You’ve written a new procedure.  Your procedure review identified completeness, correctness, and subject matter applicability.  You feel you’ve caught your procedure writing errors and the procedure’s ready to go…but go where?  How do you determine if your new procedure is working?

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Business and organizational development is about business process change: not as in “process change – the event”, but “process change – the journey“.  Your business processes change in response to market forces, competition, regulations, customer demand, the economy, culture, personal beliefs, and many other factors.  The question isn’t about what is causing the business process changes — we know your business processes are going to change — the question is…

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Today, everything is a project with more and more people finding themselves in a project management role of some type.  You don’t have to have the title of Project Manager to manage projects.

A Project is a temporary collection of related tasks to achieve a desired and usually unique result.

What do you think? Do you find yourself managing a collection of related tasks to achieve a desired result?  If so, you qualify as a project manager.  Businesses today are evolving, downsizing, and pushing more work down the organization chart.  You may be a project manager and not know it.  But what if you haven’t been trained as a Project Manager with the necessary skill and tool sets?

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The process maps we described in recent weeks are tools for you in your role as data collector and analyst: your role is to craft and communicate a story for change and improvement that people understand, accept, support, and will ultimately act on.  As you move from gathering data about the current process to improving it, you need tools to help communicate your improvement plan and train participants on the new process,

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Change management is at the heart of programs like ITIL, lean, ISO, or six sigma.  Change and improvement needs to occur on a regular basis, but it does not happen by accident.  It takes commitment from top management.  How does top management show their commitment?

Two ways – budget and a show!  That’s right you need to fuel innovation for change and improvement and budgets are what top management understand. 

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You have identified a problem, and you have made an immediate correction to fix it for now.  How do you make sure the same problem doesn’t happen again?

That is the role of corrective action in continual improvement of an organization.  In a reactive organization, we constantly react to problems in a corrective mode.  We make the short term fixes – over and over and over again. 

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Question of the month:How can innovative leadership influence an organization’s success?

In June, our articles focused on leadership and its impact on organizational culture. The term leadership is quite broad. Whether you are the CEO of a large company or the manager of a small department, you can make a difference through your leadership skills.

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Question of the month: How does innovation contribute to change?

After talking about change in April, we turned our attention in May to three companies that successfully embraced change and made it part of their continual process improvement. Many improvement opportunities mandate that you look at the situation a little differently and try to make it better with a different and innovative approach.

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Last week’s article was about Fueling Innovation. In recent articles we have talked about the history of innovation in the U.S., and the continuing need and opportunity for innovation and change.  We have reviewed how the spirit of innovation has played an important role in the history of the United States.

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A frequent topic at Bizmanualz is innovation.  Innovation means being willing to look at what you’re doing from a fresh perspective or to think outside the box.  Innovation fuels improvement:  improved products and features, improved methods, and improved knowledge. 

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