In last week’s blog, I shared with you the first two of the three components of a great countermeasure: the key operational change and supporting tools. Today I’m going to discuss the final component—the person in charge.
The Third Component of a Countermeasure: Person in charge
Naming the individual responsible for driving change
If more than one person owns it, then no one owns it. When identifying countermeasures, it is crucial to name the person who will own the change. This person is not necessarily the one who develops the countermeasure and does the work. It is NOT who in the company owns this process. It is more about project management.
It starts with who on your team is going to take ownership of this countermeasure and make sure it moves forward. For example, this person goes and gets the CS team to meet with the admin team, or that person goes to the sales team to solicit input. Sometimes, the person in charge is also the process owner or the one developing the countermeasure.
Allocating small activities and key operational changes
The other great piece of this component is that in a team environment, we allocate small activities and incremental key operational changes. Instead of a team member owning an entire area of the operation (such as onboarding and sales to service handoff) and addressing all the things within that, we make incremental fixes.
Typically, the teams I work with consist of six to twelve members. It is rare to have fewer than six, and more than twelve is too many. The team size varies based on availability, company size, and also because the more people on the team, the more we can accomplish in a go-live.
Once we determine who in the team will take ownership of the change, we can allocate responsibilities accordingly. For example, if a company has ten problems prioritized for a go-live, and all of them fall on the shoulders of just one person, execution may become challenging. On the other hand, if the ten problems are evenly distributed among a team of ten people, with each person owning one problem, it is a fantastic setup.
It’s also normal to see certain individuals carry more weight than others. Let’s say you have a team of six people with 10 problems; one person has five, and other people have one or two. That’s usually because the person with five has more responsibility or, for example, leads the IT department. But you can also work smarter by reallocating responsibilities and bringing in additional support to facilitate execution. This is why identifying the person in charge is crucial to the success and ability to execute the next stage of the PDCA process, which is developing a countermeasure.
To Sum Up Our Series So Far
We identify countermeasures before we start developing them. We don’t move forward until every countermeasure is named. There are three components that make a great countermeasure: its key operational change, supporting tools, and the person in charge.
Stay tuned for next week’s final blog in this series on identifying countermeasures. I’m concluding the series with the last two important points to remember during the countermeasure identification process.
In your service,
Hilary Corna
