Business

Data-Driven Process Excellence

Process & Business Improvement Conference, London

In this article, I am sharing with you the talk I delivered about our journey in leveraging data to drive process excellence by fostering a culture of continuous improvement.

Before we begin, I’ll like to share a short story about raising our puppy for success under a completely uncertain and unpredictable situation. Being first-time dog parents, we had no idea what good or bad was in terms of her energy levels, however, being learners, we always experimented & improved. To be able to give our pup enough exercise & mental stimulation, we had to identify what her current state of activity was and identify if that was enough for her. We got her a dog tracker that tracked the amount of time she slept and pottered around. Day 1 was unpredictable, as it gave us no insights into what happened. However, once we measured her activity over a period of time and got the trends, and noticed a few patterns, and then we managed to improve her daily exercise routine. Now she has a routine that does not burn her out, and simultaneously she has enough exercise to keep her at a healthy weight.

You can’t improve, what you can’t measure — Peter Drucker

The tiny dot you see in the image below, that’s a data point. Data in itself holds no value. However, a collection of data points over a period of time shows you patterns & trends. The trend can either be constant or filled with spikes & drops depending on the events that have occurred. And once you start capturing the trends and observing patterns, you will begin to understand the context behind those trends. If you are not the individual working through the events that capture the data, then perhaps you could have conversations with people who are responsible for the data. These are the people who will help you understand the context and the stories that occur behind those data points over a span of time. Now that you’ve understood the context, you can either decide on the next steps towards improvement or speak to the key decision-makers to action some improvements.

To help our organization make better decisions, our vision as a part of the Central Tech Strategy tribe was to drive excellence and future brilliance across Tech. To achieve excellence, we had to better predictability by improving operational and business efficiency. And to do that, we had to make better decisions. And this cycle continued…

But how do we make better decisions? And what does better mean for us?

To identify ‘better’, we had to dig deeper into decision-making ability first. Based on my experience, people make decisions either by intuition or by assessing the current reality. When I’m super excited, my decisions vary compared to when I’m angry or frustrated. And later, I repent. Such is the case when we not only make decisions based on our emotions but also when it affects the lives of the people we nurture as leaders. Below, I have charted a quick summary of the data-driven decision-making ability vs intuition driven to help us understand ‘better decisions’.

Golden Perspective

Now that we have understood our goals and identified the direction we wanted to lean, we wanted to map the whole system together. And thus, I coined a term called the ‘Golden Perspective’.

The Golden Perspective is inspired by Daniel H Kim’s introduction to System Thinking — Using Levels of Perspective Framework & Simon Sinek’s — The Golden Circle.

Our ability to influence the future increases with the WHY.

We started with WHY, to live & breathe our Vision of driving Process Excellence, by reducing waste & improving efficiency.

Then we headed over to HOW, which stands on the principle of Inspect & Adapt and uses the 3 levels of the perspective framework from the System’s thinking which are Adaptive, Creative & Reflective.

Adaptive is all about experimentation in improving & learning over a period of time. We don’t change the pattern, we rather adapt to it.

Creative, because we had to avoid reinventing the wheel wherever possible and reusing the existing models/practices/processes through collaborative ways of working.

Reflective is all about questioning our assumptions and seeking feedback to ensure we are heading in the right direction.

We do not learn from our experience, we learn from reflecting on our experience. — John Dewey

And the last one is our WHAT, which is completely led by data. Situations & events in our life are highly reactive, and each reaction changes the data point of the system. Hence, we needed to understand how we can adapt to the data to drive process excellence.

So how do we drive Process Excellence?

The term process excellence means a variety of things to most of us. In a truly agile way, we brainstormed and broke it down into chunks of smaller actionable pieces that gave us enough opportunity to reflect & experiment.

If the metrics you are looking at aren’t useful in optimizing your strategy, stop looking at them. — Mark Twain

We identified the top 2 areas to focus on based on our strategy.

Data Adoption

• Identify & establish the goals.
• Identify the target audience to collaborate with.
• Understand the challenges faced by the audience. In our case, it was the fear of exhaustive data and lack of knowledge.
• Assess the Impact & Value of Driving Excellence by spreading awareness of adopting data.

We never lose, we either win or learn!

Data Quality

• For people to adopt data, we had to dig deeper to find whether it was reliable or accurate? The answer was NO. This was good feedback for us to focus our attention on improving the quality of the data.
• We did so by decentralizing Data Champions in all our Tribes.
• We also expanded our partnership beyond champions to all levels in the business.
• Once we succeed in the above, our goal is to take a step back and support the experts in driving their efficiencies.

Building more experts in the business and making ourselves redundant will be the ultimate measure of success.

Conclusion

By driving these initial goals towards excellence, we aim to leverage evidence-based decision-making by strategically determining where the improvements will add the most value to the business. And with data-led experimentation, we can set our business priorities, and evaluate our potential cost savings and waste reduction.

Measurement is not just numbers, but stories from people, like you and me.

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