The “Deepwater Horizon” disaster, unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico over the last three weeks, should serve as an object lesson in how NOT to manage a crisis. Here are just a few of the ways in which British Petroleum (BP) and its contractors made a bad situation infinitely worse:

1. You have to have a contingency plan. Whether through willful disregard or naked ignorance, it’s apparent that BP and its subcontractors, as well as the federal government, weren’t ready from the outset to handle the oil rig disaster. Compared with the final tally, which we won’t know until decades from now, the cost to prepare for a worst-case scenario would’ve been microscopic.  Good risk management would’ve helped, too.

2. Someone has to take responsibility. It’s one thing to say something went wrong but you won’t know what for sure until all the results are in. It’s another thing altogether to immediately start pointing the finger of blame at everyone else, as oil executives did before the US Senate in recent weeks. Who made the final decision to undertake the project? Who made the decisions to “do this” and “don’t do that”?  ISO 9001, as well as sound ethics and common sense, dictates that someone at the top must be responsible.

3. Quality is not an inconvenience. The Minerals Management Service (MMS) was not conducting monthly safety testing on the Deepwater Horizon in accordance with federal law. Furthermore, the MMS has reportedly granted drilling permits there and elsewhere without adequate environmental safety reviews.

The most important piece of safety equipment, the blowout preventer, was said to have been damaged weeks before the fateful explosion but not repaired or replaced. Countless other shortcuts were allegedly taken for the sake of time and money.

The sad part is that the parties involved – especially BP – could have easily afforded to take their time and do things right. (The oil business has been hugely profitable over the last five years, right? Well, what have they done with the record profits they earned?)

We all see the price to be paid for haste and carelessness. We can’t afford it.

* * * * * * *

Further Reading:

• Blowout: the Deepwater Horizon Disaster, CBS News, May 16, 2010 – http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/05/16/60minutes/main6490197.shtml
• Rig Explosion: the Blame Game Begins at Senate Hearing, Associated Press, May 11, 2010 – http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/deepwaterhorizon/6999804.html

It’s at times like these — when the business world is still unsettled after several years of turmoil and prevailing wisdom doesn’t see a quick end to the situation for any of us — that we tend to forget about the far horizon and concentrate on what’s directly in front of us. It’s only natural. Who can think about next year when you’re worried about next month?

This isn’t the time to be taking shortcuts, though. Take them and they will catch up with you. For instance, you have to train or retrain employees as the business contracts. You absolutely need well-developed, accurate, and up-to-the-minute policies and procedures.

If your policies and procedures are incomplete, inconsistent, or outdated, your people don’t get adequate training, steps are missed, and customer dissatisfaction grows. You fall further behind your competition, and even drop out of the race.

To be effective, your business procedures have to be easy to understand, easy to follow, and easy to update. To ensure that your procedures are effective and error-free, keep the following points in mind:

CLARITY – Write your procedures so they’re easy to read (or view) and easy to follow.

CORRECTNESS – Your procedures must be grammatically and syntactically correct. If they’re written procedures, there should be no spelling errors. If you plan on audio or video procedures, be sure the speaker pronounces words correctly, speaks clearly, and uses a style acceptable to the intended audience.

CONSISTENCY – This is not simply a matter of “look and feel”, or of references, terms, and resources. Those are all important, but what we’re really talking about is consistent actions and consistent results. This is especially true when training personnel on procedures that are new to them. If you assign the procedure to two people who’ve just been trained and you get two different results, it may be your procedure’s at fault.

COMPLETENESS – For obvious reasons, your procedures cannot have any gaps in information, logic, or design. Incomplete information and instructions mean you won’t get the results you’re looking for.

CONTEXT – Procedures must accurately and appropriately describe the activity to be performed and they must not exist in a vacuum. There is no such thing as a stand-alone procedure — all procedures affect, and are affected by, other procedures so it’s best if you put a procedure in context. From where do its inputs come and where do its outputs go?

CONTROL – Your procedures have to incorporate feedback loops and process controls to be effective. Get familiar with the Plan-Do-Check-Act Cycle if you’re not already. (Think you are? Maybe, but a refresher certainly won’t do you any harm. Complacency is the enemy.)

COMPLIANCE – Every procedure is written to ensure compliance with something — user needs (stated and implied), regulations, company requirements, and other. Address all requirements, not just some, in your procedures.

Pay careful attention to these seven keys when writing your policies and procedures and get the results you want!

We’ve already discussed writing policies and procedures and reviewing them. Now let’s talk about doing something with them.

Too many companies look at procedure documentation as a necessary evil. They look at business as a number of tasks and events; sometimes those events and tasks are connected, but many times they’re not. In these cases, the process – and the procedure that’s supposed to describe it – are two different things. In other words, there’s “what we say” and there’s “what we do”.

You’ll enjoy greater success if you look at your business procedures like you look at everything else you do — as an opportunity for improvement. To make sure you do, always keep the following concepts in mind:

1. Be sure your process objectives are reasonable. As I’ve often said and will continue to say because it bears repeating — nothing does more harm than having unreasonable expectations.

2. Be sure that as you’re developing your procedures, you have all stakeholders involved from start to finish. Do you know who the stakeholders are? Yes, the customers are, ultimately, but there are others.

3. Be sure that everyone — not just the people who are responsible for executing your policies and procedure, but those at both ends of the process, too — understands the importance of the procedure to the success of the company and have bought into that.

4. Train people on the procedure before you officially implement it. Do as many “dry runs” as are necessary; once is never enough.

5. Execute the procedure faithfully. Don’t do only those parts of the procedure that make sense to you. Don’t take shortcuts.

6. As you’re executing, be sure to monitor & measure the process. You can’t improve a procedure if you don’t have data.

7. Do something with your data — don’t just look at them and say, “Oh, that’s interesting.” What is so interesting about the data? Do you see outliers and trends in the data? Do they make you want to take action? Do you know what’s normal and what isn’t? Continually reevaluate your objectives.

8. Review your procedures periodically. Things are not always what they seem. Different people see things differently. Don’t wait for problems to occur — assume they will and head them off.

9. Revise and retrain. No procedure should be considered “set in stone”. Internal and external forces are continually changing. Either you see change as a normal part of doing business or you don’t see it until it’s too late. If you’re ready for change, it’s much easier to deal with. Revise procedures and retrain continually, in small increments.

10. Always think proactively. What’s better, to be active or passive in the business world? (It’s a rhetorical question — we all know active is better, right?)

Don’t sit on your laurels. Just because you’ve implemented your procedures doesn’t mean it’s time to sit back and take it easy. (Well, maybe you can for a moment, but don’t get too comfortable.) The business world, like time, waits for no one.

In the last two weeks we discussed an Olympic skater’s disqualification and came up with a possible root cause; in this case, human error. Specifically, everyone assumed everyone else was keeping track of the number of laps and, as it turned out, no one was.

Finding a root cause was the easy part. How does the skating team eliminate the root cause? How do they eliminate carelessness and inattention? How do they eliminate the possibility of even a momentary lapse in concentration? What’s the best corrective action they can take?

Carelessness and inattention being uniquely human qualities, the best corrective action, or countermeasure, is to do what you can under the rules to eliminate them. The first thing that comes to mind is an automated signal — for instance, a voice — triggered as a skater goes through an electronic gate.

They already have start and finish gates for all racing events. It wouldn’t be difficult to include a lap counter that would also prompt a skater, aurally or visually. Tell or show them what lap they’re on and when to change lanes. Wireless in-helmet communicators have been in use in the National Football League (NFL) for several years. The NFL ensures that no team has an unfair advantage. Everyone’s quarterback gets an in-helmet communicator.

While some, I expect, will say that communicators remove the “human factor” from the sport. What about body suits? Or the changes made to skates? Everyone has the same opportunity, so that it comes down to who is the better skater.

Better training under race conditions is another possibility. For instance, work on exercises that sharpen one’s mental acuity – concentration – during an event.

What does this have to do with your organization? Plenty. Take a look at your best and worst processes in terms of performance and consistency. Look at the numbers generated and determine where your weak points are. Why are those your weak points? What’s causing them?

Where is waste occurring, and how much? What kinds of waste are there?

Now, how do you reduce or eliminate waste? How do you prevent root causes of error and waste from recurring? Once you determine what corrective and/or preventive actions to take — and you take them — you’re on your way to making the process in question as foolproof as it can be.

Remember — inflated expectations are the worst form of sabotage. No process can ever be made completely foolproof. Nevertheless, you owe it to your customers — and your company — to try.

We all know what “corrective action” is, right? If you don’t, it’s really easy. It’s an action you take to eliminate the root cause of a problem (or nonconformance), thereby preventing — or reducing the likelihood of — the problem’s recurrence.

So, define the problem. (Well, see, it’s like this. Our skater was ahead — I mean “way ahead” — in the longest of the long-distance races. It’s, like, six miles. And with nearly three-quarters of the race gone, his opponent’s nowhere near him. He might as well be in another building…or another country.)

Doesn’t sound like a problem to me. (I was about to get to that. It’s at that point that our guy’s supposed to switch lanes to the outside. Only our coach says, “INSIDE!”, and our guy GOES inside, like he’s told. And because he didn’t switch lanes, our man’s DQ-ed.)

DQ-ed? (Disqualified. He had the best time, but didn’t win the race. We had the best man, the best coaches, the best training, best nutrition, best staff, the fastest track…and we have nothing to show for all that. No winner, no medal, no endorsements…nothing.)

And why was your man disqualified? (Like I said, the coach said “go inside” and he went inside. The coach made a mistake. So did our skater, I guess.)

Why did the coach tell your skater to go inside? (He wasn’t paying close attention…he was distracted…he was confused, somehow.)

Why did the skater do what the coach said? (He trusted the coach. He wasn’t paying attention, either.)

Why weren’t they paying attention? (I can’t say for sure. Maybe they were so far ahead, they got a little careless.)

See what we did? Recognize the “Five Whys”? We got down to a possible root cause. I say ”possible” because we rely on an individual’s focus, memory and biases. If we subject several people, including the skater and coach, to the “Five Whys”, we get a somewhat balanced result.

Now that we’ve identified a root cause, how do we eliminate it? Better yet, “What does this have to do with MY business?” For the answer to these and other questions…

…stay tuned.

Business continuity management — more commonly known as “disaster recovery”, even in the present day — used to be about worst-case scenarios.  That is:

“What is the worst thing that could befall my company, and how do I ensure minimal to no disruption of the company’s operations if that happens?”

Aftermath of 1906 San Francisco Quake

“What could happen” has traditionally centered on such events as:

• Natural disasters (fire, flood, storm, earthquake);
• Disasters of the human kind (terrorism, rioting, looting, etc.);
• Major utility outages; and
• IT system problems (malware attacks, hardware failures, etc.).

While the likelihood of such a catastrophic event is believed to be very small, its impact – if it occurred – would probably devastate the business, causing it to fail.

As computers have insinuated themselves into every facet of every type of business, and the importance of alignment of strategy and operations has been realized, the scope of “disaster recovery” has broadened.  More complex recovery systems have been devised to address companies’ needs on a more comprehensive basis.

However, we’re still focused primarily on disaster recovery — assuming that only the worst will happen – rather than using a truly comprehensive, risk-based approach to crisis and continuity management.  Instead of dwelling on the most unlikely of possibilities, we ought to be more concerned with:

• What threats are more likely to take shape than others?
• Which of those threats, if manifested, will have the greatest impact on the company, which will have the next-greatest impact, and so on?
• How will the company act to prevent those problems or minimize their effect?

I’m not suggesting that your company has to completely give up on the doomsday scenario.  However remote the possibility of a cataclysmic event, you want to be prepared.

I am saying that your business continuity management plan ought to cover the risks inherent in conducting day-to-day business as well as the remote possibilities…things like the current brittle economic environment, or risks to our business structure and processes (e.g., cloud computing, embezzlement, misuse of company information, swine flu).

What do you think?  Could your crisis and continuity management plan take a more comprehensive, risk-based approach? Are you satisfied with your current plan?  Do you even have a plan?

Or, are you counting on the world to end in 2012?  (In which case, I suppose, the whole crisis and continuity exercise is moot.)

Much has been made about the lean benefits of “5S” — Sort, Shine, Set in place, Standardize, and Sustain — over the years it has been a part of the quality lexicon.  Very little is said about the drawbacks of implementing a 5S system.  5S is an exceptional lean system, in theory.  Where it often falls short is in the execution.  Now, I’m not saying that for every benefit of 5S, there’s a drawback.  As designed, it’s all good.  But like they say, “There are at least two sides to every story.”

The benefits of implementing a lean 5S system are huge.  They include:

• The employer’s concern for cleanliness and worker safety contributing, sometimes significantly, to morale…people take greater pride in their company when the company takes pride in its plant, offices, & people;
• The efficiencies gained by freeing up space, improving layout, and optimizing work flow are enormous;
• The potential for increases in productivity when things are laid out so as to maximize efficiency and turnaround time;
• Less time and motion are wasted when workstation layout is optimized, even in an office setting; and
• A well-run 5S system can encourage employees to think about, and look for, other incremental improvements, or kaizens (“baby steps”, Dr. Leo Marvin* called them) as they go about their daily business.

Read about the Toyota Production System (TPS) if you haven’t already.  There’s much to learn about the benefits of 5S in the TPS story.

The shortcomings of 5S are not in the system itself, but in how 5S is applied.  Most companies that don’t get 5S fall short on the most crucial element of all — sustaining.  To them, 5S isn’t a system — it’s an event.

What they don’t understand is that 5S isn’t a one-time-does-it cure, like a pill or injection for a serious physical ailment.  5S is a system, a cycle.  It’s a habit the workforce gets into, like exercising three or more times a week to decrease the likelihood of a “serious physical ailment”.  The company that doesn’t get much out of 5S probably isn’t incorporating the 5S philosophy in its daily routine.  Perhaps they don’t understand lean thinking.

Clearing everything off of everyone’s desk once a year is not 5S.  Having a place for everything and everything (back) in its place, every day — that’s 5S!

5S is sometimes applied rigorously — to the letter — by overzealous, micromanaging types.  They mistake discipline for tyranny.  Taken to extremes, 5S stifles individuality and creativity, lowering morale and productivity.  (Believe it or not, people aren’t inspired when they’re told, “It has to be this way…or else!”)

Some managers don’t quite get the “standardize” part of 5S, either.  Standardizing is about processes and procedures, not people.  When you say every workstation has to have a uniform appearance, that doesn’t mean you have to rob individual work areas of personality.  Limiting workers to “one or two personal effects, not to exceed a certain size or character”, has nothing whatsoever to do with 5S.

Granted, a small number of coworkers go overboard, with their Beanie Babies and their Star Wars posters, ad nauseam.  But, if my boss said, “Get rid of the hockey puck paperweight…oh, and no baseball calendar”, I’d be much harder to get along with than I already am.  (Ask my coworkers.)

In the effort to optimize work flow, maximize efficiency, and gain productivity, sometimes we forget to “build” breaks into the day.  We can’t possibly keep working at a steady pace throughout the workday, even though our machines and our computers can.  Actually, machines and computers need maintenance and down time almost as much as we do.  People cannot “multitask”, either. (Trying to multitask leads to irritability, sleeplessness, and a greater risk of illness, contributes to short attention span, etc. — as “Yogi” Berra said, “You can look it up!”)

The moral of the story is, “Understand and follow the spirit of the law, not the letter of the law.”  Use 5S as it’s designed and you’ll have increased success and a satisfied workforce.

* “What About Bob?” (1991)

You may have noticed that on some of our web pages, Bizmanualz is soliciting your feedback in “Talkback” dialog boxes. On our consulting pages, we invite you to share your “Toughest Process Challenges” and your “Training and Communicating Challenges“.

By prompting you with the right kinds of questions in the right places, we hope to gain a better understanding of your wants and needs and how we can help.  Your responses will help us update our web site so that it better addresses the issues and questions on your mind.

Some of your questions invite engagement — great!  That’s exactly what we’re looking for! We ask only that you limit yourself to one question per web page and give us your name and e-mail address so we can begin a dialogue.  That’s it! You can tell us what you think without leaving the page…even without scrolling.

To date, your input has been instructive and has helped us improve our site. Some of you have continued to correspond with us by e-mail; we plan to add more Talkback dialog boxes on more pages to serve you even better.

Here’s a list of talkback questions and links as of this week (we’ll update the blog with new Talkback links as we add them):

Consulting Services main page:
What is your toughest process challenge?

Procedure review page in the consulting section:
What is your primary documentation difficulty?

Process implementation page in the consulting section:
How do you train and communicate with your team?

Process optimization in the consulting section:
What is your toughest process challenge?

Thank you for sharing what’s on your mind with Bizmanualz.  For those of you who haven’t yet taken part, check out a recent Talkback inquiry on a process training question and our response, taken from case studies.  And, tell your friends and business associates about us!

Among the top ten reasons that managers give for why their company’s policies and procedures don’t work is that “Employees don’t use them.” When procedures aren’t used, you may wonder why you bothered writing them. Did you waste your time? When procedures are written but not used, lessons that have been learned are forgotten. Mistakes that were corrected on paper long ago are made over and over again. Continuous improvement gives way to continuing problems and waste.

Waste costs money.  Yet, when organizations don’t follow their own core procedures, it’s hard for them to know what works and what doesn’t, so improvement evades them. They risk quality problems and customer disappointment. Customers may defect to competitors. Revenue may suffer.

When even core procedures are not used, you risk not complying with health, safety, and environmental regulations. That can endanger employees and gain unfavorable notice from auditors and regulators, further distracting you from using best practices and making continuous improvements.

Why aren’t your policies and procedures used?

When we hear employees say that procedures are getting in their way rather than helping, we usually find that procedures are too numerous, too long, poorly written, hard to follow, and/or hopelessly complex.  Writing and development problems are the chief reason that policies and procedures suffer such deficiencies. (See our web site for several articles explaining how to avoid and overcome procedure writing and development problems.)

How Bizmanualz Estimates Your Policies and Procedures Project

When companies come to Bizmanualz with poorly written policies and procedures, we typically recommend reducing and simplifying what they have today. Typically, we can cut from 30% to 60% of their documentation load, reducing the cost and complexity which at the same time lessens employees’ objections.

We can recommend an approach for your policies and procedures improvement project based on your answers to the following questions:

• How many procedures do you have today within the scope of the improvement project?
• Send us two or three sample procedures in MS WORD or PDF format. Let us know what format you want for the final procedures.
• What industry are you in?
• List the countries in which the procedures will be used. List each of the languages into which the procedures need to be translated (if any).
• Who is the lead regulator for your industry in each of the countries where the procedures will be used? Provide a link to the regulator’s web site and on-line regulations if available. List any other regulators that are likely to review or audit your procedures.
• Mention any quality standards that you are using or plan to use within 24 months.

Pictures and Graphics Help Bridge Cultural Gaps

If the procedures will be used in more than one country, we typically recommend replacing text with graphics, illustrations and pictures. Graphics are interpreted more consistently across cultures, which drives uniform interpretation and more consistent usage of procedures.

Page for page, graphics are more expensive to produce than written material. But a single graphic may eliminate a lot of pages of written material, mitigating the cost of development.  Most companies consider investment in graphics worth-while because:

• Procedures are used more consistently
• Compliance improves
• Injuries and work disruptions decrease.

Your Budget Considerations:

If Your Budget is Less than $10,000 US:

At budget levels less than $10,000 US, we would typically recommend training for your in-house procedure-writers on how to write more effective procedures. The training is similar to our Well-Defined Processes training, but emphasizes authoring procedures. After the training, your in-house team rather than Bizmanualz would apply the principles and update your procedures. Depending on the experience level of your procedure-writing team, more than one training event may be required.

If Your Budget is $10,000 to $30,000:

At budget levels above $10,000, Bizmanualz relieves your team from the production responsibilities, and provides the man-hours and expertise to update your procedures more quickly than most companies can train and do it on their own. At budget levels in this range, Bizmanualz:

• Evaluates the content and format of each of your existing procedures within the scope of the project
• Provides you with our written critique
• Provides a visual storyboard outlining the specific changes
• Drafts the procedures for your review
• Completes the graphics and reviews them with you
• Provides one revision to text and graphics, incorporates your comments
• Completes and delivers the procedures.

Projects above $30,000 are larger projects in scope; they might require deployment in more than one location, translation, optimization, or a lot of information graphics.

Larger projects may include procedure implementation of your procedures with your employees to make sure that they perceive value and use the procedures.  This may include additional buy-in training for your in-house procedures team on how to build and maintain support for your policies and procedures project.  You may need other communications tools such as job aids or videos that are not strictly considered procedures, but which nonetheless help workers apply the procedures consistently.   Process procedures optimization may require implementing lean, ISO or quality systems.

You can control the scope and budget of your project by:

• Controlling the number of procedures
• Working in phases, and reducing the scope of the current phase.
• Creating fewer language translations and limiting the number of geographies where the new procedures will be used.
• Using fewer graphics and more text.

If you would like Bizmanualz to estimate your policies and procedures project, please send us the information listed above under ‘How we Estimate Your Policies and Procedures Project.’ Don’t forget to send us samples of your current procedures. We will recommend an improvement approach that will increase compliance, safety and communication.

Contact: Dan Davison, Dan@bizmanualz.com, tel. (314) 863-5079 x23, Bizmanualz, Inc.

What would you do if you were set in the middle of the Pacific, on a raft, with no provisions, no motor or oars, no navigational aids, and no way to contact the rest of the world?  It’s just you, the boat, and the unending blue above and below.

If you’ve ever been assigned the unenviable task of writing policies and procedures, maybe you can imagine better than your fellow workers what being cast adrift is like.  How many of you were given an office in a remote part of the building (think Milton in “Office Space”), ostensibly to keep the disruption to a minimum, and instructed to develop a set of policies and procedures for accounting, or IT, or (gasp!) the entire company?

And when they eventually pulled the plug on the project, did you feel relief that the misadventure was finally over?  That is, were you rescued, or were you left adrift, watching the circle of sharks — blame, recrimination, etc. — tighten around your little blow-up craft?

Did you feel this harrowing experience could have been avoided, or perhaps produced the desired results, if only someone had given you the tools, resources, direction, and – most of all – the guidance and support of top management before you spent the last six months marooned with Gilligan and the Skipper?

That’s exactly where our Chris Anderson is going with this month’s series of articles on the Process-Procedure Journey.  If you’ve already been to the first article, you’ll remember Chris’s description and map of the Process-Procedures Journey. I’ve reproduced the process map with one minor alteration.

Even a simple map like this might be a huge improvement over your current procedure development process.  Well, guess what?  We don’t even get this much in all but a few isolated circumstances.  (And to the lucky few who’ve gotten what they needed, please tell us what was it like.)

Like a castaway on the raft, it often seems as though we’ve been dropped into the middle of the sea without a sense of where we came from, where we’re going, or how we’re going to survive the journey, let alone get to our destination, wherever that might be.  Too often, we start our journey somewhere in the middle (Template Design or Procedure Writing) instead of at the appropriate starting point (Project Management).

For direction, advice, and tips on how to make your journey a successful one, keep on reading (or start reading) this month’s articles.  If you’d like more in-depth assistance – something tailored to your unique circumstances – please contact us or visit our web site.

Best of luck to all of you.  Smooth sailing!