A performance measurement system for reduction of firefighting and providing predictability – A Lean Six Sigma baseline metric system

The simple setting of goals and tracking metrics variances to these goals does not make improvement occur. Traditional charts such as a table of numbers, pie charts, stacked bar charts, and red-yellow-green scorecards can lead to much firefighting. In addition, using these charts to run a business is not unlike driving a car by only looking at its rear view mirror. What is needed is a no-nonsense predictive performance measurement system.

The Integrated Enterprise Excellence (IEE) system provides a mechanism for accomplishing these objectives. IEE goes beyond Lean Six Sigma and the Balanced Scorecard methodology. The IEE system incorporates a no nonsense 30,000-foot-level scorecard/dashboard metric methodology to describe a high-level view for outputs: Y variable, key process output variable (KPOV), or critical to quality (CTQ), This “in-flight airplane”, high-level-view for operational and project metrics has infrequent subgrouping/sampling. With this methodology short-term variations, which can be caused by variations in key process input variables (KPIVs), will yield charts that view these perturbations as common cause issues. A 30,000-foot-level individuals control chart can reduce organizational firefighting when used to report operational metrics; e.g., common with red-yellow-green scorecards. 30,000-foot-level metrics are also very beneficial to baseline Lean Six Sigma projects from which project success is measured.

With this system, an alignment and management of metrics throughout the organization can yield an orchestration of the right activity being done at the right time. With this system, meaningful measurements are statistically tracked over time at various functional levels of the business. This leads to an enterprise cascading measurement methodology where meaningful measurements are tracked statistically over time at various business functional levels. With this system, there is an alignment of important metrics throughout the organization. This alignment extends from the satellite-level business metrics to high-level KPOV operational metrics, which can be at the 30,000-foot-level, 20,000-foot-level, or 10,000-foot-level (all having infrequent subgrouping/sampling), to KPIVs at the 50-foot-level (frequent subgrouping/sampling). With this metric system organizations can enhance business operations so that there is less firefighting and a pull for project creation and execution system whenever operational metric improvements are needed.

Details of this overall methodology are described in the article
“Corporate Performance Management: The Integrated Enterprise Excellence System”

Referenced books and recorded webinars provide details of implementing the system.