To compete in today’s marketplace, our performance standards must begin with Value Excellence.
Value Excellence is driven by Value Stream Management, a systematic and strategic approach that defines, understands, and delivers value to all stakeholders – your customers and the teams that create, produce, and deliver your products or services to your end customer. It involves the identification of key objectives, analysis of functions, evaluation of alternatives, and implementation of innovative solutions, prioritizing demand and renovating capabilities to be faster, better, and more efficient
When organizations maximize value, they optimize their resources, improve efficiency, and enhance stakeholder satisfaction, improving and sustaining an effective balance between the wants and needs of stakeholders and the resources required to satisfy them. When organizations evaluate and strive to improve their products, projects, and processes, it’s always with an eye to efficiently managing resources and containing costs, either at the project, product, process, or organizational phase, as well as during delivery to the end customer.
Times Have Changed. Things go Wrong. Shit Happens!
Yet so many companies are not optimized for efficiency, flow, and cost containment. They’re stuck in their traditional ways of doing things, so much so that they cannot get out of their own way to break their cycle of resource and dollar waste and inefficiency. Even worse, because they’re going head-to-head against disruptive market entrants and innovative peers, they’re losing ground and failing to hit their market share and profit targets.
It’s a bleak reality, made starker by the findings of a Harvard Business Review study, that says that companies that achieve Operational Excellence have a 25 percent higher growth rate and 75 percent higher productivity. Whether you’re a topline manager or a frontline worker, you’re likely losing sleep at night, recognizing that too many bottlenecks and too much wasted time, activity, and money are making you feel not so comfortable at work. But what can you do about it.
Down to the Studs
Your unrest, signals that it’s time to – well, Renovate. At Slide3, we serve clients by guiding them through an Operational Renovation.
Operational Renovation provides a clear view of the elephant in the room to reveal the hard truths and target the areas needing improvement… and the solutions required for People and Adoption Management. No shortcutting. No sugarcoating. Frankly, when we say Operational Renovation, we literally mean take the walls down to the studs. At Slide3, we know that the only way to undue misaligned operations is Operational Renovation that takes a comprehensive view so that you can architect a rebuild of your operational adoption models.
Guidance That Fosters DIY Adoption
The goal is to eliminate unnecessaries and combine and / or repurpose capabilities. Instituting cost efficiencies transitions to
It takes guidance from objective sources who help with navigation, but the renovation is all DIY. Everyone’s involved – executive sponsors, affected leadership, process owners, SME’s, and automation / IT teams. It’s pervasive… cultural. Collaborative and transparent, it’s an environment in which all stakeholders have ownership and voice.
You facilitate using four archetypical models:
- Eliminate the Unnecessaries – Optimize resources by analyzing demand and aligning with capacity.
- Combine or Repurpose Capabilities – Map improvements by instituting value stream creation to better prioritize lean project and design thinking and align human resources to meet demand.
- Substitute Cost Efficiencies – Test, experiment, and readjust as necessary to develop prudent and practical economies that eliminate non-forward-moving waste activities and spend.
- Streamline and Simplify – Boost productivity through enhanced transparency, time management, communication, and compliance across teams and functions
The key is to align the strategic with the tactical and bridge vision to execution so that the goal is actionable.
Mechanical and Behavioral. Pragmatic and Empathetic.
There’s a tendency in our digital world to rely on automation, technology, and increasingly AI as the end-all / be-all solutions. At Slide3, we take a more expansive perspective. We look at your company through both a mechanical and behavioral lens. Solutions don’t exclusively grow out of just mapping value streams, leveraging AI, and automating processes. Rather, they require transformative thinking so that investment in them pairs digital solutions with operating models that factor people into the equation. To execute faster and win in today’s market, companies must be bolder and manage differently. In fact, according to research from McKinsey & Company, leaders need three skill sets for long-term success:
- Technical Leadership – Comprises industry and technical knowledge and expertise, thought leadership, and communication as well as project management.
- Organization Leadership – Includes recognizing and communicating a clear vision, executing on strategy and organizational goals, coaching, delegation, and team building.
- Self-Leadership – Demonstrates self-awareness, emotional intelligence, inclusion, mindfulness, empathy, social intelligence, and the learning agility to lead during the most challenging and complex situations.
Employees tend to react to change with fear – of failure to perform under new circumstances or, even worse of their job being eliminated. Excluding them from the adoption process increases fear while collaboration builds trust. Individuals feel the psychological safety to take risks and experience recognition.
We Get Shit Done (GSD)
Slide3 is onsite with you. Using innovative team-building approaches, we guide you as you create the value stream roadmap that will get you to Value Excellence. We facilitate interactive working sessions designed to align multiple stakeholder groups. We stretch thinking, enabling rapid decision-making and the solutioning of complex issues. The goal is to foster a sense of purpose, nurture alignment, and prompt a sense of accomplishment. Storifying new functional assignments adds human touches that democratize roles, mitigate fears, and drive enthusiasm, acceptance, and adoption.
The Kaizen Improvement Operational Model is integral to our lead facilitation and a straw-man model builds the structure that guides participant activities. We begin with design and preparation of and for group work, orchestrate and collaborate workflows and processes, and culminate with outcomes – all which are anchored by the following requirements:
- Knowledge and Understanding – Establish clarity of the operational situation… the background, problem(s), solution and approach forward.
- Action and Accountability – Actionable tasks and responsibilities must be clearly defined and transparent. As operational stakeholders, team members must be accountable for the roles and tasks they are assigned.
- Cohesive and Communicative – All communications and learning must be relevant to the improvement issue and intended policy change.
- Active Follow-up – Ensure stakeholders understand the critical solution path. Understanding is enhanced through detailed goal notation and metrics that measure progress to goal.
- Continuous Assessment – Establish future sessions necessary to assess, regroup, and realize the continuous improvement that results in Value Excellence.
Our goal is to help you develop the solutions to achieve Operational Renovation now. Our creative team handles all the organizational details – managing your teams, risks, finances, partners and expectations. This allows you to do what best serves you and ultimately your customer: develop purpose, autonomy, and mastery.
By cultivating your teams’ ability to deploy their ideas through portfolio and product management methodologies, we are ensuring the learning sticks. We train stakeholders to be faster, bolder, better, and position them long-term to work with an improvement mindset.
If that sounds like a framework that can turn things around for you, we invite you to learn more about Slide3 and explore how we can help you create your Operational Renovation blueprint.
It’s never too late to develop a plan.
We know your customers will love it.
We know you won’t regret it.
So, reach out. Then let’s talk.