Building Company Infrastructure

How to Tell if You Need to Build Infrastructure

Ask yourself this question: can you clearly explain your company's vision and goals for the improvement initiative in 30 seconds or less? If not, this is a good clue that you could benefit from infrastructure building work.

The correlation is clear. Companies that cannot clearly articulate their overall vision tend to suffer from lackluster results. Teams that lack an understanding of what they are trying to accomplish have varying opinions about what the program is really all about, why certain people were chosen to participate, how projects are selected, how long projects should take and ultimately how to gauge success.

If you sense your company has this challenge, the smartest thing to do is start with a Gap Analysis that outlines the space between where your program is today and where you want it to be. Once complete, a Gap Analysis will give you an improved focus that will help you uncover burning platforms for change. Concepts to consider in your gap analysis:

Executive Vision and Goals - Is there a clear understanding of what your management team hopes to achieve with this program? Are there measurable goals and is your team delivering on those expectations? Beyond that, is there a sense of accountability around these goals?

Financial Guidelines - Do you have consistent financial processes in place to support your projects? Are your financial teams and your project teams in sync? If not, it is time to set some guidelines and get these teams working together. This is critical as the integrity of your deployment depends on your company's ability to agree to how results are calculated.

The Project Management Process - how does your team officially brainstorm, prioritise, select and review projects? Are projects measured against the executive vision before launch? How well is this process working today compared to how you wish it was?

Team Selection and Communication - Have you created job descriptions and career plans for your practitioners? This is critical to avoid misunderstandings and ensure practitioners are secure in devoting their full attention to the program and their role. Furthermore, is there a communications strategy in place for disseminating information about the program launch, project successes and program results?

Look at each item closely and determine where you may be lacking clarity. From there, you can begin thinking about what it takes to build your company's infrastructure.  

Infrastructure Building Activities

If your program lacks a clear vision, this is the first thing you need to complete. Doing this requires you bring together senior leaders and engage them in a discussion that results in a clear, concise, and measurable vision for your deployment. BMG can facilitate this work through a Deployment Planning workshop or you may be able to do this work on your own. In working through this process, consider things like overriding goals, timelines, boundaries and definitions of success.

With the executive vision built, the next step is to put that vision into a structured action plan. This will require what BMG refers to as a core team of cross functional leaders whose role it will be to set the guidelines to match the executive vision and keep them in place for the long term. This core team should include 8-15 individuals and include members from human resources, communications, IT, finance and training as well as your deployment. It is this group's responsibility to think through all the aspects of your deployment and develop a working action plan for execution. For example, how many, who and what individuals will you train? How will results be tallied and reported? How much are you going to spend and how much do you hope to get in returns and in what time frame? How will you determine the best projects?

In our experience, companies get infinitely better and faster results when they call upon professional guidance and facilitation for this process through an infrastructure building workshops. BMG's workshops typically take place over three days whereby we help clients ask and answer the tough questions about their deployment, and track their decisions in an electronic eHandbook that later becomes their roadmap for building, managing and measuring the success of their program long term

We have an existing process excellence program we have already deployed. Is it too late for us to build infrastructure? And, if not, how would we benefit from these activities now?

The short answer is it is never too late to build infrastructure and it will always help your company to better drive results on your improvement programs. This work is critical regardless of where your current performance excellence program stands and can be especially beneficial if you are seeing diminishing results or project stalls.

For any company wondering whether its time to do some infrastructure building work here are some quick thoughts on A) how to tell where your weak spots may lie and B) what activities you may find most helpful.