This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
What basic principle can organizations use as a transformation starting point?
Mike Parkins: I think moving beyond lean is important for most organizations. I’m a firm believer that lean needs to be your foundation and your baseline. You should never give up lean principles and teaching your people that.
But to continue to drive productivity and performance, you’re going to need to match that with the new tools, the new capabilities of your people, and the ability to work with and influence other functions within the company.
What is the role of people in the pursuit of next-generation operational excellence?
Kimberly Borden: At the heart of any technology transformation or any transformation in general is people. If you’re not solving for the people and bringing them along with the journey, you’re missing the point completely.
Mike Parkins: One of the barriers for driving productivity in any organization, is the willingness to invest in your people, in their skills, giving them feedback. Having managers who are comfortable giving supportive feedback, having those conversations, having the right metrics and others in place so that people know how they are doing.
What is the role of technology in enabling next-generation operational excellence?
Kimberly Borden: There are lots of ways in which technology can bring together collaboration, collaboration platforms, data visibility. Suddenly, you know what’s happening, where, and when — instantly. And are able to connect the dots across different data.
There are many reasons why technology plays an incredibly important role. One of the things that I love best about it is it takes the tediousness out of the job. Many times, people assume that it would replace jobs. It replaces the work that nobody wants to do.
How can technology underpin an organization’s principles, behaviors, and management systems?
Kimberly Borden: Technology can enable a feedback culture. And what I mean by that is you are getting constant feedback if you’re using a copilot or something along those lines. It will make you better in your job, but it also gives you this wonderful feedback mechanism that then you can share with others.
What I find in a lot of clients is they’ve got a little bit of that, but they still don’t have great feedback, performance dialogues with managers to individual contributors or up. And so really being able to reinforce that performance loop with the people that are executing is critical and, I find, oftentimes overlooked.
What is one important thing to remember before starting a next-generation operational excellence transformation?
Kimberly Borden: You also need to rewire the processes fundamentally end-to-end in order to ensure that the transformation is successful. So even if you have a technology tool, if you don’t transform the process too, you miss the impact, because it’s never just technology.
