In last week’s blog, I shared with you how setting a 30-day lead time can help in successfully developing countermeasures. This time, I will discuss why we aim for an 80 percent completion rate in our 30 days of countermeasure development.
If you’re in the process worksheet (download it for free here), you’ll see your countermeasures under the tab “Key Operational Change”, columns E, F, and G. By this time, when you’re at step 5 of the PDCA process, which is developing countermeasures, they’re already populated, so you have a complete plan.
Over the next 30 days, we’re looking at columns H and I. There’s no going backward on the problems, reprioritizing them, or adding new problems. It’s just managing the status and the next steps over the next 30 days, with the goal of completing 80% of the countermeasures.
What does an 80% countermeasure completion rate mean?
Eighty percent completion of countermeasures is essentially leaving room for unexpected circumstances. The reason behind this is that as we go into developing the countermeasures, sometimes you see that even with all the discovery, discussion, and understanding of the root cause, your idea to solve the problem just doesn’t work. I’ve seen this time and time again.
It can be a great idea, but sometimes it’s too complicated. Sometimes, there are just many reasons why an idea doesn’t work, and so this is where we allow freedom for failure. We can’t expect 100% of the ideas to work.
Also, sometimes, once we start that 30-day lead time and get into the development of the countermeasures, we see that the problem is actually a lot more complex than we originally thought.
You get in there, start talking to the right people, and look at the processes. You realize there’s more to this than we knew in the first place. We have to break it out, like untangling a ball of string. The more you untangle that ball of string, the more you are clear on how things are connected and where the root cause of the problem is coming from.
Sometimes we go in and think we can solve the problem with this key operational change; it seems pretty straightforward. And then we uncover something else. Even if you uncover three more problems, it’s not a bad thing. What’s great is that we found it versus them remaining hidden.
If the idea doesn’t work, that’s not a failure. That’s why we have that 20% buffer. That’s just the reality of discovering deep-rooted issues in the process. In developing countermeasures, we’re not adding or deleting; we might just decide that something can’t be included because of whatever we’re discovering. But we’re not haphazardly deciding this isn’t a priority anymore. What we are doing is managing the progress.
Confirming the Go-Live Date
With this 80% completion rate in 30 days, we can get clear on a confirmed go-live date. Towards the end of our 30-day lead time, we’re able to see far enough ahead to be able to say that on this date, we can go live with these 50 countermeasures across the whole operation. This is a huge milestone in activity.
Through the PDCA’s eight steps, every step is a milestone in and of itself. You start to feel success in every step; the clarity, the camaraderie that comes from understanding, and just the heightened awareness around processes already improve things, even though you haven’t changed anything yet.
Stay tuned for next week’s blog post. I’ll be teaching how you can make sure your team is on track to accomplish the 80 percent completion rate in developing countermeasures within 30 days.
In your service,
Hilary Corna
