I recently spoke with process management practitioner, Wes Ralph of Collins Aerospace, about his recent work to improve the adoption, ease of use, and scalability of Collins Aerospace’s process management efforts.
How did Collins Aerospace decide that their process management efforts needed to be simpler for more success?
In 2017, my division of Collins Aerospace was hosting a third-party to perform benchmarking regarding process management. As we were showcasing one of our processes that increased its process maturity, the other organization asked, “What’s your strategy to take what you achieved with this process and multiply it across the organization?” We quickly realized we did not have an answer to this important question, which inspired us to re-examine our approach.
Often, change is met with resistance. Was that the case for your improvement efforts, even though you were promising to make things simpler for leaders and employees?
There was surprisingly little resistance in our division. We re-wrote the proposed process before we began, so were able to show leaders details about how this approach was better than ever before. We also offered to start with as little as a 2-hour commitment and the promise they didn’t have to continue down this path if they didn’t see the value.
What are the structured learn-do-share workshops and how do they provide employees with skill empowerment?
These were pivotal to our success. A learn-do-share workshop is a full day event that consists of 2 hours of skills training, 6 hours of immediate application by the teams, and an hour at the end of the day for sharing progress, reflection, and feedback. This has potential beyond process management as a method of skill empowerment for any topic.
Once you’ve accomplished the goal of adapting simpler and more effective process management, what guardrails did you put in place to make sure it remained simple and effective?
Once a leader launches teams, we design an ongoing cadence for process maturity reviews. The leader will choose how often and how deeply to guide teams, balancing empowerment with accountability and simplicity. Our ACE/continuous improvement team also participates in these reviews as ‘outside eyes’ to provide ongoing consultation. Allowing choice for the leader has been enormously helpful because all leaders have different styles on how they prefer to guide their organization.
Join Wes at APQC’s Process & Performance Management Online Summit, October 6-8, to learn more about Collins’ process journey and how its Electric Power Systems division chose a simpler approach to prioritizing processes and developing purposeful training and communication for leaders and employees to create increased employee empowerment and engagement.
For more process and performance management research and insights, follow me on Twitter at @hlykehogland or connect with me on LinkedIn.