The Six Roles of an Internal Continuous Improvement Organization
Imagine that you are the leader of a business unit and your team is trying to close a gap in performance (think: product quality, customer satisfaction, unit cost, etc. — your choice). The team is struggling to develop a course of action — perhaps due to resource constraints, competing views on what the problem is or even lack of experience in how to address it.
You decide that you need help.
As you turn to your company’s internal Continuous Improvement (CI) organization, expecting them to provide advisory services to help frame the challenge and facilitation resources to develop a plan, you discover they are only set up to provide access to their online tool set.
The customer, in this case, will feel their needs aren’t being met. They will likely accuse the CI group of being “useless” and look for solutions elsewhere. The CI group will, in turn, find itself frustrated that it can’t get any cooperation from the business as it seeks to find traction and “pull” from the organization for its well-curated collection of tools and associated training materials.
To paraphrase the great anthropologist Margaret Mead:
What internal continuous improvement groups say, what they do and what they say they do are entirely different things.
Is your internal CI group a “Norman Door”?
There needs to be alignment of expectations between the role(s) customers expect their internal CI organization to perform and the ones they actually play. Failure to do this will leave the customer feeling as though they have encountered a Norman Door (think of a door with a handle suggesting you pull to open it when actually you need to push) — with all the associated frustration.
In order to increase clarity and alignment on roles, CI leaders must enter into a dialogue with their customers and other stakeholders and establish their needs, desired outcomes and the roles CI can play in helping to meet them.
Six Roles of an Internal Continuous Improvement Organization
Below is a framework that CI leaders can use as they work with their change agents to establish the role of CI in helping business teams pursue improvement and innovation opportunities.
Internal CI organizations can perform roles based primarily around their access to intellectual capital or their ability to provide talented resources who can apply it (typically in person and “on the ground” with their customers). This is the horizontal knowing-doing axis.
Additionally, there are roles that are passive (i.e., being ready to respond to requests for their support) as well as ones that are more (pro)active, seeking to engage customers in anticipating, defining and addressing their needs. This is captured along the vertical axis.
Within this framework are six roles, each of which completes the following phrase:
“As a provider of continuous improvement support, we offer our internal customers …”:
⚀ Tools, Frameworks & Knowledge Sharing
Value Proposition:
“We offer a common and consistent approach to continuous improvement, one that is scalable and repeatable across the organization. We facilitate the sharing of knowledge and practices amongst change agents in the business in order to promote a culture of continuous improvement.”
There is value for an organization in having a common set of tools and approaches that are regularly and systematically used to drive improvement and innovation. When a team needs to frame their CI challenge it is helpful that they know what to reach for, whether it is a project charter, A3 poster or Abstraction Ladder, and where.
There is also value in having a group of people who can facilitate the exchange of lessons learned throughout the organization in order to increase knowledge of what works — and what doesn’t.
An internal CI group that fulfills this role can meet a customer’s needs for things such as:
- A ready-to-use, fit-for-purpose, curated and branded set of tools that people can access and use to drive CI projects
- A common and shared language around business improvement and innovation concepts (e.g., Lean, Six Sigma, Design Thinking, Agile, etc.)
- A group with “convening power” in the organization who can bring practitioners together who are applying the tools and techniques so they can learn from one another
⚁ Oversight & Intelligence
Value Proposition:
“We provide organization-wide visibility of the current portfolio of continuous improvement efforts. We help track progress and value from these efforts in order to help decision makers allocate resources and recognize success.”
It is not uncommon for leaders to occasionally ponder the “big picture” when it comes to a collective, portfolio-level view of all the CI efforts that are under way. There are various means to achieving this end, including ones that rely on centralized reporting of progress and results as well as approaches that rely on decentralized platforms that allow for real-time visibility of improvement efforts. Regardless of which approach is taken, a CI organization can play a valuable role in facilitating the oversight and intelligence of improvement initiatives across the company.
An internal CI group that fulfills this role can meet a customer’s needs for things such as:
- Being able to understand “what is going on in the organization” from a CI perspective
- Having enough visibility of the results of company-wide improvement and innovation efforts to make portfolio-level decisions on resource allocation and further investments in similar initiatives
- Accessing macro-level analytics on improvement and innovation efforts in order to develop and refine future strategy
⚂ Training, Coaching & Facilitation
Value Proposition:
“We provide training, coaching and facilitation support to individuals and teams so that they are better equipped to drive their improvement efforts for themselves.”
One of the more frequent requests of change agents in an organization is for support in building out the skills and capabilities of their team. This will usually take the form of hands-on training but can also include on-the-job coaching as well as ad hoc facilitation of teams. In some cases this role will be outsourced to any from a range of external service providers (see the Advisory & Brokerage Services role below). In others, the organization may retain enough trainers, coaches and facilitators to provide these services in house (whether from the CI team or another function, such as HR).
An internal CI group that fulfills this role can meet a customer’s needs for things such as:
- Introducing new tools, skills or methodologies to the organization
- Ongoing support for change agents as they apply their newly-acquired skills in pursuing improvement efforts (i.e., Lean or Agile coaching)
- Facilitation of “group processes” (e.g., opportunity finding, framing, problem solving, decision making, team “look backs”, etc.) in support of CI efforts
⚃ Subject Matter Expertise
Value Proposition:
“We can facilitate access to talented individuals and teams for customers who require specific content knowledge and/or capabilities relevant to their continuous improvement program.”
Sometimes the customer needs to speak with someone who worked on a problem like theirs before. Sometimes they need a functional or technical expert for a period of time to fill a particular knowledge gap or help a team address a vexing technical issue as part of their improvement work. The role of providing access to Subject Matter Expertise is a valuable one.
An internal CI group that fulfills this role can meet a customer’s needs for things such as:
- Gaining access to specific knowledge or technical expertise to address a specific problem
- Gaining temporary access to people with specific functional experience to help develop or configure a solution
- Accessing relevant experiences with similar CI challenges elsewhere in order to reduce the cycle time from opportunity identification to value realization
⚄ Advisory & Brokerage Services
Value Proposition:
“We partner with business leaders to understand their organization’s vision, objectives and improvement needs in order to help them define a course of action. We work with leaders to identify and access the best resources (internal or external) with which to work.”
Personally, I find this role the most powerful of the six. If played well it will determine which of the other roles ought to be fulfilled (and how). This is the role of the “trusted advisor” who sits down with their business counterpart to learn more about their performance plans, the vision for their organization, their “pain points” and improvement objectives. It is with someone in this role that a business leader can collaboratively frame and define the support they need. As a result of this dialogue, support options — including additional resources (internal, external) or even funding — can be identified and procured on the customer’s behalf.
An internal CI group that fulfills this role can meet a customer’s needs for things such as:
- Having a partner with whom a change agent can explore how best to meet their improvement and innovation objectives
- Having someone to collaborate with to identify, define and design an approach to delivering improved performance
- Gaining access to funding and other support resources (internal, external) to pursue CI opportunities
⚄ ⚀ Implementation Resources
Value Proposition:
“We will not only help provide ‘boots on the ground’ support for our customers’ continuous improvement efforts, but we’ll also stay there until the work can be sustained by the operation.”
The last role for an internal CI group is that of providing resources who can work with the customer’s team on a full- or part-time basis to help them deliver their portfolio of improvement oppotunities. Often this is a role that involves working with an external partner (management consulting firms typically fill this need) since it usually consumes a significant number of team members from the CI group, thereby limiting its ability to support customers in other parts of the business.
An internal CI group that fulfills this role can meet a customer’s needs for things such as:
- Accessing additional resource capacity to pursue CI opportunities
- Securing temporary staff augmentation in order to free up resources to work on the improvement or innovation opportunities
- Finding resources with experience in navigating the challenges encountered on longer-term change journeys
I n the end, business leaders and change agents simply want to know who to go to in order to have their support needs met. As a CI leader there is always something you can do to help clarify your team’s role(s) in helping the organization improve.
In the mid-1990s the UK manufacturer of a woodstain product, Ronseal, launched an advertising campaign that introduced the slogan:
“It does exactly what it says on the tin.”
What does it say on your CI group’s tin?
📑 Notes:
- I share this framework with the knowledge that it may fall afoul of what might be called “The Cardinal Ximénez Effect”, a reference to the classic Monty Python sketch about The Spanish Inquisition. “NOBODY expects the Continuous Improvement team! Our weapons are fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency …”). There might very well be a role missing in the framework above.
- This article takes its inspiration from the work of Andrew Sturdy, University of Bristol and Nick Wylie, Oxford Brookes University: Internal Consultants as Agents of Change (September 2011). I agree with their assertion that internal consultants (the “poor cousin” to external consultants) remains an under-researched topic.
