CHOW #70– What are the manifestations of this component?

In the blog post “An extract from the upcoming book on A Framework to Assess Project Wellness” we looked at some of the components of continuous improvement, shown in the diagram above. We detailed out the practices or manifestations of  one of the components – ‘Team responds to ever increasing customer expectations’

• Team members actively participate in discussions with customers and among themselves in the generation of ideas that could improve service levels or value to customer
• Improvement ideas are assessed for value to customer and are prioritized in terms of cost vs benefits
• Improvement ideas are implemented like projects with defined goals and success criteria”
• Formal processes and channels exist to funnel improvement inputs received from various levels of the customer to the team

The challenge for you is to figure out the manifestations or practices of ‘Team responds to management expectations’. I can think of five. How many can you think of? What are they?

Suggested solution:

Krishna asked Arjuna the next time they met. It was the weekend. The human resources people had arranged a picnic for some of the projects and programs. They were playing cricket before settling down for their lunch.
Arjuna and Krishna were in the batting team and they were waiting for their turn to go in. Krishna was to be the next batsman in and he was wearing pads and ready to go in. Arjuna had already batted and had made forty runs. He was out to magnificent running catch by Abhimanyu.
Krishna asked, “Arjuna, have you thought about continuous improvement?”
Arjuna said, “Yes, I have. I was thinking of the manifestations of the component ‘Team responds to management expectations’.”
“Okay, what ideas have you come out with?”
“This is exactly like response to customer expectations. he key thing is some sort of formalization of the practices that captures, analyses and implements appropriate features or processes to deal with periodic formal and informal inputs from various levels of management.”
“Okay. That makes sense. What is the first manifestation?”
“The first is what we added at the end to the response to customer expectations. ‘Formal processes and channels exist to funnel improvement inputs received from various levels of management to the team’.”
“Agreed. And the next?”
“Can’t we just take the manifestations of ‘response to customer expectations’ and replace the word ‘customer’ with ‘management’?!”
Krishna said, “You rouge! That is exactly what I was also thinking about! But I think we need to cast these ideas differently.”

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Read the book when it comes out to know the other manifestations and a lot more!