Setting Goals for Lean / CI / OpEx Teams
Many organizations have formed teams dedicated to the work of Lean, Continuous Improvement, OpEx, or whatever other term you prefer. These teams range from large centralized teams to distributed resources, to sole individuals. Regardless of the size and structure of the team, goals likely have to be set. While one might be tempted to explore how goals can be counterproductive, this isn’t the place for that exploration, as most organizations are firmly entrenched with a formal system of goal-setting at some level.
What are the appropriate goals for these teams? You will need to strike a balance between internal customer goals and vision-oriented goals.
When the team’s entire work output is focused on serving internal customers and helping those internal customers be more successful, your goals should be based on their goals. What is the organization trying to accomplish? Is it focused on increasing margins, improving speed, or being more agile? Alignment to what the organization needs to accomplish from a performance perspective allows you to serve those internal customers.
The other side of the balance is the ideal state. The lean team exists in part to bring the organization along its journey toward an ideal state. This includes the evolution of your systems and processes, the shaping of culture, and the building of capabilities such as problem solving. You can’t achieve this vision while jumping from problem to problem, playing organizational whack-a-mole. To maintain your trajectory toward the ideal state you need goals that focus your attention on the work of building the organization.
You must balance these two sets of goals. Consider your set of goals like a slider between 100% “customer need” focus and 100% “build the organization” focus. The extremes should be avoided. When CI teams focus entirely on internal needs, they often become very short-term focused and lose the essence of the vision. These groups frequently deteriorate to the least common denominator of their work, becoming on-demand facilitators and project managers.
Just as dangerous is being too focused on your vision at the expense of the needs of your internal customers. These teams tend to lose relevance and build too much infrastructure which increases the burden on the organization rather than helping it perform better. It is well intended but misguided in application.
Stay somewhere between 80/20 and 20/80, but where you fall on that spectrum should depend on the situation and will likely change over time. So, what kind of situations are we talking about? It requires a lot of organizational savviness to make a real determination, but several factors have an impact. One of the most important is how passionate and powerful your most senior-level support is. Another is how much transition the organization is challenged with, whether that transition is driven by an organizational change, a crisis, or even rapid growth. Consider how many advocates you have distributed within the organization, who can help bridge the gap between your vision and their needs.
A powerful variable in all of this is the relative maturity of your lean journey. A very mature lean organization (a) has full confidence in the effectiveness of its lean thinking and skills and (b) can handle the majority of the application on its own. This allows a central lean team to focus on the capability, systems, and culture that enables that maturity to sustain and grow.
The last thought to leave you with: be flexible. I have observed too many groups that get stubbornly locked into a singular strategy and fail to adjust as their situation changes.