Over the last 30 years, there have been a series of buzzword programs in the quality and productivity improvement area in organizations. These include such alphabetic combinations as TQM, BPR, Lean, AGILE, LSX, Six Sigma, ERP, MRPII, TOC, WCM, Kaizen, CIT, CAPM and quite a number of others. All of them have been attributed to successful business results and a few to many. On the other hand, when you look at the majority of efforts in almost every case, they have either been minimal or counterproductive. Why?
Unfortunately, if you implement a buzzword program, like you would follow a recipe for an entrée, more often than not , the results are poor. There is no substitute for thinking, for basic problem solving and for achieving a state of actionable understanding so that you can make effective day to day decisions.
Why have many if not most, failed?
- In some cases, it's because the buzzword chosen is due to the flavor of the day or what the boss is familiar with (or what worked for the boss somewhere else) and does not fit the situation.
- More commonly however, it's because implementing a program by recipe without much thought usually creates a slew of unintended consequences and disconnected activities.
In either case, it's the same result - a considerable amount of chaos and wonder. "I wonder why we aren't getting the expected results?" Unfortunately, failure to achieve cost, flexibility and/or new growth opportunity goals is often blamed on an external cause or a particular person who may be the subject matter expert in the buzzword philosophy. In reality, the cause was a failure to think, a failure to address root causes and a failure to understand the external environment by doing your homework.
For many an effective solution is to understand some of the successful approaches that have worked and with those in mind, to analyze the core problems in your organization in light of the external threats and opportunities. Once you've done the latter, you have a level of actionable understanding and can then pick and choose the toolkit for addressing the problems and opportunities you have.
