Change Management Using PDCA–The Act Step | Operational Excellence Quick Hits

Speaker 1: (00:06)
In the last session we talked about sustainability and the PDCA cycle to help improve the organization and to be able to put in place best practices. This session we’re going to talk about the Act step of the Plan-Do-Check-Act and there’s two elements of this step. First to standardize the improvement and then next is established controls. So, standardized the improvement this is where we can gain a lot of leverage in the organization. So, what we want to look at here is the standardize the improvement element. So, when we look at standardizing the improvement we want to make sure of course we’re putting in new procedures, processes, documentation and training those people on what the new standard is so, remember in the Do step, we put in a counter measure which means we’re doing something counter to what we’ve always done. So, in this element of the standardize the improvement we got to make sure that that is solidly in place and that people are following the new process.

Speaker 1: (01:08)
So in this element, there’s two components. One is putting those new standards in place, but second, which is most important is generalizing that solution. So, when we put new standards in place, we want to modify of course existing procedures that we put in place, update flowcharts, prints, documentations and also put in our visual controls. But under the generalize the solution, we want to look to see where else we can apply this countermeasure. So, we want to take the concept of what the solution is that solved the problem or solve the issue that we’re dealing with and if we have similar processes in the organization, we want to apply the same solution to those processes. So, that’s how we get standardization, but also we don’t need to go through the whole PDCA process again, because we’ve gone through it, we’ve come up with a solution, let’s apply that solution to as many places in the organization as possible.

Speaker 1: (02:07)
And also if we have dissimilar processes that are experiencing the same undesirable effects, because we’re using cause-and-effect thinking, if we have places in the organization that see the similar symptoms, then we want to apply the same solution to that area because, if we have the same symptoms, most likely it’s the same causes and of course our countermeasure was put in place to address the causes and then also if there’s other places in the organization that experienced the same problem. So, this is where we really can leverage our process and our capacity of our employees, we don’t need to solve the same problems over and over and over again, solve it once and then generalize the solution and apply that solution to as many places as we can in the organization, then we start to see significant improvement by going through the PDCA process one time and leveraging that knowledge across the organization.