Do you know

• who is working currently working on business improvement in your organization?
• how much time these people spend on it?
• if their ideas are aligned with the overall strategy?
• who is working on tasks that other departments are already addressing?
• if the time is well spent and will pay back?
• the total costs of business improvement activities in your organization and the expected benefits?

It’s natural that good middle managers have good ideas and try to implement improvements that will benefit the company. But these managers would be surprised how much more efficient their changes could be if they were part of an overall plan - a framework that ensures that all improvement activities will be aligned to the overall company strategy and will indeed add large value to the business.

The tool to align all improvement tasks, ensure that the staff spends it’s time on really important tasks and understand cost benefits aspects of change efforts is the Business Improvement MasterPlan:

The Business Improvement MasterPlan shows at any given point in time who is working on which change activity. It shows dependencies between activities and total required resources. It helps identify if there is any scope conflicts or redundancies between different groups of people working on similar tasks.

If you do your first MasterPlan in your organization you would be surprised how large it will be. This is the initial sign how much potential for improvement you have. Knowing all tasks that are currently conducted by different people you can sit down and group similar tasks together and define larger projects. The advantage is larger projects is that they are easier to manage and control. Instead of let’s say 100 people working on 200 tasks you can have 10 people working on 20 projects. This consolidation brings lots of advantages that we will describe in later articles.

How do you develop the MasterPlan?

Have somebody who knows your organization well with experience in many fields interview all parts of the organization and identify current business improvement activities. The goal is to get a good estimate of required resources, duration, dependencies on other initiatives costs and benefits of each activity. Then add all information in a Microsoft Project document. Add also larger initiatives such as re-organizations or SAP implementations.

After you got an overview over all activities, you need to clean up the plan, i.e. assess scope effectiveness, conflicts and redundancies. Where can we consolidate activities, where can we redefine the scope, where can we prioritize or align better to the overall business strategy and so on.

This clean up step is the most important step as you will be able to ensure that all efforts really add value to the business. The prioritization exercise often leads to quite a wake up call for organizations. Executives are surprised how many activities are conducted with lack of knowledge of the overall objectives of the company.

The Business Improvement MasterPlan is not a static document. You need to make somebody responsible to update it frequently. This will also be your main tool to plan new initiatives. The next article will show how new improvement ideas will be prioritized and find it’s place in the MasterPlan.