Quality & Continuous Improvement in an Age of Transformation

To say that the world has become smaller, faster, flatter, is somewhat of an understatement. Consider this:

Until little over five years ago Nokia, Research in Motion (Blackberry) and Motorola controlled over 60% of the smartphone market. Today, the once almighty Blackberry now has a paltry 2.9% of the smartphone market and Nokia, having joined focuses with Microsoft has just over 3.2%, (Q1 2013). And in a sign of just how quickly a company’s fortunes can change, the number of users with phones working on Android operating systems has grown by nearly 80% in the last year alone (from 59.1% in Q1 2012 to 75% today).

Emerging technologies, globalization, and a half decade old economic crisis whose reverberations continue to be felt today mean that change seems to be coming at us fast and furious. This means that companies must frequently adapt and evolve their business and operating models. But sometimes gradual evolution is not enough. Today, there has never been a greater need for more radical transformation, more often.

We’ve seen, for instance, whole industries transformed by digital technology. Ten years ago, few in the music industry would have predicted the impact that a couple computer nerds working at a company named after a fruit would have on their industry. The book publishing industry is today going through the same transformation.

Quality and continuous improvement approaches grew up in the twentieth century. The era of mass manufacturing required rigorous, methodical approaches to ensure predictable outcomes on safety and quality. The pursuit of continuous improvement became codified as a set of management practices first embodied by the Toyota Production System and then Lean manufacturing. The main principle behind continuous improvement was that small, incremental changes would yield massive results over time.

Those practices are still valid today and have since spread beyond the borders of manufacturing companies to just about every industry on the planet. But at a time when just about everything is in flux, what can quality and continuous improvement do to better support the business transformation agenda?

In this discussion, Vince Pierce, Senior Vice-President of Global Business Transformation at Office Depot, Estelle Clark, Business Assurance Director at Lloyd’s Register and Gregory North, Vice-President at Xerox Corporate Lean Six Sigma and Business Transformation discuss where they see quality and continuous improvement heading in today’s era of transformative change.

“Continuous improvement is a mindset. It’s more of a verb. It is an activity that happens pervasively in the business everywhere we go.” — Vince Pierce, SVP Global Business Transformation, Office Depot

HOW WOULD YOU DEFINE QUALITY, CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT AND TRANSFORMATION?

Vince Pierce, Senior Vice President Global Business Transformation, Office Depot: I define the concepts of quality, continuous improvement, and transformation very differently. I’ll start with continuous improvement: it is incremental in nature — it’s not breakthrough — and it should be pervasive in nature. I tend to think of local, autonomous improvement, where every process gets improved every day, very, very tactically. These are small improvements, small barriers, small countermeasures that, over time, accumulate and make a heck of a difference to an organization. Continuous improvement is a mindset. It’s more of a verb. It is an activity that happens pervasively in the business everywhere we go.

This is in contrast to transformation, which is breakthrough in nature. Although I believe you can apply transformation at multiple levels to an enterprise, a division of a business or even a process, for me, transformation always has some element of strategy, people, process and technology.

My definition of quality is very focused on the quality aspects of a product or service, whether it be accuracy or quality of craftsmanship. I tend to think of quality as how well do we do it? Or how well do we make something?

Estelle Clark, Business Assurance Director at Lloyd’s Register: For me, quality is about something that’s organization-wide; it’s an organization-wide approach to understanding precisely what your customers need and then being able to regularly — that’s consistently — deliver those solutions within budget, on time and, increasingly in today’s world, I think, that quality also needs to encompass “minimum loss to society”. There’s a sustainability obligation there also, in relation to quality.

I agree with what Vince has said in relation to transformation and continuous improvement. But one more thought from me on continuous improvement: I think that continuous improvement is largely about culture. It’s about making sure that everyone in the organization understands that they have the ability and an obligation to look for changes and things that may improve things day by day. This is incremental, for sure. But the person closest to the work needs to understand that this responsibility [for continuous improvement] is a key part of their job.

Gregory North, Vice President Lean Six Sigma, Xerox: I’m responsible and have the privilege of working within the Xerox Corporation, globally. To really help define what we need for competencies in our corporation to drive quality and continuous improvement and then enable those competencies at all levels across all our businesses. It’s an exciting place to be, Xerox is in the process of a very public transformation; moving from a strong, innovative technology leader, to one that is a services-led technology-driven business. That means our very business model and our offering is in transformation and as a result everything we do in the corporation, from a whole-scale change in our offering to a change in the way we think about delivering that offering is, in a sense, up for grabs.

It’s a sweet spot for the area of thinking about our business from a quality and continuous improvement standpoint, in that, really, process is at the center of what we’re doing. Our work here at Xerox is designed to help our leadership team and our employees across the corporation make that journey successfully.

“What do we do to meet the challenge of net speed? Moving as fast as the market is moving? […] I think it’s up to the quality industry and the continuous improvement industry to be able to change and, ultimately, take advantage of, and drive those waves going forward.” — Gregory North, Vice President Corporate Lean Six Sigma, Xerox

DO YOU THINK THAT QUALITY AND CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT HAVE AN IMAGE PROBLEM? WHY OR WHY NOT?

Estelle Clark, Business Assurance Director at Lloyd’s Register I think there is an image problem, particularly for quality professionals. I’ve been in this field for quite some time and I think that one of the problems is that quality can sometimes be thought of as being something that prevents change from happening, rather than something that supports it.

If you think about quality purely in a compliance sense meaning that anything that deviates from the documented system is, by definition, a noncompliance (and therefore needs to be stamped out) then you get yourself into this way of thinking, that if you want change, you want continuous improvement and if you want transformation, you need to go somewhere else to find it.

I think it’s getting worse, to a degree, because all of the brand new roles that have come in relation to IT. I’m sure we’ll touch on it later, but things like a Chief Process Officer and some other terms, are being sponsored, largely, by IS organizations. The idea is that IS is sexy whereas quality is just about business as usual and not change. I fundamentally disagree, but I do believe that there’s an issue.

Gregory North, Vice President Lean Six Sigma, Xerox: I completely agree with Estelle’s point, that we do have an image problem in, what I would call, generally, the quality industry. Let’s stick with that idea of what’s sexy and what’s not.

Let’s think of it in terms of product, life-cycle and brand. Bringing it home to Xerox, we’ve had a history of quality over the years. Quality leadership was a program that was in place in the 80s. There was a Xerox-wide quality problem solving process in the 80s and 90s, a leadership management model that was used in the 90s. Later on, Lean Six Sigma was introduced in 2003, and so the arc of that shows a quality journey, if you will, from the vantage point of the Xerox employee and our customers. But like any other product and brand, we have to continuously refresh it.

This gets back to this question: is it cogent for the times? Do you bring forward, out of the past, what is most important or successful? For instance, do we need the things like the quality basics Estelle was just mentioning — the rigor of quality management systems and controls?

Those were needed and important 30 years ago, 20 years ago, and they’re needed today. But in addition to that, what do we do to meet the challenge of net speed? Moving as fast as the market is moving? Moving as innovatively as our customers require us to move? And that’s where the constant transformation really comes in and I think it’s up to the quality industry and the continuous improvement industry to be able to change and, ultimately, take advantage of, and drive those waves going forward.

For example, we’ve introduced Lean Six Sigma 2.0 over the last 18 months at Xerox and that is a reboot, from our standpoint. It’s a way of looking at the fundamental truths in Lean and Six Sigma, but approaching them through a much more pragmatic, much more business focused, wellaligned to the top and rapid rate of improvement manifestation and that requires all of our quality professionals world-wide to, first, up the bar in themselves and perform at a better, faster level. It also ups the bar in the business, in terms of the expectations for what this can deliver. We see this as a journey, we also see it as a continuous need to press on ourselves, to transform and change, so we can help change the business.

Vince Pierce, Senior Vice President Global Business Transformation, Office Depot: I agree with both Estelle and Greg, so I’ll try to come at this from a little bit of a different angle.

I would say we’ve got two challenges in this space: first, there seems to be an evolution of terminology with very similar operating definitions. So, back in the early 90s, I was part of a quality group. But I don’t use that terminology much these days. Quality management or quality assurance — quality looked at the world from a management system. Fast forward to today and people that focus primarily on Lean also see Lean as a management system.

Sometimes we use the term, continuous improvement to mean much more than incremental, so I think one challenge with our industry is do we call it process excellence? Do we call it continuous improvement? Quality? Lean Six Sigma? Do we mean the same things? Are they all different? Part of a larger construct? So, I think we do ourselves a disservice in not having clear, standardized definitions for what we mean when we say these things.

It was a little bit difficult for me to answer, for instance, how I define quality. That’s because I can define it a number of ways. It depends on whether I think of it as a system such as in those earlier days or if I think of it tactically around a product or a service.

The second challenge we have is around our professionals in the space. I’ll call it process excellence, which is a term I use for the broader portfolio of things. I think there is a prevalent risk or issue that some of our professionals — particularly those in the younger generation that are learning the ins and outs of these principles and concepts — sometimes aren’t very relevant to the business leaders they’re working with. We try to focus on the tools and the concepts of quality, continuous process excellence and sometimes have a hard time connecting that to, ‘so how do we drive the business? How do we use those concepts and that thinking to reshape the business model or the operating model in the company?’

I think when we talk about transformation, it’s important for us to acknowledge that it goes well beyond just process excellence. That’s why a lot of folks that have spent ten, 15, 20 years doing continuous improvement, quality and process excellence, sometimes struggle in the transformational space — there’s so many other things that have to be contemplated and addressed in a transformational piece of work.

I think as we struggle it can create an image in the mind of the executive, in my opinion, that we will look towards continuous improvement when all is well and we move things forward on a more incremental, slow pace. But when it’s time to transform the business or achieve a major objective that’s a radical departure from today, they turn towards consultants and other methodologies.

“We need to help surface individuals who are very good at double clicking out until they see the macro business picture — not just within the four walls of our corporation — but also across the silos of companies into alliances; upstream and downstream of our business, looking to our customer space and our customer’s customer space.” — Gregory North, VP Lean Six Sigma, Xerox Corporation

WHAT IMPACT IS THE RAPID PACE OF CHANGE HAVING ON APPROACHES TO QUALITY AND CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT?

Gregory North, Vice President Lean Six Sigma, Xerox: We can’t bring the same tools to a different game. If you we go into a net speed world where we’re also dealing with ERP implementations and wholescale changes in global processes, which often is suffused with IT organizations, major investment strategies, and consultants brought in from the outside to provide guidance. If that’s the new game we’re in, we need to bring to that match something that amounts to a different lens and a different set of skills and competencies.

I think that means that we need to help surface individuals who are very good at double clicking out until they see the macro business picture — not just within the four walls of our corporation — but also across the silos of companies into alliances; upstream and downstream of our business, looking to our customer space and our customer’s customer space.

In addition to that, the sense here is that process design and optimization on a grand scale is a more important skill-set than some of the detailed and rigorous process analysis that, for example, Lean Six Sigma has been famous for over the years. It’s really now, more about crafting a big picture of what can be accomplished with a blank sheet of paper and then being able to operationalize that through extremely successful global program management. I would say those are the new competencies we’re trying to, both surface within our existing talent pool, and bring in from outside.

Estelle Clark, Business Assurance Director at Lloyd’s Register I agree on a number of points. To pick up on a couple: for me, global program management is really key. I remember a time when you did a project and then you started off another project. You might have had some working in parallel, but they probably weren’t operating in the same space, so that you had some distinction between the things that you were trying to change.

Now, I don’t know of any organization that’s not having a transformation portfolio and many of the things that are happening are operating in ways where the project or changes are interrelated. You need to be able to have people managing this who understand those interrelationships, because we can’t afford the time to run everything serially, so we have to learn how to do it in parallel.

We also need people who are able to pick up on the fact that everything’s faster, whilst also picking up on the fact that everything needs to link to strategy. The sorts of people you need to be having in your system need to be able to make that strategic link and not actually just think that they’re making some potential small-scale changes.

I think that some of the speed of change and things that are happening in the world at the moment, make people feel that they’re out of control. They feel that there are lots of things that are happening — black swan type events — which people weren’t able to predict.

One of the reactions to that, typically, is more compliance and more regulation — the desire for society to actually put in place more rules. Typically, the quality management system is one of the places, where the rules get described, in order to make sure that the organization remains legal.

I know that in my particular role, on one hand, I’m trying to do things faster, I’m trying to do more things and I’m trying to link all these things together. On the other hand, there’s just a huge, huge, huge influx of new rules and regulations to take account of that actually work completely contrary to what you’re trying to do through transformation. It really is quite a tricky balancing act.

Vince Pierce, Senior Vice President Global Business Transformation, Office Depot: I think the point is that business is changing and it’s changing quickly and it’s enabled, primarily, by technology. But consumer behavior is shifting, things are becoming distributed, much more connected and social is a big part of what we do today.

I think the impact those elements have on process excellence is that they are forcing us to be able to apply a set of universal principles. The things we do in our profession are not limited to transactional environments or manufacturing environments. The thinking that we go through, the ways we approach the work, the tools that we use, I think, we all agree, are universal.

The challenge is going to be, can we apply those concepts and tools in relevant ways as the world around us changes? I think that’s where we really struggle. I think this is where we’ve got to go beyond training in the methodologies and the concepts. I think we need a broader skill-set for our process excellence professionals today. More utility players, if you will.

Aside from functional domain knowledge and expertise, like supply chain or financial services, we need to think about business acumen. Estelle mentioned program management and to that I would also add change management, a baseline level of technology acumen, facilitation skills, coaching skills, the ability to talk about strategy, to understand what a business model is and how to apply the A3 thinking, for example. You also need to apply basic PDCA thinking to how you would engage and contribute in architecting a new business model, or how you would engage in organization design, competency modeling, or technology requirements.

Our thinking and our tools apply, it’s just applying them in a new context, which requires a baseline level of understanding across a number of dimensions.

“If you do the transformation thing, but you don’t do the culture of continuous improvement piece, it’s very disempowering. It’s like saying to your employee base, ‘attention everyone, we’re improving the company; we’ll let you know when we’re finished.’ That’s not the message, obviously, that corporations want to send.” — Gregory North, Vice President Corporate Lean Six Sigma, Xerox

CAN YOU CONDUCT CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT & TRANSFORMATION INITIATIVES AT THE SAME TIME?

Estelle Clark, Business Assurance Director at Lloyd’s Register I think that there need to be occasions in which you do distinguish between continuous improvement and transformational change. If you’re making a significant transformational change, for instance, I think you ought to freeze continuous improvement and not do it at the time of the change. However, I think we’ve all been in situations where we’ve been told that a transformational change was going to be happening in the next 12, 18, 24 months, and actually, in reality, it’s taken even longer. You can’t afford to hold up continuous improvement for that long, so I do think you need to be continually improving until such a point, in order to keep things up to date and as relevant as possible. There are also the cultural benefits of involving people in change.

But I think you need to be bringing continuous improvement back very soon after some significant change. That’s partly because there’s likely to be things that haven’t actually been implemented in the mainstream of the change (because it’s been trying to deliver to a deadline and there’s stuff that’s just got moved into business as usual) but also because following the change you do make sure that you maximize your investment and you keep the change current by applying continuous improvement as soon as you possibly can.

I would also use continuous improvement in the whole plethora of things that are going on that aren’t part of the transformation. I don’t know any organization that’s transforming absolutely everything. I think if you were changing more than 25 or 30% of stuff that’s going on, you probably need your head examined.

So, the rest of the world and the rest of the people need to have the opportunity to keep everything continually improving. The danger is, of course, that the transformation is thought of as being the sexy place and it’s the only thing that anything gets talked about and the rest of the world is the Cinderella.

Vince Pierce, Senior Vice President Global Business Transformation, Office Depot: Assuming continuous improvement is part of the culture, you would expect that to take place even in the areas that are being transformed. The assumption is that we’re not stopping production in whatever environment you’re in; the work still continues.

If you’ve got a culture of continuous improvement and you’ve got some fundamentals in place people can continue to do work and improve in the context of a process, while things are transforming. Unless the change is being implemented at a particular time in a particular area, people are still doing things. If you have the fundamentals in place — you’re doing daily huddles, for example, or you’re looking at yesterday’s performance and things that got in the way, that need to be removed through a set of countermeasures — I would expect that to continue.

I probably wouldn’t introduce continuous improvement as something new in an area that I’m transforming. Assuming it’s there, though, I wouldn’t want them to stop when we’re off trying to figure out what the changes are. Even if those folks are involved when they go back in running production, I would expect them to be operating those fundamentals.

How we position continuous improvement in our transformation framework here at Office Depot is in the sustain phase, so we ensure that the culture of continuous improvement and the fundamentals that we use to operate it are reinforced at the end of the transformation if they existed before we got there and if not, we’ve got that culture and we’ve go those fundamentals in place, so we can hold the transformed state. Continuous improvement is absolutely a part of it and how much of it we do, during the transformation, depends on the state of the operation being transformed before we got there.

Gregory North, Vice President Lean Six Sigma, Xerox: I would put it slightly differently. If you’re making a major change in a given, space you’ve got to be very careful about introducing new concepts, or even, perhaps, putting some on hold existing ones, to make sure that you allow adequate mind-share to drive the change you’re looking for.

The way we think about it in Xerox now, and the way we talk about it is that in Lean Six Sigma 2.0, we have a pyramid. The pyramid has a foundation or base, which is the culture of the corporation. That’s where we talk about the culture of continuous improvement — innovation — that we want our employees, everyday, to be thinking about ways to lean out and ways to add new value.

Above that level of culture, there are processes that go across the company. We want those to be designed in a robust, lean way, but we want to continuously optimize. That’s where our master black belts and green belts around the world are working to break down functional silos and optimize them and ultimately, improve our game on a month by month, quarter by quarter basis.

Then, once again, going up to the capstone of the pyramid, think of it in terms of the cycle of years and strategy versus months.

This is not where projects occur, this is where programs occur, and in that business transformation space, leaders are charting a vision for the future that translates into strategy; that’s where we make investments in people, process and technology, as Vince said earlier.

Ultimately, corporations have sometimes failed when they’ve looked at any one of these as being sufficient. If you do, for example, the transformation thing, but you don’t do the culture of continuous improvement piece, it’s very disempowering. It’s like saying to your employee base, “attention everyone, we’re improving the company; we’ll let you know when we’re finished.” That’s not the message, obviously, that corporations want to send.

Similarly, not every change effort has to be a large transformational program. Some things can be done well and quickly. You want to drive that speed with local control and local optimization. From our perspective, what’s exciting about the times we’re in, is that not one of these things becomes less relevant. Continuous improvement is never more important than it is today because it gives every employee in every customer interaction a chance to improve. That’s the rate of change our customers are looking for.

“The opportunities that IS can now provide to fundamentally transform businesses — transform with a big T — is such, that you really need their input about the art of the possible, fairly early on before you go to do too much process work, otherwise, you’ll find that you might be missing something significant.” — Estelle Clark — Business Assurance Director, Lloyd’s Register

WHAT ROLE DOES, OR SHOULD, INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY PLAY IN ENABLING YOUR CONTINUING IMPROVEMENT INITIATIVES? DO YOU REQUIRE MORE THAN A BASELINE UNDERSTANDING OF TECHNOLOGY?

Vince Pierce, Senior Vice President Global Business Transformation, Office Depot: In some areas, I’d say that you do require more than a baseline understanding. In others areas, though, I’d say not necessarily. The role I play, quite often, is one of the village idiot. Disclosing that I don’t have a ton of domain expertise gives me a license to ask questions that challenge assumptions sometimes. Other times, knowledge of the area is very helpful, so it really is, at least, in my opinion, situational — it depends on the context and on what you’re trying to accomplish. Are you there to understand? Are you there to influence? Depending on what you’re trying to accomplish there are different approaches you can take. The amount of domain knowledge you need will depend on a lot of those factors.

Gregory North, Vice President Lean Six Sigma, Xerox: Our Chief Information Officer, Carol Zierhoffer, and I work very closely together, to make sure we understand how process and technology go hand in hand. IT is often looking for an angle into the business to truly understand what the expectation is from the strategy and the business process design standpoint. Sometimes major technology change programs are gated by a lack of sufficient understanding in those areas. They feel like they’re trying to, if you will, drive it from an IT center, versus a business center and we -in our world of business process management of quality and continuous improvement — have been, swimming in that sea forever of trying to make sure processes are well-defined and then later coming to technology.

By bringing those two worlds together upfront, there’s a tremendous amount of power. Right now, we’re looking at global process design, global process ownership and then global IT enablement. The sequencing is very important there, in that if you don’t have a global sense of who owns it and how to design it, it’s very, very difficult later, to think about what the appropriate technology enablement is. So, we see this as being extraordinarily important to see it as a partnership.

Vince Pierce: I think Greg brings up a really good point and I’d like to revise my earlier response. In a lot of IT projects — from ERP implementation down to minor enhancements — a common challenge I hear from IT is, we don’t have the right level of investment on the side of the business. They don’t invest the time in understanding requirements, they don’t take the time to describe exactly what they need and the engagement is less than they desire.

We have to do more of that role on behalf of the business. Folks in our profession have the ability to serve as a facilitator between the two sides, to make sure we’ve got all the bits and pieces in the right spot. It is less about one’s ability to understand and explain the value of the service oriented architecture, an agile, versus waterfall SDLC, as it is influencing both sides to understand each other and to talk about things like process ownership, roles and responsibilities, the value of spending time, understanding requirements, doing the right functional design. Those are more interpersonal influencing skills than they are technology acumen or domain expertise related skills.

Estelle Clark, Business Assurance Director at Lloyd’s Register Firstly, I also feel joined at the hip with the IS director and if I thought back five years ago, I don’t think that was the case. Now, there’s hardly a conversation that either of us has, that doesn’t involve the other one. I think, in terms of speaking their language, yes, you need to, to a degree, although I like the idea of being a village idiot; I think of myself, sometimes, as Forrest Gump for the same reason. But, IS also need to have our language and sometimes, I feel that they could do more in making efforts towards that.

I used to worry quite a lot about the IS tail “wagging the process dog.” There’s the risk that people thinks that all we need to do is to find an IS solution, without fully understanding the business requirements and process needs first.

However, increasingly, I find myself changing my mind. As much as there’s a concern about the IS tail wagging the process dog, there are times when we shouldn’t have the process tail wagging the IS dog, in the sense that the opportunities that IS can now provide to fundamentally transform businesses — transform with a big T — is such, that you really need their input about the art of the possible, fairly early on before you go to do too much process work. Otherwise, you’ll find that you might be missing something significant.

“The thoughtful contemplation and design of how we work together — defining ways of working, ground rules, rules of engagement, etc. — cannot be underestimated. Ensuring proper governance cannot be underestimated.” — Vince Pierce, SVP Global Business Transformation, Office Depot

WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON BRIDGING THE IT/BUSINESS DIVIDE? DOES PROCESS EXCELLENCE SIT IN THE MIDDLE?

Vince Pierce, Senior Vice President Global Business Transformation, Office Depot: Putting process excellence between IT and the business routes their relationship through an unnecessary stop so I’d prefer to think of it a working relationship between multiple parties. It’s not just one area of the business — it’s probably crossfunctionally several areas of the business working with IT and working with the process excellence folks. The thoughtful contemplation and design of how we work together — defining ways of working, ground rules, rules of engagement, etc. — cannot be underestimated. Ensuring proper governance cannot be underestimated.

Anyone that’s led a large-scale change, whether it’s transformational with a big T or a little t, knows the importance of governance. Without governance, it often leads to chaos. So, it’s important to think about the guiding principles that govern the relationship. How do we best work together? How do we make decisions? Who makes what decisions? If these questions are not answered, it sometimes gets tricky.

We use, for example, a rapid matrix, which is a form of RACI. It clearly defines the decision-maker. Who provides the counsel? The advice? The insight? Asks the questions? Ultimately, who makes the decision? This needs to be clearly understood before we get into the throes of decision-making. Then it’s about asking question like this: How do we get to a win/win? How do we make decisions? Who gets involved? When do people not get involved? If you think those questions through, the actual doing gets lubricated and it just, kind of, works.

I’ve found that when I haven’t invested the time to do that or I couldn’t influence people to see the value in it, we’ve struggled. So it’s a pay me now or pay me later proposition, in my opinion.

Estelle Clark, Business Assurance Director at Lloyd’s Register I do think that there’s a role for process folks to do some translation. As Vince said, obviously, you don’t want to slow things down and sit between anyone. I know that in the organization I’m part of, myself and my colleagues are quite often used as almost, if you like, as a sounding board; a sanity check about whether the IT guys gone too “gung ho” in terms of some of their thoughts. I do expect though to be able to be adequately skilled, in terms of our understanding in IS, to be able to perform that role. The people I find that I employ tend to like to do that too.

Gregory North, Vice President Lean Six Sigma, Xerox: Companies often bring in consultants to help do this work of bridging the IT/business divide and there are corporations that are really good at that. I think one of the things that we have to do in the process excellence community is to learn from that and understand that there is a role to play to facilitate this conversation. One of the things that we can do is understand that an expectation, to some extent, of IT and the business is that there will be a process framework, in which, we’re operating on a global basis or on a regional basis depending on how you might be set up as a corporation. One of the things we have to do as a community is make sure we fully understand our role in helping to create and continue to improve the process framework.

“I think the organization that I work for is often surprised that I seem to have a bunch of people who can make things happen successfully. If the organization thinks that that’s a miracle and don’t understand that we use some tools to achieve what we do, I really don’t mind as long as they keep work coming our way.” — Estelle Clark, Business Assurance Director, Lloyd’s Register

WHERE DO YOU SEE LEAN SIX SIGMA HEADED? DO YOU THINK MORE FIRMS WILL RELY ON LEAN SIX SIGMA?

Gregory North, Vice President Lean Six Sigma, Xerox: My sense is that we change the terminology a lot, decade to decade. I go back to Juran and quality management systems and then the introduction of Lean and Six Sigma. I think what we have to do is to be open and willing to be less adherent to labels and more focused on capabilities and competencies. I think, as long as we do that, we need to understand that while some things will always be true new things will always have to be brought in, learned and deployed.

Vince Pierce, Senior Vice President Global Business Transformation, Office Depot: I tend to shy away from locking into specific methodologies, so I just use the term process excellence. The definition we’ve got here is that it encompasses everything in the space that’s relevant to drive improvement in our business. That’s Lean, that’s Six Sigma, that’s old school TQM — and more. Trying to distinguish the bits and pieces on which one is better, to me, is just not a value-adding discussion.

I think we still will use Lean Six Sigma in the market place. But look at the title of the forum that we’re talking in — Process Excellence Network. This isn’t the global Lean Six Sigma network…as process excellence, we invite everyone from the various disciplines under that umbrella to the discussion, and it’s always a good one. So I agree with Greg; the importance of labels is somewhat misplaced sometimes and it is about the competencies and ultimately, it’s about improving the business.

Estelle Clark, Business Assurance Director at Lloyd’s Register I also don’t use the labels Lean Six Sigma, Lean, and others. I think the organization that I work for is often surprised that I seem to have a bunch of people who can make things happen successfully. If the organization thinks that that’s a miracle and don’t understand that we use some tools to achieve what we do, I really don’t mind as long as they keep work coming our way.

However, I do think that we do need to make sure that use all the tools that we have learnt. Some of the quality tools go back many, many generations. And it’s important to add to them. We must add new capabilities that mean that we can link strategy and understand the business operating model and the much bigger picture and the new capability of being able to run multiple programs and projects together, in order to fuel the transformation agenda.