Commonplace business management problems are prevalent in organizations but are often not noticed. At first glance, traditional business practices may not seem to be an issue, but low ROIs and system loss can open eyes to the fact that business management problems are present.
When one examines a business honestly, several elephant-in-the-room business management system problems will inevitably appear. The key to success is to be prepared to address these issues from an overall business management system perspective. However, even though one realizes there is a problem, there is the challenge of determining what to do differently to address these business-management issues.
Let’s first examine seventeen commonplace business management system problems that 21st-century businesses encounter and then describe what to do to resolve these issues with one business management system.
1. Traditional Metric Reporting Techniques (#1 of the Listed Business Management Problems)
Traditional metrics reporting techniques are very inefficient and ineffective. Regular business performance reports such as red-yellow-green scorecards and a table of numbers can lead to wasteful firefighting and unhealthy-organizational behaviors. Unfortunately, most businesses still use these reporting techniques, and it’s holding them back in terms of management effectiveness that leads to the best organizational behaviors.
2. Process Improvement Deployments that do not Benefit the Big Picture (#2 of the Listed Business Management Problems)
Everyone should realize that organizations need to improve, which can be a survival requirement. Because of this understanding, an organization may undertake a Lean Six Sigma or Lean process improvement deployment to improve processes.
These and other process improvement methods have been around for years; however, these deployments typically are not long-lasting in organizations. Why? Executives do not see how these process improvement program undertakings benefit the big picture’s financials.
3. Generic Executive Business Strategies (#3 of the Listed Business Management Problems)
Often organizational strategies originated from a two-day executive retreat. These created strategic statements are then cascaded for implementation throughout an organization using Hoshin Planning techniques.
Strategic statements from executive retreats often have a very generic wording that is hard for employees to get their arms around. Most of the time, these business strategies don’t work well within a business environment and have difficulty getting completed.
4. Setting Organizational Goals (#4 of the Listed Business Management Problems)
Often leadership sets monthly or quarterly organizational goals; however, this business goal setting practice can lead to very unhealthy, if not destructive behaviors.
A next-time-period-goal-setting business management policy culture can lead to organizations playing games with the numbers to make things appear better than they are. For example, to meet a next period goal, such as the number of units shipped, an organization may shift future orders into a current time to make this time-period numbers better, perhaps at a great expense from future order revenue.
5. Voice of the Customer (VOC)
Organizations often focus on using a 1 – 5 Likert scale to assess customer satisfaction. However, this type of survey does not typically provide specific insight into what to do differently to improve processes relative to better fulfilling customers’ wants, needs, and desires.
Organizations benefit if they incorporate a business management system that provides timely Voice of the Customer (VOC) feedback to improve operations.
6. Employee Accountability
Often organizations emphasize individual performance goal setting. However, creating personal performance goals without underlying processes for achieving these goals can lead to playing-games-with-the-numbers and destructive organizational behaviors.
Both management and employees need to appreciate the importance of improving local and enterprise metric performance processes so that there is consistent efficiency throughout the organization.
7. Organizational Transparency
Suppose an employee in an organization identifies a problem. This employee may be hesitant to raise the issue up-the-chain-of-management-command because of fear of a ″shoot the messenger″ possibility.
Organizations benefit when they have a business management system that encourages open and honest communication with no fear of retribution and an incorporating culture where there is an understanding that everyone in the organization is ″in this together″ so that there will be a whole-business benefit.
8. Employee Career Development
It is crucial to have a business management system that encourages employees’ utilization, so the right people are used in the organization’s best role to receive significant benefits from their work. Appropriate employee career development should occur at the right time as part of this overall system.
9. Examination of the Numbers
Often both leadership and employees are not creating and encouraging examining data and performance metrics throughout the enterprise from a process output point of view, utilizing statistics when possible to make decisions.
10. Business and Functional Area Collaboration
In a business management system, organizations are often viewed in silos and do not have a structural interconnection that all authorized can readily examine.
11. Process Documentation and Business Performance Metrics
Process documentation and the resulting performance metrics from these processes are often not adequately documented or easily found and reported.
12. Remote Work Management
Managing the work from remotely-located employees and teams is often very inconsistent between functional units and not leading to the most appropriate efforts being completed in a timely fashion at the right moment in time throughout the organization.
13. Business Analytics
Businesses often assess business analytics from a few individual-points perspective or a drill-down-into-the weeds view instead of from a high-level-process-output perspective that utilizes statistics as a structure portion of the organization’s decision-making process.
14. Business Improvement
Improvement efforts for the business do not typically collectively consider the many important aspects of a company to determine what to do differently to improve the enterprise’s financials. For example, VOC, the theory of constraints (TOC), business functional process-output metric responses, competition, economy, and internal statistical-comparison assessments should be a collective part of an organization’s decision-making process.
15. Ineffective Meetings
Organizations often have ineffective meetings and meetings that take much preparation with little, if any, benefit.
16. Employee Turnover
Employee turnover can cause the loss of talent to get jobs completed satisfactorily, especially when there is no documentation of employees’ knowledge that others could pick up the slack when key personnel leaves the organization.
17. Superman and Superwoman Syndrome
Organizations often seek to fulfill leadership and other positions, with so-called supermen or superwomen, without the understanding that an organization benefits most when they have a team-based management system that is not dependent upon the brilliance of one or a few key individuals.
Resolution to Items #1 and #2
The following video describes issues with traditional metric reporting and improvement (#1 and #2 items) and what to do to resolve the problems:
Resolving 17 Commonplace Business Management Problems
Organizations benefit when there is an orchestration of business management practices.
Businesses can accomplish this orchestration and overcome the 17 above business management system problems by implementing a 9-step Integrated Enterprise Excellence (IEE) business management system.
The novels Management 2.0: Discovery of Integrated Enterprise Excellence and Leadership System 2.0: Implementing Integrated Enterprise Excellence provide IEE details and how-to-implement techniques.
Provided also in these practitioner and manager books are:
• Free software app which provides metric response tracking information not possible using a traditional reporting approach.
• Methodology for selecting improvement projects that can provide more overall business financial benefits than a traditional project-selection approach.
• A clickable Lean Six Sigma Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control (DMAIC) process-improvement roadmap which offers all the necessary tools a practitioner might require. This DMAIC roadmap provides direction on using the right Lean or Six Sigma tool at the right time.
These books explain how traditional control charts, AQL testing, and reporting Lean Six Sigma deployments have issues and what to do about these problems. These books also provide high-level information about the benefits of wisely applied statistical, non-statistical techniques, design of experiments (DOE), and other methodologies so the business benefits.
Customer Amazon Book Page Video Testimonial
Mark Singleton provided the following Management 2.0 Amazon video testimonial about the book.
Contact Us to set up a time for a discussion on how your organization might gain much from an Integrated Enterprise Excellence Business Management system.