Lean System Management for Leaders

A New Performance Management Toolset

Richard Mr Mallory, Richard Mallory, Richard E. Mallory

• Publisher: Productivity Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138481848
• eBook ISBN: 9781351059497
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Richard Mallory introduces a leadership framework for system management, including practical tools and guidance for its use. It enables an agile quality framework throughout an entire organization that will build the kind of "learning organization" championed by Peter M. Senge in his classic book, The Fifth Discipline. This innovative framework opens a broad new horizon for management science through the use of structured leadership systems as a new foundation for organizational structure.

This book shows leaders how to achieve superior leadership results by applying a Lean DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control) structure to leadership systems and program office operations. It provides specific guidance on system improvement through development of best known practice, achievable best practice, and an operational plan to carry it out.

Mallory shows leaders how to align and evaluate systems using a Lean approach, that will eliminate duplication and waste of executive and senior management time, and that will reduce the wait time and non-value add in dependent processes.

The book shows how to set up an organization-wide scorecard to rank the maturity and capability of fact-based management in all systems, projects and processes throughout an organization, as a means of creating sustained and predictable delivery of excellent products and services.

1

Introducing System Management

As with many disciplines, the concepts of quality management have been progressively interpreted and stylized by various practitioners over time, particularly through specific, successful applications of its use. Its predominant application today has been narrowed even more through the focused practice of Lean Six Sigma. Through that narrowing, it has largely failed and given up on the application of quality practice to entire organizational systems—even though they are essential to designing and sustaining quality practice over time.

This book will correct that problem and introduces a broad new framework for system management,^* including practical tools and guidance for its use. It provides the long-promised “profound knowledge of systems” and shows how structured systems can unify and align quality practices throughout an entire organization. It also introduces a framework for objectively measuring the maturity of systems and processes^† to provide an organizational quality scorecard, essential for sustainability.

Many research studies have shown that proven practices of performance excellence, or “quality,” cannot be maintained over the long term. This book postulates that the reason for this failure is that there is no cohesive guidance on the management of groups of people working together toward specific goals.^‡ Instead, we have only a patchwork application of two very specific knowledge areas—one for process management and one for project management. That is the end of our management science as it applies to group practice, and we then try to patch it together with a generic body of knowledge which we call leadership. If individual leaders cannot pull it all together with vision, instinct, or charisma, some other books offer various “frameworks,” which are sometimes described as maps. This is certainly not a body of science; it is akin to a box of puzzle pieces that we are trying to piece into a picture that no one can really describe!

Process management and project management are treated as distinct subcategories of all organizational management, so they cannot provide a structure for guiding the organization toward the use of fact-based management and structured problem solving everywhere. Much of the practice of leadership, then, is focused only on either one-to-one interactions with individuals—“supervision”—or generic group practices^* such as “motivation,” “goal-setting,” or “encouraging the heart.” The practice of “frameworks” is equally unscientific and provides a cook-book of advisory or prescriptive tactics under headings such as “Baldrige,” “ISO,” or “The House of Lean.”

It is a great omission of current management knowledge that there is no framework for defining, analyzing, standardizing, or implementing continuous improvement in areas such as governance, strategic planning, budgeting, quality control, and program management.^† These, and a number of other categories of organizational work, are defined as systems in this book, and are therefore opened to fact-based analysis and improvement through the described tools and practices it provides.

The use of scientific management on the noted systems is indeed possible, because systems are repetitive and cyclical and create definable outputs. For this reason, they offer an opportunity to learn and improve, and you will learn specific frameworks and tools for their definition and improvement.

Other repetitive, cyclical, and output-specific functions or systems include organizational goal-setting, decision-making, and oversight. Not only are these not viewed as subjects of fact-based analysis and improvement in the current management literature, but they are often viewed as either isolated activities or sequential decisions that are only manageable through spontaneous or consultative decision-making by individual managers. Similar attitudes also exist regarding the management of a program, or a program office, and all of this structuring and decision-making is therefore incorrectly left to the judgment of a single executive.

This kind of thinking—which could be called leadership despotism—leads to the conclusion that the actions of executives are somehow above or isolated from the application of Lean and quality science. This in turn leads these managers to believe that the actions, events, and activities they use for decision-making and program direction should not and cannot be standardized and documented. They incorrectly believe that executive actions should be created by their individual intuition and contemporaneous judgments, which also means that they are reactive and insulated from organizational wisdom. This belief must change!

System management and systems science,^* introduced for the first time in this book, references the fact that any management outcome created through repetitive and predictable components is ideally suited to fact-based management, to the application of the well-known principles of quality science, and to participation by empowered and engaged employees. This opens the door to structured learning and improvement throughout the organization, as well as achievement of superior results. This indeed is the learning organization envisioned by Peter Senge in his famous work The Fifth Discipline.

This book therefore opens a broad new horizon for management science and a new foundation for understanding and improving organizations. It presents a structured framework for defining and controlling organizations, along with a system maturity standard that allows regular measurement of the maturity and capability of defined management systems. In this way, it provides an agile framework for the organization-wide practice of quality (which we will refer to as performance excellence^†) and enables the use of a system maturity scorecard showing the capability and maturity of quality management function throughout the organization. It also allows and enables an organization-wide scorecard on the practice of quality at the process level through use of the process management standard.^* The combination of system management with process management enables the consistent and sustainable use of quality practice and corrects the single major failure of quality practices everywhere. The alignment of structured system and process management practices creates an agile and continuing quality framework throughout the organization.

This book refers to system management in the singular for two reasons. First, there is a need to distinguish system management from the generic term systems management that fills conceptual management theory. Second, this book introduces a form of system management that is so specific and tactical that it must be a measured requirement of all future management. It is not a theory but a daily management practice.

It also reconciles the differences between project management and process management, in that system management also creates a comprehensive framework for projects that is consistent with the process management body of knowledge. Lastly, it solves the problems of application of process management to unique and tailored deliverables, which are created by variable work groups.

The structured system management framework provided in this book provides specific rules and tools for identifying and modeling key organizational systems (each one in the singular) and for their alignment in a system of Lean, quality, and continuous improvement. Its maturity standards allow measurement of the depth and completeness of the adoption of quality practices in each key system and process and overall in the business unit and the organization.

This is designed as a workbook, and is presented sequentially, so that you can immediately test its theory and value as you use it. Because it is a workbook, it will provide necessary background theory in the Appendices.^† This allows you, the reader, to quickly understand these new tools, to apply them to your specific circumstances, and to rapidly devise implementation plans.

This overall presentation then allows Chapter 2 to begin with the necessary descriptions and definitions of processes, systems, and projects; the chapter wraps up with a description of how systems management combines with process management to provide an overall organization-wide framework for management and change. Chapters 3–6 then present the tools and practices necessary for the identification and control of your systems through system mapping.

Chapter 7 introduces the use of the system management standard to objectively score process maturity, while Chapters 8–10 show how system management fits together with process management and project management to create an agile framework for organizational quality.

The use of structured system mapping and maturity scoring is a pioneering discipline in management science, which can forever change its practice. It opens the door to a profound new understanding of structured and designed systems with the potential to create another giant leap forward in the efficiency, effectiveness, and delivered value of all managed work enterprises.

*The term system management will often be used in this book rather than its more common plural form, systems management, since the skills necessary for the management of a single system independently are required for precision of analysis and improvement. The management of a plurality of systems will be simple once the tools for system management are understood.

†Mallory, Richard, 2018. Quality Standards for Highly Effective Government. Second Edition, Taylor & Francis.

‡Both the Baldrige Excellence Framework and ISO 9001 purport to provide such frameworks, but both their complexity and their lack of a system management standard have hobbled their broader use.

*Generic group practices are not associated with a particular desired outcome or output and are believed to be associated with either a positive work environment or worker commitment to generalized goals.

†Appendix III presents the Roles of Management as systems.

*The terms quality science and process science refer to the tools and knowledge associated with quality management. These had their origins in the Toyota Production System of the 1970s, embrace a broad body of professional knowledge focused on doing work right the first time, and are embodied in the Body of Knowledge maintained by the American Society for Quality. The terms system management and system science are described in this book and very broadly defined in the Baldrige Excellence Framework of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Baldrige Performance Excellence Program. It is a new practice that will redefine the framework of quality.

†Performance excellence should be the preferred term to quality in the 21st century, in that it captures the essence of what the quality...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Author
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Introducing System Management
• Chapter 2 Systems, Processes, and Projects—And Their Role in Managing Work
• Chapter 3 Starting Your System Map
• Chapter 4 Defining Principal Activity Groups
• Chapter 5 Defining the Influencing Factors
• Chapter 6 Defining Metrics and Indicators for Your System Map
• Chapter 7 Application of the System Management Standard
• Chapter 8 The Overlap of System and Process Management
• Chapter 9 The Overlap of System and Projects
• Chapter 10 The Overlap of Systems and Frameworks
• Chapter 11 Wicked Problems, Logos, and the Future of System Science
• Conclusion
• Appendix I: Lexicon of Key Terms
• Appendix II: Auditable Quality Standards: Purpose and Origin
• Appendix III: Systems Management as an Agile Quality Framework
• Appendix IV: Systems Management to Launch the Next Era of Quality
• Bibliography
• Afterword
• Index