Strategic Quality Management Flashcards
Problems with the Traditional MbO approach:
One way communication: In traditional MbO planning processes the communication process is one way, downwards from the manager to the subordinate, with little input from the team. This causes plans, goals and targets which can be unrealistic in execution.
Management after the fact: MbO has a particular focus on results without identification of causes as to why results have not been achieved, which means that performance gaps are rarely realised early enough to take remedial action.
Individual skills: There is a particular leaning towards skills of individual employees with little effort to improve processes, or identify cause and effect relationships between plans and results.
Failure to eliminate problems: Problems tend to be identified at local levels, which tend to be an effect of problems with processes involving many different departments. The root causes are rarely identified for corrective action and process improvement.
Failure to capture knowledge: The performance appraisal within the MbO approach tends to be carried out annually, without any knowledge or learning feedback into the organisation, to improve future planning processes.
Used as a weapon: MbO is often used as a weapon to threaten employees, by measuring individual performance against top down objectives, rather than understanding process capability.
Lacks horizontal integration: The MbO approach attempts to achieve vertical integration between layer of management , but does not effectively integrate process activity across the organisation to strategic goals.
Hoshin Kanri planning system
Five-year vision: Include draft plan by president and executives. Normally an improvement plan based on internal and external obstacles, and revision based on input from all managers on the draft plan. Enables top management to develop a revised vision that they know will produce a desired action
The one-year vision: Involves the selection of activities based on feasibility and likelihood of achieving desired results. Ideas are generated from the five-year vision, the environment and ideas based on last year’s performance. The provisional plans are rated against a selection of criteria and a decision is made on the best action plans.
Deployment to departments: Includes the selection of optimum targets and means. It focuses on the identification of key implementation items and consideration of how they can systematically accomplish the plan. The individual plans developed are evaluated using the criteria that were used for the one-year plans.
Detailed implementation: Implementation of the deployment plans. The major focus is on contingency planning. The steps to accomplish the tasks are identified and arranged in order. Things that could go wrong at each stage are listed and appropriate countermeasures selected. The aim here is to achieve a level of self-diagnosis, self-correction and visual presentation of action
Monthly diagnosis: Analysis of things that helped of hindered progress and the activities to benefit from this learning. It focuses attention on the process rather than the target and the root cause rather than the symptoms. Management problems are identified and corrective actions are systematically developed and implemented.
Presidents annual diagnosis: Review of progress to develop activities which will continue to help each manager function at their full potential. The president’s audit focuses on numerical targets, but the major focus is on the processes that underlie the results. The job of the presidents is to make sure that management in each sector of the organisation is capable. The annual audit provides that information in summary and in detail.
Why is Hoshin Kanri > MbO?
Inclusive approach to implementation. ‘Catchball’ approach allows people at all levels in the organisation to understand how the objectives affecting them are developed and linked to broader organisational objectives. Allows them to influence these objectives and how they are implemented
Linking regular audit of organisational performance to effective action, rather than using it to judge and reward as in MbO creates a more positive approach and the self assessment allows for a more honest analysis of performance and his opportunities for improvement.
The benefits to an organization of implementing ‘catchball’ over traditional approaches would be:
- The involvement of each layer of the organizational hierarchy in the development of their own goals tends to generate much more ‘buy-in’ for those goals, reducing resistance and increasing commitment.
- The discussion surrounding the process between two levels raises the understanding of not only what must be done, but why it is important throughout the organization. This will lead to behaviours which are much more closely aligned to strategic intent.
Discuss the three dimensions on which stakeholders may vary?
Which of the three is not part of the normal stakeholder analysis?
Influence: Some stakeholders are more important to the organisation than others. Those who directly affect the variability of the organisation are often given priority over others
Interest: Some stakeholders care more about the performance of an organisation than others. A University’s outcomes are likely to be of crucial interest to the students, but as long as there are no adverse community effects they may be of less interest to local government.
Focus: Not all stakeholders care about the same things. Parents may be concerned about cost, employers about relevance of the curriculum and the government about consistently high standards.
Focus is not traditionally part of stakeholder analysis
Briefly explain the concept of ‘catchball’ in the context of Hoshin Kanri.
The ‘Catchball’ process is an approach to goal setting which consists of a planning group at a given level of seniority in the organization passing the intended goals to their subordinates who then discuss the feasibility of the goals and resource issues. This is fed back to the more senior team who review the goals in the light of their own goals and constraints. The process may be
repeated until an acceptable set of goals is generated.
Discuss the weaknesses of performance appraisal in the context of improving organisational performance,
- Bias and lack of repeatability in the appraisal of individuals when done by one
person (typically their boss). - Appraisal against targets is misleading since differences could relate to the inadequacy of the target as much as to the failings of the individual.
- Teamwork is undermined by the differential rewarding of individuals for achieving personal rather than group goals. Deming suggests that performance of an individual is often largely determined by the system within which they work.
- Creates ‘players’ because of the tendency to focus only on what is being measured. Individuals may also perceive themselves as losers or become cynical regarding the fairness of the system (regardless of its actual fairness) if they receive poor ratings. This may lead to a lack of performance
- Inhibits informal communication because the boss will tend to give feedback to their subordinates in the formal but infrequent appraisal meeting. There is also no encouragement in the system to communicate with colleagues about performance.
The practice of 360 degree appraisal is often suggested to be an improvement on standard performance appraisal. Describe how this approach would address the issues with the standard appraisal.
The 360 degree system:
- Uses a variety of informants (boss, subordinate, customer, supplier) to reduce the potential for bias which is inherent in single assessor systems.
- Is focused on a variety of perspectives so that comparison to individual targets is much less important than the overall view of performance.
- This also reduces the likelihood and effectiveness of game playing.
- The wider range of informants means that communication is encouraged in all directions.
