• Establishing a Quarterly Improvement Cadence: to track progress against strategic goals, structure training and coaching to drive the improvement glide path and develop capabilities through practical activity. This sets the heart beat for improvement programme governance as part of the performance management routine to ratchet up performance by managing:

  • Transitions in roles and responsibilities and the development of capabilities to deliver those new roles,

  • Actions to enhance measurement and analysis precision to surface and deal with design weaknesses and optimise operational capability,

  • Recognition of teams and individual success to reinforce the proactive culture and provide clear role models for

• Creating a Culture of Ownership: . Allocating cross functional core teams to critical assets and problem hot spots as a vehicle to deliver improved performance and develop capabilities through practical projects that:

  • Transition support roles from “policing” processes to enabling front line teams to take ownership of:

    • Setting of Critical Parameters: Documentation of policy standards based on lessons learned,

    • Deployment of enhanced work routines and workplace organisation protocols,

    • Standardisation and problem prevention,

• Nurturing an Improvement Leader Network of Team Leaders, support functions and specialists across the organisation to act as catalysts, embedding the mindset of continuous improvement across the organisation covering:

  • Scheduling to progress from functional to cross functional to dynamic scheduling

  • Collaboration to align improvement priorities and support task transfer.

  • Data analysis and decision support re set up, error prevention, reduction on planned interventions to create a glidepath to optimum conditions.

Making it Happen

Phase 1: Preparation

Start with a diagnostic of current status and use the assessment report to set the agenda for a plan the plan session involving cross functional leaders in:

• Actions to deal with immediate priorities

• Evaluation of business drivers, definition of future vision and a realistic and achievable plan for the next 12 months.

Defining a robust future business vision is less about wordsmithing a slogan and more about gaining insights into how to set the future customer agenda. In the first year of a programme, it is usually necessary for business leaders to evaluate options to identify winning options over time. Where a site is part of a larger organisation this can involve pitching for new products or investment opportunities.

Ideally, these actions are carried out in parallel with front line and middle management actions to deal with immediate priorities. That way, next years business plan can include experience of delivering the foundations for deliver of revised strategic goals.

Phase 2: Use a Pilot Project as the first cycle to learn how to establish a TPM centre of excellence.

The quarterly cycle has 3 Leadership touch points linked to the monthly Performance Management review process. These are

• Beginning of Month 1: Mobilisation of improvement team, including training and the timetable for core team and area leadership actions,

• Mid Month 2 Mid cycle review: to review insights gained in the first 6 weeks, capture lessons learned and agree actions to remove barriers to improvement and lock in improvement gains.

• Month 3 Feedback: To share lessons learned, provide recognition and kick off the next improvement cycle.

Phase 3: Quarterly review

This involves an assessment of team progress against Team Review and Coaching (TRaC) benchmarks agreed at the start of the cycle. That combined with performance management metrics creates a leading indicator that links behavioural outlook with bottom line business results.

Find out how our training, facilitation and coaching support can help you organisation to deliver those gains as part of your current or future improvement programme.

Maintain Improvement Gains

One of the most common reasons why improvement gains are not sustained is a lack of joined up Performance Management Processes. The missing link means that once the short term pain of immediate failures has been dealt with, the performance management radar shifts attention towards a fresh issue.

In contrast, successful organisations adopt a joined up approach to systematic improvement as part of their Performance Management Process. That means investing time to improve processes that are already working to expose and deal with deeper, systemic issues that hinder improvement.

The outcome is a commitment to make progress past short-term wins and embed improvement into the very fabric of the organisation by: