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What happens when political motivations trump process improvements?

APQC recently held a panel discussion on how organizations can take advantage of a holistic strategy encompassing an intersection of knowledge, process, and quality management. APQC’s Travis Colton, Jim Lee, and Jeff Varney collectively responded to this follow-up discussion from the panel:

Q. What happens when management does not support what the knowledge, process, and quality management reveal as poor performance and political motivations trump the goals of process or quality improvement?

Clearly this is a difficult question for any “process improvement” initiative to solve and regrettably, sometimes it is not solved by any of the means discussed in this panel. That can happen when the rewards for solving the performance problem are not greater than the rewards for maintaining the status quo, or the barrier (person) has built up enough political capital to hide the true problems, or the organization thinks that it is doing well enough so that change is not needed.

One way to attempt to defeat those kinds of situations is to tie any improvement efforts to the goals and objectives of the organization—at the highest levels if possible. So if the company goal is to increase sales, make an improvement pitch that directly addresses the increase in sales possible from the project(s). With that kind of visibility to the top leadership of the organization the political persons may have no choice but to agree to play along.

In quality management, some organizations have almost completely eliminated these types of political issues by making all quality measures—at least the good ones that have gone through measurement alignment—completely transparent within the organization. Transparent means anyone in the organization can access the quality measure dashboard and view monthly results for any part of the organization. This does several things.

First it creates accountability. Transparent measures create that inherently because most managers care what others think about them and the majority also cares about performance. Because everyone can see the measures the accountability becomes automatic and there are not many political machinations that overcome that. Second, it fosters healthy competition between product or service lines. And lastly, transparent measures promote the sharing of proven practices within the organization. A manager of a product, service, or project that isn’t performing can pick up the phone or send an e-mail to another manager with high performance and find out what she is doing to achieve that performance. This type of culture takes a bit of time to develop, but it can result in great success. Check out one of the articles from our 2012 Quality Measurement study for more details.

Finally, performance is achieved through the efforts of individuals working effectively and delivering products and services. The goals of knowledge, process, and quality management should be to enable that performance, not just for one person or team, but end-to-end across the business. When leadership ignores the issues identified and solutions recommended, they are accepting inefficiencies or risks that may result in sub-optimal results. The mindset of leadership must be what is good for the business first rather than individual or local benefit.

For more information on the intersection of knowledge, process, and quality management check out:

 

For more process and knowledge management research and insights follow me on twitter at @hlykehogland or APQC’s knowledge management research specialist, Mercy Harper on twitter @mharperKM.