With the world economy recovering from a unique recession, now is a vital time for business transformation and it offers a unique opportunity. The assumption that process excellence, business improvement, Six Sigma, Lean, etc are all about taking cost out is wrong. It is actually about leadership and culture and consequently is vital for growth.

The challenge for everyone in the improvement community is to crush those assumptions and make sure that continuous improvement (CI) takes its place as an inherent part of the strategy of the busines and becomes a part of the growth engine going forward.

This was one of the main themes to emerge from the 11th Annual IQPC Process Excellence Summit and Awards, held this week in London. Representatives from hundreds of organisations, across various industries and specialisms convened to discuss the latest issues and plan strategy for the coming upturn. The event was organised to allow interactions between practitioners, leaders and service providers, with presentations, workshops and a display area for consultants and software providers.

The Emotional Quotient

The rallying cry to make CI a major player in the business resonated throughout many of the presentations, but was perhaps most enthusiastically put by Rene Carayol, senior executive and former board member for Pepsi, Marks&Spencer, IPC Media and the Inland Revenue.

Rene stressed the need for CI professionals to manage a little less and lead a little more, to change the way CI is viewed by becoming more commercial and strategic with their thinking and, consequently, their actions.


The aim should be for the ‘pull’ of executives going to the CI leaders and talking about growth projects and how to build the business, instead of the CI team simply reacting and trying to push the ideals onto the business. But in order to do that, the CI leaders need to earn the right to get to the table, and that requires a shift in mindset away from management to leadership.

Whilst the ‘IQ’ of management is important, it is the ‘EQ’ – the ‘Emotional Quotient’ – of leadership that really inspires and drives the people within the organisation, and ultimately culture is more important than strategy.

Data Stewardship

This strategic focus of process improvement was similarly highlighted in the presentation of David Montgomery and Gary Adams of RWE npower,  who talked about how important it is to bring process and data management together in order to drive the business forward. Within their organisation and many others, data is a critical asset.

When they began their improvement initiative, they strategically started to raise awareness and get the people of the organisation thinking of data in those terms. For them, process ownership is not enough: there is a strategic need to have “Data Stewardship” as well, and accountability and responsibility for both data and processes throughout the value stream.

Consequently, the npower CI team embarked on a campaign a few years ago to “make data sexy” and engage employees in both CI and data stewardship. This, along with a remit that the central CI team should teach, support and coach, with the change being done within the functions themselves, is proving to be very successful. There is now a CI culture within npower that shares knowledge through communities of practice, think tanks and work shops to ensure the sustainability of their successes.

As a member of the i&i Network of Practice, npower has collaborated with other organisations on knowledge management, and another i&i member organisation- the General Medical Council – also talked about this topic in their presentation. Phillip Roberts, Head of Business Improvement talked of how “right first time” is critical to quality and strategy at GMC.

Creating an efficient knowledge management system is vital to the business, but doing so requires engagement from the people and senior management. Phil spoke of several challenges the improvement programme has faced, including the importance of recognising the difference in cultural attitudes from manager to manager and the need to adjust the way to work accordingly.

Also, making sure senior managers sign up to a sponsors charter which identifies each part of the project cycle, and thus ensuring their commitment and support. GMC have consequently seen SLA delivery reduced from 47 days to just 1 day thanks to the work done by Phil and his team.

Sustaining change

Stakeholder management was an issue also touched upon by Cem Miralay of British Gas. Cem spoke about the active management of stakeholders at all levels to ensure engagement in their drive to create a company-wide focus on customer-driven process re-engineering. British Gas has a clear objective not to be beaten for Customer Service and is well underway to achieving its high level goals while delivering increased customer satisfaction, cost optimisation and revenue growth. A major factor in this success has been the engagement of stakeholders and staff.

June Jones Supply Chain Change Manager at Argos, talked about sustaining change inside distribution and spoke about the importance of language of leadership and getting the right balance between advocacy, admonishment and inquiry to give clear intent so that the people can follow the example of the leaders.

At Argos they have given their leaders multi-faceted coaching skills,
including recognition, to ensure that they don’t just manage, they
lead, and consequently create an environment where people can confront
and solve their own issues. This philosophy has helped Argos reduce
their delivery error rate by 48%.

Across the presentations, workshops and meetings, it was clear that now is a time of great opportunity, but the most successful organisations will be those who look to build their business around the customer. It seems that lots of businesses who were at the conference are using NPS (Net Promoter Score) as their key metric for gaining customer advocacy and ensuring that, as their business and the economy grows, they are doing it in the right way, for the right reasons.

NPS was mentioned in several of the presentations, and Bill Black of ABB spoke of how NPS is much more than just one question and can be used for strategic advantage to gain simple but effective customer insight.

This information is key in guiding strategy, and in tandem with an effective CI policy, can result in substantial competitive advantage. Bill also echoed the theme highlighted at the beginning by stressing the importance of earning the right to be at the top table.

Bill quoted visionary CI guru Joseph Juran, who said “quality people will never be understood by the business until they learn to speak the language of business”. It is this shift in mindset which will ensure that CI not only survives, but becomes a major part of every successful business.