How 'Daily' is your Daily Management System?

Many organisations hope to realise their grand strategies by sending the wood, the nails and other parts needed to assemble their goals and expectations downstream. They hope that lower-level staff and teams will miraculously deliver on the improvement vision and simply send remarkable change back upstream in the form of a beautiful sea-faring vessel. Should we be surprised or disappointed when departments miss targets and a finger-pointing frenzy ensues?

Worse still, to compensate for poor results individuals often launch emergency crisis management tactics that invariably destroy value one way or another. As the dust settles the only survivor is the consequence of failure to properly identify root causes of abnormalities and address them with effective countermeasures. Needless to say, this approach to change rarely ends in celebration (planet-lean.com, 2015).

The antidote to this sort of knee-jerk approach and the discouraging and sometimes devastating aftermath is the implementation of a system that helps teams correct deviations daily—ideally as they occur and while they are still fresh in everyone’s minds. Think of the system as a means to connect improvement strategy with improvement activities on the ground. We call it the Daily Management System (DMS) and it will move your organisation away from reactive responses towards proactive, value-driven behaviour on the part of every person employed.

To illustrate the need for this system, see Figure 1 and how it describes the impact of leaving a problem or defect to fester over time. If left undetected, not only will the problem amplify, but also it will be more difficult to to establish what caused it in the first place since the evidence will no longer be fresh.

Figure 1: The impact of leaving a problem or defect undetected (adapted from David Munch, 2013)

So leaders need the Daily Management System to help them channel the waters of multiple, disconnected streams of focus into fewer more powerful rivers, so directing people to work on areas that really count towards desired change. Teams are then able to spend their limited time on edging performance forward—slowly and purposefully. The DMS fosters a close connection between the employee and the improvement process. When your people have a finger on the pulse of the organisation, they are able to neutralise threats as soon as they appear on the radar and respond to challenges that could negatively affect daily operations with the right pre-emptive strikes.

Though the DMS might seem a relatively simple concept, certain key elements are needed to manifest its true potential:

• Clear Direction: How have you defined your improvement vision (or as I like to call it, your North Star)? Which improvement areas will your DMS focus on? Ultimately any successful change effort will be the sum of its parts—the contribution from and quality of each team’s bespoke DMS. Think of each department involved in the change effort as one of the vessels in a flotilla of ships collectively navigating towards the North Star vision.
• Input and output measures: What makes the improvement process tick? How is performance in key improvement areas measured? Which factors contribute most to change?
• Measurement system: With the input and output measures defined, ensure the existence of a robust system for gathering and synthesizing data into visual props— charts, diagrams, documents, graphs, photographs and so on—that catalyse problem-solving.
• Triggers: What is the Target Condition for performance? What elements trigger problem-solving? To keep teams motivated and interested ensure improvement targets are both challenging and attainable.
• Display board: Where will you display the Daily Management board? Remember that the location should coincide with the area in which daily meetings take place. In some cases, teams are fortunate enough to have a dedicated meeting area where the DMS board takes pride of place. Ensure that you choose a practical location, close to the action. Ideally you should source a whiteboard, felt board or notice board on which to display the DMS but hand-made boards consisting of flipchart or brown paper will do just as well.
• Standard headings: Decide on the notice board’s headings and focus areas and include the following:

o  Team name

o  North Star vision

o  Target Condition

o  Current Condition

o  Obstacles (include a Fishbone Diagram to capture obstacles)

o  Experiments (Action Plan: which countermeasures will be experimented with?)

o  A3 report (Breakthrough Changes and ongoing reporting)

o  Leader Standard Work

• PDCA: Build PDCA cycles into the DMS design. Have teams check off each stage of the PDCA every time they experiment with countermeasures.
• Accountability: Who will update the board? Neglect is to a DMS, what drought is to crops. An overlooked DMS begins to wither and information captured becomes meaningless. Decide who will update the board every day, prior to the Daily Accountability Meeting. With time and as confidence builds, encourage other team members to share in this responsibility.
• Focus: Too much detail makes teams lose focus. Strike the right balance and ensure that all information displayed is concise enough to make performance transparent, but not so vague as to prevent teams from extracting the most relevant issues. When designing the visuals to display under the Current Condition, limit yourself to three or four indicators and a maximum of seven. Although the Fishbone containing the obstacles will be heavily populated (and this is a good thing), it is important that the team only tackles one obstacle at a time. There is a two-fold advantage to this approach. First it restricts overloading the team with problems to solve. Second the team is able to test one countermeasure at a time. This makes it easier to see which actions are in need of adjustment or discard and which have brought about desired impacts that can be standardised.

To help you get started on designing a Daily Management board refer to the example below in Figure 2. Once up and running it is only a matter of time before teams refine behaviours and routines that drive the DMS. The board allows employees to very easily follow specific routines to complete and repeat an improvement cycle. These behaviours include grasping the current situation, identifying obstacles, running experiments and reflecting on the evidence. In this way, any new heights of performance reached can be stabilised.

Figure 2: Example of a Daily Management board

A final note. Beware of the Daily Management board that goes from being a respected watchdog to a toothless lapdog—pretty to look at and always on display but hardly capable of any sort of bite. Make sure your Daily Management board progresses to a Daily Management System, that tackles fresh-off-the-press problems, tackled by everyone, everyday, in a scientific way. Developing Kata, or routines, to drive this behaviour is a critical success factor. More on this later.

For more information to support your improvement journey, refer to Clear Direction (Heathcote, 2014) and Making a Difference (Heathcote, 2016).