Rob Walley is our guest writer for our October issue. Rob is an Awards Manager, Australian Organisational Excellence Foundation (the Foundation). The Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation that will focus on the development and recognition of organisations and individuals in the pursuit of excellence and long-term performance. The Foundation manages the Australian Organisational Excellence Awards which recognise the achievement of organisations committed to excellence.
There are many definitions of quality but there is only one person who can define it and that is the person who wants whatever is being offered. It does not matter whether it is the latest iPhone, the ability to pay a bill or a trip round the world. We are all asked to separate ourselves from our money in pursuit of goods and services.
What drives people to queue for hours just to be an early adopter of technology or hunt around for that special deal on a sofa? It all comes down to one issue and that is a personal calculation of value versus cost. Each of us is different in this respect; it’s as individual as our fingerprint.
How does an organisation make sense of this potentially very confusing situation? Luckily there are many aspects of life that are predictable and can be relatively easily planned for. The really great organisations however work hard to make it easy for customers to do business with them and also work very hard to understand what it is that their customers value about the relationship such that they are willing to stay with them over the long term.
My hero Walter Shewhart realised and first described the difference between special and common causes of variation and that variation exists everywhere. It was he who first suggested that this could form the basis of a different way of looking at business processes and managing them appropriately to deliver customer value. He realised also that every plan is a theory until proven otherwise and hence the PDCA improvement cycle. An Australian called George Elton Mayo, who coincidentally worked at the same factory at Hawthorne in Chicago as Shewhart and Edwards Deming, also carried out some ground breaking studies on what affects the way people work. The fact that this work was done in the 1920s does not detract from its profound effect on us today and guides managerial behaviour when eliciting superior team performance.
In fact what it does for me is merely reinforce the fundamental truth that drives excellence in business. Excellence is the pursuit of long-term performance and the realisation that everything is a theory until proven in practice is fundamental to achieving success and is so-defined by the Australian Business Excellence Framework. Its basic premise is that there are proven aspects that enable an organisation to be managed effectively and outlines the framework that describes them. It then encourages the organisation to devise appropriate ways of approaching each aspect and, very importantly, verify using data that the approaches actually work. Organisations that are willing to reject approaches that do not work and reinforce ones that do, generally do better than those that just introduce the latest fad and hope that it works. If it can institute a regular practice of review of its approaches and taking action arising from it, then the results can be amazing.
This can be a hard journey however and requires conviction and in the words of Dr Edwards Deming – Create constancy of purpose towards improvement. This was the first of his fourteen points and probably the most important as without it, it is easy to become disillusioned and blame the concept rather than its implementation. The Australian Business Excellence Framework is a good place to start to apply this process and I recommend it to you.
For further information about this article, please feel free to contact Rob by emailing awards@aoef.org.au