How do you identify underperforming areas in your organization? How do you address underperformance? Do you have a business improvement toolbox with a disciplined problem-solving approach? How do you prioritize projects to drive improvements?

These are just a few questions that the CPM officer and office deal with on a daily basis. Let’s touch on a few.

Best-practice, award-winning organizations have a proven balanced scorecard to identify negative trends using leading indicators (see the prior posting on this topic). The CPM officer will conduct further analysis to prioritize the impacts of these underperforming areas. The CPM officer will collaborate with executive colleagues to select the highest priority projects to be addressed by a proven tool set. Our research indicates that the most common remedial efforts include Corrective Action Plans (CAPS), PDCA, 10-Step Problem-Solving, and DMAIC Six Sigma. In a mature environment, the CPM will have a portfolio of projects in partnership with the operating and support areas of the business to drive improvements. Clearly this a more involved topic, and we will spend more time on it going forward. ###