Improving Process in Troubled Times (Part One)

This four-part series considers some tactics for making your improvement initiative bulletproof in budget-slashing times.

Improvements become easily deferrable under cost control's myopic focus. Our attention to the cost of our efforts can destroy any understanding of their underlying value. Which improvement initiatives are most likely to survive when the economy sours our expectations? The ones that the organization believes are valuable.

Your organization might assess your improvement program as a cost burden or a liberating value. Programs assessed as cost  burdens become disembodied line items, easily slashed, while those efforts seen as delivering real value survive. What  constitutes real value? If you're stuck on a sinking cost-burden effort, how might you transform it into a valued contribution?

Help your organization determine obvious, overwhelming value for your efforts. If your initiative cannot value-justify itself, help kill it. When the budget slashers are around, you're better off focusing on easily justified efforts rather than defending unjustifiable ones. If your funding authority quakes at the following questions, he's just flunked a dedication test. If he will engage in a conversation that could raise his value consciousness, everyone's potentially better off.

What will it cost if you don't do this?

Gently deflect those cost-estimate requests, shifting the conversation toward value. Deferring necessary improvement is never as free as the penny-wise budget slashers might believe. Help them see their actions' pound-foolishness.

What is the initiative worth- what value will it add?

Rather than focus on what resources the initiative will consume, zero in on what it will add. This quantity is much more easily and accurately determined than any cost estimate. It is also juicy and alluring, while cost is most often a dry, dead, encumbering figure.
 

Determining value isn't about creating a cost/benefit ratio. Value is not simply negative cost. Your organization might express value as an ethereal aspiration, a defining constraint, a conditioning regulator, or a focusing target, as well as viewing it as a traditional long-term benefit over cost. But be careful! Your organization will not necessarily most highly value long-term benefit in difficult times. The key to helping your initiative survive lies in positioning it to deliver what your organization really values. Doing this requires that you know your organization in ways that cost accountants never consider.
 

The Value of Anything

An organization might value its aspirations more than its targets, its constraints over its regulations, and any of these more than the long-term legacy effects from your efforts. If your initiatives are to survive these times, your job includes understanding which values your organization holds most highly and framing your initiative so that it easily satisfies that value orientation. In this way, you can help your organization enjoy the real value of your contribution rather than experience the burden of its cost.

The next installment of this series will look at two very different ways in which organizations value improvements and howto align your efforts with them.
 

David A. Schmaltz is the founder and a principled consultant with True North pgs (project guidance strategies), Inc., a strategic consultancy that helps people work well together. His book, The Blind Men and the Elephant: Mastering Project Work, will be published by Berrett-Koehler in March. His Web site is www.projectcommunity.com, and his email address is david@projectcommunity.com.
 

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The following links will take you to the other pieces in this series:
Part One Introduces the concept of aligning with perceived value as a key contributor to improvement success.
Part Two Aligning with Aspiration and Constraint-valuing Organizations.
Part Three Aligning with Regulator and Target-valuing Organizations.
Part Four Aligning with Legacy-valuing organizations and summary of advice.

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