or are trying, yet again, to augment your home-grown system to keep pace with organizational growth

• Is your information available for viewing at Head office level?

Effective performance management starts at the teams themselves. The development and implementation of Self Directed Work Teams goes a long way in solving these communication problems. Teams at shop floor level also need a set of Goals that they need to achieve. These goals can be measured and monitored on the visual boards in the various teams’ Green Areas. Most companies have a well-defined strategy but fail on execution. While there are various reasons for this, most often execution fails because day-to-day operations are not aligned with organizational strategy. In an attempt to bridge the gulf between strategy and execution, organizations often employ financial numbers. However, because of their backward-looking nature, financial numbers and other lagging indicators lack sufficient predictive power to provide early warning of trouble areas and enable more proactive decision making. We have to explore how organizations are leveraging innovative approaches such as the use of leading and lagging indicators and new software solutions (Introspect Business Suite of Applications) to effectively bridge the gap between day-to-day execution and overall strategy. The ultimate is to work towards a balanced scorecard reporting solution. Topics featured include a historical context, the traditional perspectives of a balanced scorecard system and the importance of incorporating the balanced scorecard into organizational management. In short, balanced scorecards allow organizations to overcome previous measurement pitfalls and align management and strategy. Striving to remain competitive in an increasingly challenging economy, you’ve made your production organization as efficient as it can be. So how do you continue to advance your production business and transform it into a profit centre contributing to corporate objectives? The key is how to use operational performance management to align a sound operational strategy with effective execution to deliver tangible improvements to the production organization’s overall effectiveness and become highly profitable.

There are a number of methods that can be adopted, such as:

GENERAL INTERVENTIONS
Management is an economic organ in an industrial society. Every act, every decision, every deliberation of Management has an economic implication as its first dimension. Therefore, in an organisation, Management must - in every decision and action - put economic performance first.

Management techniques provide a foundation for improved managerial performance. The main strengths lie in their systematic, analytical and, in many cases, quantified base. They operate by means of a continuous cycle of gathering and analysing factual data, formulating problems, selecting objectives, identifying alternative courses of action, building new models, weighing costs against performance and benefits, and monitoring performance to point to the necessary corrective action and improvements.

There isn’t a magic formula for good management, of course, but if you’re a manager, perhaps the following tips will help you be more effective. “A good manager has at least 10 good qualities” - Bill Gates, namely:

1. Choose a field thoughtfully. Make it one you enjoy. It’s hard to be productive without enthusiasm. This is true whether you’re a manager or employee.

2. Hire carefully and be willing to fire. You need a strong team, because a mediocre team gives mediocre results, no matter how well managed it is. One mistake is to hold on to somebody who does not hold up (shape up).

3. Create a productive environment. This is a particular challenge because it requires different approaches depending on the context. Various people require various incentives, such as financial, self-gratification, etc. to stimulate productivity. One element that almost always increases productivity is providing an information system that empowers employees.

4. Define success. Make it clear to your employees what constitutes success and how they should measure their achievements. Goals must be realistic. The people who do the work, for example, must set project schedules. People will accept a ‘bottom up’ deadline they helped set.

5. To be a good manager, you have to like people and be good at communicating. This is hard to fake. If you don’t like interacting with people, it’ll be hard to manage them well. You must have a wide range of personal contacts within your organisation. You must encourage these people to tell you what’s going on and give you feedback about what people are thinking about the company and your role.

6. Develop your people to do their jobs better than you can. Transfer your skills to them. This is an exciting goal, but it can be threatening to a manager who worries that he/she’s training his/her replacement. Many smart managers like to see their employees increase their responsibilities because it frees the managers to tackle new or undone tasks.

7. Build morale. Make it clear there’s plenty of goodwill to go around and that it’s not just you or some hotshot manager who’s going to look good if things go well. Give people a sense of the importance of what they’re working on and its importance to the company.

8. Take on projects yourself. You need to do more than communicate. The last thing people want is a boss who just doles out work. From time to time, prove you can be hands-on by taking on one of the less attractive tasks and using it as an example of how your employees should meet challenges.

9. Don’t make the same decision twice. Spend the time and thought to make a solid decision the first time so that you don’t revisit the issue unnecessarily. If you’re too willing to reopen issues, it interferes not only with your execution but also with your motivation to make a decision in the first place. People hate indecisive leadership.

10. Let people know whom to please. Maybe it’s you, maybe it’s your boss, and maybe it’s somebody who works for you. You’re in trouble and risking paralysis in your organisation when employees start saying to themselves: “Am I supposed to be making this person happy or is this other person happy? They seem to have different priorities. ”

Fantus Technologies facilitate change across all types of organizations, large and small. We are often the catalyst in the organization striding to meet the objectives set.