What's in a Name?

Continuous performance improvement programs can increase productivity measurements such as revenue per employee by 5 to 10 % year-after-year. This is easy money. Enterprises can choose to drop this money to the bottom line or reinvest it for growth.

It is also easy money to find. The way most enterprises add new business processes, technologies, and organizational structures is literally with bailing wire and bubble gum. With the right focus and the right expertise, the low hanging fruit of performance improvement is easy to pick off. Then as the organization gains in expertise, ways are discovered to continuously squeeze out another 5 to 10% next year. But if it’s so easy, why aren’t more organizations successfully achieving these results?

The biggest danger to the success of a continuous performance improvement program is not the lack of opportunities, or the lack of expertise. It is a lack of focus. If there isn’t a continuous improvement program, there’s an obvious lack of focus. But the existence of a performance improvement program does not mean the focus is correct.

Ask the participants of your continuous performance improvement program to state its objectives. What would they say? Would they talk about cutting costs? Or would they say the objective of a process improvement program is to improve business processes? Would they mention increased customer satisfaction? Or would they say the objective of a six sigma program is to reduce process variation to a six sigma level?

In many improvement programs the focus turns away from the program’s objectives to the program itself. The villain behind this is usually the name of the program. Continuous performance programs start out with the right objectives; the launch slides contain all the right words: increase revenue, or margins, or employee or customer satisfaction. But soon everyone starts referring to the process improvement program or the six sigma program.

With time the original presentation slides are forgotten. The focus shifts away from the program’s stated objectives to the objective implied by its name. The program becomes its own reason for being. There is a simple solution to this problem. Name the program after the primary objective. Then while continuously improving performance, don’t forget to continually improve the name.