Achieve and Maintain Process Excellence Buy-In with Key Stakeholders

Stakeholder buy-in continues to be the fundamental supporting pillar to a successful process excellence project. Depending on who you ask, between 60% and 70% of all process excellence projects are doomed to failure. The reasons for this are varied of course, but none is more critical to the future of your project than having stakeholder buy-in, that means executives and members of staff alike.

The importance of buy-in cannot be underestimated, and the reasons for its importance should be self-evident. To put it simply — failure to achieve buy in on any level will lead to a failure of any changes or processes you may have implemented. In order to encourage permanent change and create new working habits, stakeholders must be personally invested in what it is they are being asked to do.

Here are four techniques you can use to achieve buy-in from stakeholders to ensure that happens.

Expectations Vs. Reality

#1 — Manage and continue to monitor expectations

In the early days of your Process Excellence team, it’s imperative that you set clear and realistic expectations for what will be achieved. It’s realistic to expect push back, so perhaps it’s unrealistic to promise broad, sweeping, revolutionary changes right off the bat?

A more sensible approach would be to focus on modest deliverables in the initial months of your process initiatives. Low-hanging fruit, as we’ve seen before, is an easy approach for younger initiatives, and goes a long way to meeting expectations with fast achieved success.

Once the quick wins have been tackled, this would again be an ideal time to re-evaluate stakeholder expectations, which are very likely to have grown or possible even moved beyond the initial concerns. Following the Kano Model, expectations constantly grow and evolve over time, so in order to retain buy-in; this must be revisited at regular intervals.

#2 — Ensure you’re aligned with stakeholder objectives

The key to not just achieving, but retaining stakeholder buy-in, lies in aligning the objectives of your process initiatives with their own. Change is often an alien and uncomfortable state to be in because outcomes are often unknown. Ensure that your process improvement projects are aligned to stakeholder objectives and it becomes infinitely easier to sell them on the idea because it directly benefits them also.

For habit building, this is possibly the most important step you can take to ensure that weeks or months from now, your stakeholders are still just as heavily invested in your project as they were at the beginning.

Moreover, it’s not enough simply for a tenuous link to exist, the link must be strong enough to the core objectives of your stakeholders to maintain a level of personal investment in your projects.

#3 — Ensure ALL stakeholders are bought into the process

It’s not enough to ensure you have an executive championing your projects, you need to ensure you achieve buy-in at all levels for your projects to be a success.

As we’ve mentioned, change is often met with great resistance, and the best way to overcome that resistance is to ensure that people have a personal stake in the success of your project. This goes double for middle-management and lower level staff as they are often the ones responsible for the day-to-day implementation of the change in process.

In order for the new processes to take hold, they must be followed consistently. Deviation at any stage in the process will quickly result in all concerned reverting to old, and your process, however well intentioned, will wither and die on the vine.

#4 — Communicate early, communicate often

With each of the previous three points, it really comes down to exceptional communication skills, and the willingness to engage. This cannot be underemphasised. However simply communicating is not enough, communicating at the right time is also paramount to achieving stakeholder buy-in at all levels.

Let’s use an example. Say a friend of yours asked you to go on holiday this Summer, you might agree, thinking this is a fantastic idea. But instead of then hashing out the details, your friend replies with: “Great! I’ve booked us tickets to Portugal, booked a twin room at a nice hotel and we’re flying with Generic Airways.” How excited are you now? Sure, you might have always wanted to see Portugal, but you’re very likely put off by the fact you haven’t had any input in the planning whatsoever.

So it is with change within a company. Communicate with your stakeholders early on, and encourage and welcome their input and feedback. It all goes back to ensuring they’re personally invested in your project — the more your stakeholder feel they’ve had a hand in the decision making process, the more they are likely to take ownership once the new process or project is launched.

It’s time for a more integrated approach to process excellence!

Where process excellence professionals work more closely with functional teams to ensure the process works on the shop floor. Forward thinking companies are creating a ‘toolbox’ that marries BPM, Six Sigma and Lean tools, and applying their resources dependent upon the situation.

There is a new focus on delivering value to the customer through process excellence. Trends show a renewed effort to put the customer at the centre of process development — but how far should we take this idea and who gets to make the judgement as to what the customer wants?