Review: European Business Excellence Summit, Brussels - Day 2

by Matthew Moore on 29th October 2009

Effective communication of goals and successes was the main talking point of the second day, along with Value Stream Mapping and Net Promoter Score.

Day 2: Wednesday 28th October 2009

The second day of the 2009 European Business Excellence Summit began with a question: how do you best prepare for change? With many of the attendees representing fledgling change programmes, this was an extremely pertinent question and one that the second day's chairman was well qualified to answer.

Jens Erik Ebbesen, VP Corporate Systems at TeliaSonera Group was in the chair and also gave a presentation entitled "Preparing the way for change", in which he explained the main elements that effect any change. These are: the three basic ingredients for change (motivation, knowledge, skillsets), the four personalities to deal with (enthusiasts, pragmatists, conservatives and sceptics), and the four stages of learning (unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, unconscious competence).

Successfully identifying and dealing with these elements is what makes a change programme successful, but it is of course highly complicated. Jens Erik went on to talk about how effective and consistent communication is absolutely essential: second only to the Change Manager is the Communications Manager, a role Jens Erik believes should be separate and distinct. In addition, the communications programme, including scoreboards, should all be designed with the main elements mentioned above in mind.

Key Performance Indicators

Effective communication was also a key aspect of Michael Howarth's presentation on the improvement programme at Lloyds Register, who went from implementation to winning three awards at the Process Excellence Awards in only 16 months. They created a "closed loop" programme deliberately branded as "Business Assurance" in order to avoid the academic argument of choosing a particular methodology and toolset. Even though it was built around Six Sigma and Lean, by avoiding the nomenclature they were able to pick and choose the tool appropriate to the situation.

The Business Assurance model they created clearly communicated the improvement goals and related them to the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of the business in order to give a clear, understandable picture to the executive team. In addition, the programme benefited from having a Business Assurance director at the top table, which gave not only great leverage and traction, but communication as well.The strategy was designed using the Kaplan-Norton model which Michael credited with enabling them to make sure the projects were launched in the right areas of the organisation.

Many other models and toolsets were talked about during the course of the conference, but undoubtedly the most talked about was Value Stream Mapping (VSM). The reputation of this tool has been growing in recent years, and time and again people referred to its power and effectiveness in not only enabling change, but communicating the necessity for change. VSM is highly visual and easily understandable, and consequently there was great excitement when Minitab unveiled the latest version of their "Quality Companion" software, which now incorporates VSM functionality.

Value Stream Mapping

Robert Collis of Minitab gave a case study which showed how VSM can be used to track important variables such as inventory, takt time, and cycle time, all in such a way so as to be easily understood and effectively communicated to anyone within the business. It clearly shows complexity, bottle-necks and waste and as such is an incredibly effective tool for process improvement. Minitab incorporated it into their Quality Companion software after extensive research showed them how important a tool it is. Once again the key component here is communication: Quality Companion manages the 'soft' tools of an improvement project from start to finish, via a clear roadmap and integrated dashboard and incorporating VSM has made it the complete package.

The other tool for which there is a growing clamour of interest is Net Promoter Score (NPS), mentioned on numerous occasions in organisational case study presentations as being an excellent and powerful method for gauging customer satisfaction levels. Vodafone, Lloyds Register and Virgin Media are but three examples of companies with impressive improvement programmes who use NPS as a customer advocacy measure at a high level. The expectation is that this will become an increasingly relevant topic during the next year.

Author Name: Matthew Moore

Provider: IQPC