MANAGEMENT A 12 Step Program to Stop the Reorganization Insanity! 36 maintworld 4/<strong>2019</strong>
MANAGEMENT How many reorganizations (reorgs) has your company gone through in the past five years? Some will say too many to count. It is not uncommon these days to see companies have one to three reorgs per year in various departments and even the corporation as a whole. ALAN WARMACK Energy Services Director and Partner Marshall Institute BELOW IS A 12-STEP program to assist you in improving your company’s operational effectiveness. Let’s stop the insanity and build a plan that will be successful! 1. Admit you have a problem! a. Many times, we know we have problems, but we don’t start the improvement process by clearly defining them. We wind up taking a “shotgun approach” and shooting in the dark, hoping to hit the mark. This rarely works. When leadership is ready to undertake an initiative as large and impactful as a reorg, ensure that it will be one of the solutions and not become just another part of the problem. 2. Understand the “true” problem and its source (Assessment) a. If you want to truly get to the bottom of your issues, you must recognize all the gaps inside your company, departments and business units, etc. b. An assessment provides a “cold eyes review” of your current situation and should be compared to industry best practices in order to build a gap analysis c. Here is where another mistake can be made if you are not careful. Assessments can be too high level. We don’t ask the Subject Matter Experts (SME). Who is that, you ask? It is the personnel that live in the poor processes currently. It’s the operators that (struggle to) run your process every day. It’s those maintenance technicians that are forced into a reactive process, so we only have time to “fix it when it breaks”. It’s their supervisors that are many times, handcuffed into working with sub-prime workflow processes and systems. d. If you want to understand the problems, you simply must ask the right people. They know what’s wrong and many times they have great ideas on how to make it better. We simply don’t ask them because “we know what needs to be done”. 3. Build strategies so people can be successful a. Align to the mission of the organization – If you have done a good job of producing a successful assessment and now have a detailed gap analysis, you are on a much better path to addressing your opportunities for improvement. As part of this step, you should take the time to prioritize all the opportunities by performing a risk analysis on each item in order to properly prioritize them. Once again, mistakes can be made at this point. You take the proverbial “shotgun approach” and try to hit everything all at LET’S STOP THE INSANITY AND BUILD A PLAN THAT WILL BE SUCCESSFUL! once. We call this being “a mile wide and an inch deep.” Prioritize your list and ensure that your plan is aligned to the company’s mission. If you can ensure your plan is designed with these things in mind, your chances of improving the right things at the right time is beginning to have a chance at success. b. Design department goals and objectives that support the company mission. So, you have a high-level mission for the company. You have goals and objectives defined by Corporate leadership. We must now ensure that the plant, and or the departments being affected will use the information from the assessment gap analysis to set their own goals and objectives. In order to properly prioritize the improvement activities, they should align their plans in support of the company mission, goals and objectives. Key stakeholders should begin designing their improvement plans using a risk benefits analysis in order to assist in prioritization of activities. c. Development of Work Process flows to support daily functions of the department. One of the key activities will be design of the workflow process(es), dependent on the function of the department in the overall scheme of the plant. This should have started as part of the assessment to determine the “as is” current process, in which many opportunities are identified during this exercise. Once this is designed, reviewed and gaps clearly identified, you can then use this “brown paper” to design a “to be” process. Then a “white paper” exercise should be designed to address all of the issues identified in the current way of doing business. Once designed by the SMEs, it is best practice to have others review it, using team members from the exercise to “walk” the reviewers through the process. This begins to build buy in as now it’s their process. Getting feedback from others gives them an opportunity to contribute and hopefully gain buy in as well, making the process rollout a little less stressful. It won’t be the first time they have seen it and they helped to build it. d. R & Rs designed to support Dept processes and meet goals and objectives. Once the new process flow(s) is built, the next step will be to design a RACI chart. »» R – Who is Responsible for performing the activity? »» A – Who is Accountable for ensuring the task is completed? »» C – Who should be Consulted to ensure the task is performed properly? »» I – Who should be kept Informed on the status of the task? »» e. To start understanding the work process flow and the RACI, start at the beginning and ask: • Who is in the box? • What is their role in the box? • What level of training is required to provide adequate knowledge of the task(s) and the skills required 4/<strong>2019</strong> maintworld 37
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