Want it done? – schedule it!
I was struggling to get updates from my regional project management directors. We had asked each region to submit their monthly written updates by the first week of the following month. Some sites were chronically missing the deadline and there was a lack of consistency across all sites.
Sensing my frustration at having to constantly repeat my (apparently futile) requests to the team to provide their updates consistently, my boss suggested, “If you want something done, schedule it.”
He meant that if updates are needed at a specific time, actually schedule them directly on people's calendars, making the expectation and reminder "automatic" each month, and emphasizing the importance of the updates by turning them into meetings – people tend not to show up empty handed to meetings where they're expected to present.
Scheduling removed a bit of "friction" and created a sense of urgency that resulted in real progress. Amazingly, they didn’t miss any updates after that point!
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Over the years we’ve been exposed to Six Sigma, Juran, Deming PDCA, 8D, Dale Carnegie, A3, Shainin, and more. Each technique works pretty well, and has been demonstrated many times in a wide variety of industries and circumstances. At the core they are all essentially the same!
Each approach relies on an underlying logical flow that goes like this: [a] make sure the problem is clearly defined; [b] be open to all sources of information; [c] vet the information for relevance and accuracy; [d] use the process of elimination to narrow down all possible causes to the most likely few; [e] prove which of the suspects is really the cause of the issue; [f] generate a number of potential solutions; [g] evaluate the effectiveness, feasibility and risk of the potential solutions; [h] implement the winning solution(s); and [i] take steps to make sure your solution(s) don’t unravel in the future.
The differences between the paradigms resides in supplementary steps and toolkits. For example, 8D contains the important “In
Your team is marching through the tools of your company's chosen problem-solving approach. This is time not spent on growing your business or delivering cost reductions. Yet your customers are suffering, and they're not shy about letting you know it! Why isn't it working?
