To deliver a successful improvement programme you need four essential elements:
These will help you deliver your programme both on time and in budget.
All programmes need a purpose, ideally for S A Partners they should be the output of The organisations strategy or an Assessment. They should be converted into objectives that are easily understood by the people within the organisation. We use two simple tools to help us with this:
As leaders we need to sponsor improvement within our organisations. Create time and resources for our people to be able to deliver improvement. Show interest, coach, support mentor and instruct. Realise our people are putting themselves “out there” for us. Back them remember their success is ours. There is some great teaching in our leader programme around how to identify language choices and support styles.
If we want a high performing Programme we will need high performing People. Pick people who have the time to run programmes, who have the skills to manage resources, whilst having the energy and commitment to deliver improvement. It’s a very rare mix within individuals and will often need to be developed to create the champions for change that every organisation desires. Remember change is not easy, rarely is the road smooth, these people need to be well selected and very well supported.
Traditionally this is what programmes are all about- complicated Gantt charts with risk and issues identified. We all agree this is essential as we need something to baseline our improvement off, but if we create plans alone without purpose, sponsorship and resources all we have is a plan.
We agree and build great plans, make sure you review progress, track your benefits and not just your actions, raise the agenda of improvement, make Sustainable Continuous Improvement a key element of what we do, but remember a successful Programme needs Purpose and People to make it work.
To deliver an effective improvement programme it is important to have the right mix of skills throughout the organisation, if not there will be an imbalance leading to the programme drifting or failing.
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