Managing Performance Improvement

Lynne F. Baxter, Alasdair M. MacLeod

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134211647
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

From TQM to Six Sigma and the Balanced Scorecard, there appears to be no end to the 'revolutionary' approaches proposed to improve business performance. However, on closer inspection, most new performance improvement approaches offer few differences from their predecessors.This thought-provoking book provides a critical perspective on the managemen

1 Introduction

Innovation and rapid change are normal features of organizational life and usually associated with the goal of improving performance. There are many parties interested in developing specific initiatives, models, and sets of ideas designed to assist in realizing objectives: academics, consultants, government agencies, and industry and professional associations to list but a few. It would be pointless to speculate when people became interested in improving performance, but interest has accelerated since the “industrial revolution,” and a popular perception is that the speed of development is now at its height. Victorian pioneers of new technology, Taylor, the Gilbreths, Shewhart, the “quality gurus” popularized in the 1950s, the Japanese Manufacturing debate of the 1970s and 1980s, TQM, BPR, “Lean” “Six Sigma,” the list is endless, but the intention is the same—improving competitiveness through improving performance. Many of the approaches share similar characteristics and are implemented in similar ways. They all involve close examination of processes, suggest involving the people closest in devising better ways of working, and infer that any improvement is likely not to impact performance if not linked to what the end recipient values, namely what the customer wants. The approach itself is heralded as “new,” a flurry of activity ensues while the range of techniques is learned and implemented—and typically fizzles out after about a year.

For their part, in organizations, people put considerable effort into engaging with these initiatives, addressing shortcomings with existing ways of doing things and “second guessing” future needs, especially when this is associated with personal career advancement. The intention is to progress something but, in our experience initiatives, which can be labeled “improvements” with any long-term confidence, are all too rare and any link to a particular model or set of ideas frequently very hazy. “Improvements” can generate additional problems, fail, or even make the situation worse.

The aim of the book is to provide a critical perspective on the management of performance improvement initiatives through relating theory in the area to practical examples from industry. We position our work between existing texts that, we think, adopt a stance that is not constructive for people working in organizations, tending to be either overly positive or unduly negative. Some texts trumpet “innovations” designed to be implemented in organizations to accelerate improvement without stopping to consider any downside to their suggestions; others criticize changes without putting forward any practical ideas as to how jobs are to be maintained and organizations to be developed. Our book presents a critique of these innovations, questioning the so-called theory in itself but also using the knowledge we have gained through different writers and researching organizations to derive alternative angles to shift a stagnant debate forward.

In this introductory chapter, we discuss our reasons for writing the book and continue by pinpointing our specific concerns with the existing literature before outlining our methodology and the rationale behind what we have included and why. We are well aware that there are many texts in the area; when we accessed www.amazon.com in October 2006, we found that there were 23,300 books connected to “performance improvement” when we typed it into the search engine. The number actually increased by four during our session! A look down the findings backs up our impression that they are for the most part highly repetitive: Similar topics crop up; for example, new tools, project management aids, how to manage employees. We are working in a heavily populated area, but we hope we are doing so from a fresh perspective, using ideas that have not been aired in this way before.

The initial impetus for the book stemmed from our unhappiness with the materials others had developed and which we used in our teaching, which encompasses undergraduate, postgraduate, and post-experience courses with classes of students already familiar with introductory operations management. We perceived a need paradoxically for both a more global and a more local perspective! We began to contact and research organizations. We think that our work is of use in specialist modules. Other academics should also find it of interest; from our experience in carrying out the research and presenting our findings to a range of people, we would extend our readership to those who are working in organizations that are also keen to learn about how others have gone about improving their performance and want to build their understanding from the broadest possible base. Perhaps this differs from the many books that focus on one specific tool or on one specific organization.

We hope the book contributes to understanding at a number of levels, which we will now outline and then describe more fully in the rest of the chapter. First, we want to engage with other writers; we have reviewed key literature in the area and believe we have useful points to make on existing work. Our perspective, developed from engaging with several areas of the literature and the cases, produces insights that we believe to be different—for example, we have not come across any work that discusses the damage that improvement can cause. Second, we hope our ideas on improvement shift the debate from what we perceive to be a recursive loop—what we mean by this is that for a long time, “what has to be done” has remained relatively stable, it is the implementation that has not been straightforward; however, most writers have chosen to rehash the list of what has to be done rather than to investigate in any grounded way why the implementation has stalled. Third, we have carried out research in a wide variety of organizations, manufacturing, service, and a public sector example, and the descriptions of our findings should be of general interest, and shed more light than the arid distant survey techniques beloved by some academics.

We are very different people in ourselves, and our discussions have sparked alternative interpretations. Last, we hope the whole package is constructive in a practical way, enabling a wide range of people to consider problems with improvement from a different perspective. The next sections of the chapter explore these points further.

The existing literature

The texts we have read, curiously for what we consider to be such a holistic subject, can be divided into many subcategories, none of which seem to engage fully with one another. There are “guru” prognostications, company war stories, repetitive text books, and a cache of “critical” literature, which carries an assumption that all management attempts to improve performance will undermine the position of the employee.

If we were to describe existing work in the area, we would conclude that most of the “uncritical” texts are based on a modernist perspective, of the kind that has been undermined in other branches of social sciences for more than thirty years. Improvements can be achieved if lists of areas are attended to. There is an assumption of progression of ideas and “causal” relations that can be manipulated. This is seen most strongly in the journal articles wherein the relationships among “variables” are investigated in a survey population (see, for example, Samsom and Terziovski, 1999), but it is also evident in the textbooks (e.g., Evans and Lindsay, 1999 and Beckford, 2000), those putting forward “new” sets of ideas, such as Hammer and Champy (1993) and the reconstructions of activities portrayed in books about individual organizations (Welch, 2003 and Semler, 2003). We have included discussion of these books in ours because we want to engage with the ideas, but our view of organizations is subtly different. We think that it is difficult to base social science ideas on a model of natural science that does not even apply. There has been a vast body of work detailing how scientists do not use scientific method (e.g., it is not the logical exploration of variables but often hunch and “happenstance” that lead to breakthroughs). However, most improvement cycles boil down to the use of scientific method (see, for example, “DMIAC” in Six Sigma). We subscribe to the view that individuals, time and space vary (Giddens, 1976). What occurred for one person in one organization at one point in time might well not apply to the same person the following week; social life is so much more complex than is often portrayed in the improvement literature. We agree with Feigenbaum (1991) in his irritation with the “instant pudding” approach to change.

This means we would rule out making sweeping generalizations. Our conclusions are designed to provide instances to promote understanding and spark further ideas. This type of system has worked very well in the legal profession.

We will now go on to develop our argument that the literature is very similar and recursive: For example, text books follow remarkably consistent formats (i.e., introducing the “gurus” and following up with subcategories that cover the areas of people involvement, process improvement, and implementation processes). “Leadership” is discussed, but the performance improvement writers rarely include organization behavior writers who have carried out extensive research in the area, meaning the discussion concludes with ideas that have in some instances been superseded long ago.

Similar topics are managed in similar ways. For example, the same set of exhortations has been repeated in only slightly different guises for fifty years. Given the stability of these ideas, it is odd that there is also widespread agreement on the high failure rate for performance improvement!

Two authors whom we admire are Juran, the famous guru, and Heller, a UK management commentator. Despite a difference of more than fifty years in their idea development, they seem to cover remarkably similar ground (Table 1.1).

From this table, the reader can pick up on the consistency of the themes. Prepare people, set stretch objectives, divide up the tasks, set up an organization structure to manage the improvement process, think through the wider implications of individual projects, reward effort, and be persistent. Heller (1997) includes a possible “hurdle” of negative past cultures; however, he fails to raise the issue that negative past cultures may well be the result of previous attempts to address his other points! At least he acknowledges that the organization might have a “past”—few authors do, far less admit that individuals’ previous experiences with improvement initiatives might affect their approach to the current one.

These ideas remain at the level of recommendations; the specific methods to achieve them are not often developed. If we were being unkind, there seems to be a stream of exhortations that seldom go beyond the rhetorical for the employees trying to improve actual processes in organizations. Given that one of our objectives is to teach people who do or intend to manage organizations, this is far from helpful.

Table 1.1 A comparison of established and current ideas on performance improvement

Underlying the approach we have adopted for our text has been the strong conviction that introducing a fresh perspective into how the basic issues associated with improving performance in the organization were reviewed was opportune.

Methodological considerations

Alasdair spent the major part of his industrial career in the ICI group deeply involved in studying how operations might be conducted more effectively—he managed other people and utilized work study in implementing the improved methods that emerged from his work and that of his colleagues. As we discuss in chapter 4, work study may be regarded now as being somewhat past its “sell by” date; but its ethos—the analytical, questioning approach that lies at its heart—is as relevant now as it ever was. Alasdair has carried this over into his academic work. Lynne’s career is the converse of this: predominantly academic with periods of consultancy. She worked with colleagues in improving supply-chain management in a wide variety of organizations but decided that she enjoyed researching more and has been involved in a series of research projects using her skills in qualitative methods to generate practical findings and theoretical insights. Both of us have been trained in the past as assessors for the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) excellence model.

The book is an outcome of a research process that has lasted just past a decade. As we indicated earlier in this chapter, we were keen to seek out and present cases to illustrate how organizations on this side of the water have gone about improving their performance to help to illustrate our points while teaching. With this aim in mind, we approached a daughter organization of the EFQM, Quality Scotland Foundation (QSF), who gave us a list of possible contacts that we added to our own. We were told later that we were extremely lucky to obtain a small grant from QSF to cover our travel expenses in exchange for some short cases for the organization to use in its introductory literature on the EFQM model for members.

The first phase of the research involved visits to a wide range of local organizations. We asked each contact if they had a significant “improvement project” that we could learn about by visiting their company and interviewing those involved. It was made clear that the cost to the organization would be limited to the time their people spent with us describing the project. We visited more than a dozen companies and interviewed people whom our contact person thought relevant, usually the contact person, supplemented with one or two colleagues.

It became clear that despite considerable effort being put in at a general level, few of the organizations had any initiatives for us to study in depth. At that time, it was suggested by a publisher visiting the university that we travel further to include mainland European organizations, and we contacted the EFQM in Brussels, where a facilitator kindly forwarded a list of contacts. We also obtained a further small grant from the UK Institute of Management Services. The response was again mixed, with this time, most of the organizations not following up on our enquiries. We are eternally grateful for the warm reception we received from the organizations kind enough to take part in our more in-depth studies, and our period of more intensive research took place between 1998 and 2004.

In total, we studied eight organizations in greater depth, visiting them and interviewing a wide range of stakeholders, in some instances several times. We found it insightful to see how our contacts formed our list of people to interview—we asked them to include a broad range of people who had been involved. The numbers we spoke to varied from organization to organization, ranging from about fourteen in one to six in another. We usually talked to the managers steering the initiative and those managers involved in the associated changes. In the majority of organizations, we interviewed “front-line” employees. It was intriguing to us when the managers who chose our interviewees did not include such employees. Both of us interviewed together, one taking notes while the other attended to asking the questions. We saw around each facility, although it has to be admitted this was not very extensive in office-type organizations. We had a discussion after interviews and adjusted our questioning accordingly. In many instances, we were given documents and other materials to help our understanding of the initiatives.

We wrote up our interviews and constructed draft case studies that were submitted to the company for review, amendment as necessary, and comment. Each company would have right of veto over the content of their particular case. In practice, we found that the process of securing approval to undertake the studies took much longer than we had expected, although a benefit of this was sometimes further visits and interviews to obtain more information. The companies whose cases we document cover a wide spectrum of activities—from airline ground services to cement manufacture—and include telecommunications equipment manufacture, health diagnostics, and agro-chemicals. From their association with EFQM, we might have presumed that their approach to improvement might be expected to have been guided by its model. However, we found that even though they had all recently gone through a major process of change with the expectation that their performance would improve significantly as a consequence, the evidence from our studies suggests that this was not always the case.

The foregoing applies to all but one chapter, which features a discussion of the work of Constanze Hirshhauser, Lynne’s PhD student. Constanze, because she was a full-time student, was able to spend much more time in her chosen organization (six weeks of participant observation at each site) and she thus interviewed a very wide range of people.

We construct the book in the way we have constructed each chapter. We want to demonstrate that we are familiar with the conventional thinking in the area; we have some points to make on it, and our concern is practical, so we then describe our findings from organizations—often at variance with the existing texts—before trying to reconcile the two. This is very explicit because our final section is about repair. It is important to engage with existing texts with which our readers are familiar before making our points and suggesting alternatives. The final part of this chapter explains the contents of each succeeding chapter and introduces the organizations that we studied.

Section 1: The management role in performance improvement

The first section explores familiar topics in the area. Samsom and Terziovski (1999) note that the “soft” aspects of management have the greatest effect on performance improvement and ask for more work on how these can be changed. We hope that our chapters make such a contribution. We discuss leadership and strategy in separate chapters. Performance measurement is not considered a soft topic; however, how systems are designed includes soft aspects, something we view as key to their success or failure.

The nature or quality of leadership has been a feature suggested by Deming and Juran in the 1950s as a way of differentiating their initiatives from simple assurance and process control. The term recurs in excellence models and is intended to signal to senior managers that they should be active in the process: Improvement is not solely about getting other people to change their behavior; it is also about joining in and generating enthusiasm. Our chapter discusses some of the theories in the area, and we highlight some of the practical issues with two different examples wherein the improvements were in one case capable of being sustained when the leader who gave the process impetus left and the other wherein they were not; the improvements fizzled out when the leader left the business unit. The leaders themselves shared many characteristics, although the organizations in which they worked were in very different industrial sectors—one senior manager was the head of an aircraft engine maintenance and repair facility, owned by a global organization; the other was a site manager of a cement plant, Blue Circle, also owned by a global organization. The initiatives they instig...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• Section 1: The management role in performance improvement
• Section 2: Improvement as damage
• Section 3: Repair
• Discussion question hints
• References