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Implementing the technical changes of the solution is often easy; the difficulty is usually the emotional and cultural resistance to change. The implementation should be planned and managed as a project. The project should include the actions taken to change the business systems and structures in addition to the specific problem solution.

Quick reference

Implementing the Solution

Implementing the technical changes of the solution is often easy, the difficulty is usually the emotional and cultural resistance to change. The implementation should be planned and managed as a project. The project should include the actions taken to change the business systems and structures in addition to the specific problem solution.

When to use

The implementation of the solution comes during the Control phase. This module focuses in particular on the challenges of implementing a complex cross-functional solution. Smaller changes or single function changes will not face many of the challenges that this module addresses.

Instructions

When the problem solution or improvement involves cross-functional activities in order to implement, an implementation project should be created. The members of this project team may be different people than the Lean Six Sigma team. This team needs to include representatives from all affected functions.

The scope of this improvement project will include not only the direct solution implementation, but also the changes to related business systems, processes, procedures, and management systems. The schedule for this project is often dictated by constraints within the various departments that are affected. For instance, a change in an IT system may need to wait until the next system upgrade.

When the changes are in-depth and cultural, the change project needs to plan for a three-stage organizational transformation. First, they must unfreeze the current processes and systems – making them open to change. Then the change must be implemented. This is often the easiest of the three stages. Finally, the organization must refreeze around the improved state. This makes the improvement the new normal and standard practice.

Resistance can occur at any time and frequently occurs just as the change is introduced and performance drops off until everyone learns the new process. It will also occur when the change is partially implemented and has exposed a number of other problem areas that must also be corrected to get the full benefit of the change. Either of those points are types of potential derailment.

A third time for derailment is a premature declaration of victory before the sustaining changes are in place. In that case, although the solution was effective, the implementation did not occur because the enabling systems were never changed.

When implementing a cross-functional problem solution, Ensure the implementation project addresses these three change contexts.

  • Structural context – The business systems, processes, and organizational structure. These are often interrelated and all must change in order to reinforce the improvement.
  • Procedural context – The procedure of implementing the solution; not the solution itself. These provide legitimacy for the change. All stakeholders were engaged, the change process used was understood and agreed upon, the leader is respected in the organization, and the entire process is considered appropriate for the organization.
  • Emotional context – The ability of individuals to personally engage in the change. This has both positive and negative elements. It includes creating dissatisfaction with the status quo and opportunities for individuals to become personally invested in the change through involvement of the understanding of how the new state benefits them and the organization.

Hints & tips

  • The implementation project may be longer and more expensive than the problem-solving effort. Plan and manage it like a project.
  • Ensure your implementation project has the buy-in of affected organizations and departments. Expand your team to include those departments.
  • Don’t take the resistance personally. Keep in mind that you have worked with this problem for weeks or months and understand what is wrong and what needs to be done differently. However, many in the organization have never thought about the problem before and everything you are proposing is new and somewhat “scary.”
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  • 00:05 Hi, I'm Ray Sheen, and I'm going to shift gears a bit from all the typical
  • 00:09 Lean Six Sigma tools and techniques and
  • 00:12 deal with what I've found to be the biggest challenge on many projects.
  • 00:16 That is effective change implementation.
  • 00:20 You've been focused on finding a technical solution to the problem.
  • 00:24 And I'm sure that if you've applied the Lean Six Sigma tools and
  • 00:27 techniques, you have the problem contained.
  • 00:29 But now you need to think about the organization in which you're operating.
  • 00:33 What are the formal and informal structures?
  • 00:35 Who has power and who does not?
  • 00:37 In fact, you may even need to consider organizational politics.
  • 00:41 If you want a truly effective solution,
  • 00:43 the answer to your problem is probably not enough.
  • 00:46 You need to think about all the related business processes that must change,
  • 00:51 product and process, tooling and equipment, training programs,
  • 00:55 maybe even hiring or system updates.
  • 00:57 And those sometimes are released on preset dates and you may have to wait months for
  • 01:01 the next release.
  • 01:02 Of course, there are the management systems, measurements, and oversight.
  • 01:06 People do what is measured, and changing a long-established measurement system
  • 01:10 could impact the practices of many people in the organization.
  • 01:14 If your change is cross-functional in nature and impacts several of the areas I
  • 01:18 just mentioned, then I recommend that you treat the implementation like a separate
  • 01:22 project with its own scope, schedule, and resources.
  • 01:25 This will likely take focused effort and often a different skill set and expertise
  • 01:30 than what you needed to identify the problem and craft a technical solution.
  • 01:35 When organizational change is needed, the organization and
  • 01:39 organizational culture often go through a three-phase process.
  • 01:43 Process improvement is about change.
  • 01:45 First, you need to unfreeze the way things work right now.
  • 01:48 That may take some work to get people to let go of the old.
  • 01:51 Then, put in place the change and often, that's the easiest of the three phases.
  • 01:56 Finally, get the organization to refreeze around the improved way of doing business.
  • 02:00 If you don't manage this process well, you'll find the change doesn't stick and
  • 02:05 the problem returns in no time at all.
  • 02:07 The process I've just described can be time consuming.
  • 02:10 I worked with one organization, which was a company whose heritage went back over
  • 02:14 a hundred years, and many of the people working there had only ever worked for
  • 02:17 that company their entire adult life.
  • 02:19 Our process improvement change,
  • 02:21 challenge some of the cultural assumptions of the organization.
  • 02:25 We had the data to prove we were right, but
  • 02:27 the data was contrary to what many believed to be true.
  • 02:30 It took over two years before we finally got buy-in for some of the changes and
  • 02:34 started to see significant improvements.
  • 02:36 I found that in some cases, the implementation of the improvement
  • 02:40 was much more difficult than finding the root cause and designing a solution.
  • 02:44 Think about how hard some of these items may be.
  • 02:47 Changing an IT system that is part of the organization's core load.
  • 02:51 When I was working with companies to manage Y2K projects, we were sometimes
  • 02:56 replacing software that had been running in the organization since the early 1980s.
  • 03:00 Depending upon the change, you may need new regulatory submittals which can be
  • 03:05 very expensive and time consuming.
  • 03:07 Not to mention trying to make an organizational change and
  • 03:10 moving people from one department to another.
  • 03:13 Your solution may not have any of these and that case,
  • 03:16 your implementation should be much easier, but some solutions do have these issues.
  • 03:22 So let's talk now about the context of organizational change.
  • 03:25 There's no statistics or flow charts.
  • 03:27 We're going to be talking about people and relationships.
  • 03:30 First, there is the structural change.
  • 03:33 These include reporting relationships and how people are measured and rewarded.
  • 03:37 If your change impacts someone's incentive bonus,
  • 03:40 you can bet that they will be interested and either very supportive or
  • 03:44 hostile depending upon the nature of the impact.
  • 03:47 Then there is the procedural context.
  • 03:49 And I don't mean operating procedures for the process change.
  • 03:52 I mean the procedures or
  • 03:53 approach you're using to implement the change in the business.
  • 03:56 Did you gather input from those who are affected?
  • 03:59 Does your change build on the organization's core values?
  • 04:02 Are you changing who and what we stand for?
  • 04:05 Do people have confidence in the new product or process and
  • 04:08 in those who are leading this initiative?
  • 04:10 Or do they think this is something being forced on them by those
  • 04:14 who don't understand the business and what works?
  • 04:17 And finally, there's the emotional context.
  • 04:19 Are people dissatisfied with status quo and seeking change or
  • 04:22 do they like the way things are and don't want you to rock the boat?
  • 04:26 Does the change give people hope and opportunity to get on board and
  • 04:30 become invested in the new order or does it leave them feeling isolated and lost?
  • 04:35 Let me wrap this up with a slide that shows when a change initiative is likely
  • 04:39 to be derailed.
  • 04:40 I first saw this years ago, and
  • 04:42 since then I've seen derailments in each of these areas.
  • 04:46 As the change implementation starts, people are a little confused and
  • 04:50 tentative.
  • 04:51 So initially,
  • 04:52 the process performance drops off a bit while the transition is started.
  • 04:56 This is the first point of potential derailment.
  • 04:58 Management or the operators get cold feet and
  • 05:01 reject things before they really give it a chance.
  • 05:04 So let's say we get through that point.
  • 05:06 Several key individuals get on board and as they start to use the changed approach,
  • 05:11 they're having great success.
  • 05:12 Everyone is happy, euphoria sets in, and the next point of derailment is upon us.
  • 05:18 We get a premature declaration of victory with no sustaining support or
  • 05:22 organizational change elements that I've been talking about being implemented yet.
  • 05:26 All we have is several operators in the process saying this works great.
  • 05:31 The Lean Six Sigma team is disbanded after getting a travel mug or
  • 05:35 a t-shirt, and since other business systems were not changed,
  • 05:39 the process quickly goes back to where it was.
  • 05:42 So now, we keep working past that point and start putting in the organizational
  • 05:47 change elements, but new difficulties have come up.
  • 05:50 The system changes mean that the terminals and shipping and receiving,
  • 05:54 which are still running on Windows 98, have to be upgraded, but
  • 05:58 then that requires even more systems work to be done.
  • 06:01 And to do this,
  • 06:02 we need to renegotiate the supplier agreements with one of our suppliers.
  • 06:05 But that contract isn't up for renewal for another two years.
  • 06:08 And if we start now, we may have to pay more, and on and on it goes.
  • 06:13 Fixing the problems actually exposed a number of other issues, and
  • 06:18 the organization does not have the appetite to fix all of them, and so
  • 06:22 they abandon your change.
  • 06:24 But if they persevere, we finally get the sustained improved performance.
  • 06:29 If your improvement solution needs cross-functional implementation,
  • 06:33 well, you need to create an improvement plan and
  • 06:36 consider all the organizational and cultural ramifications.

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