Ideas to Avoid ‘Planning Trap’ and Focus on Execution

A lot of organizations fall in what I call “planning trap” – a lot of planning in the meetings, lot of decisions on improvement areas and eventually very little action.

One of the simplest measures of team/organization effectiveness is to keep a close watch on how much is decided in a meeting versus how much actually gets done. It is very easy to get distracted by other issues (and surprisingly, these ‘other issues’ always exists) within your area of work.

Two main reasons why this happens:

• Executives loose focus on key actions (and focus on other issues)
• Executives get impatient for results (specially for improvement actions where an organic approach is needed.)

Here are a few ideas to get over the planning trap:

• Conclude every meeting with action items, deadlines and responsibilities. Keep a log.
• Measure the progress and celebrate ‘quick wins” to keep everyone motivated. Show them the evidences of success.
• Set the context right, so people understand the importance of actions and how it solves real business problems. They need to see the purpose of improvement actions.
• Recognize their effort and provide direct/indirect rewards for participation.
• Persistently monitor how much is decided versus how much actually gets done.
• Involve top management in demonstrating their commitment towards improvement and underline the importance of execution-orientation.
• Test, Validate, Inspect: Simply put, test the product before it ships, make use of the countless ALM tools out there for testing, and don’t allow it to have bugs!

More the gap, more you need to work on it. Do you remember that quote? – “A simple idea executed brilliantly is far better than a great idea executed poorly.”

Success in any long term improvement initiative depends largely on two factors : Doing right communication to keep everyone motivated and keeping the score.

Here are a few bite-sized ideas from my book #QUALITYtweet that underline this fact:

#QUALITYtweet: “If you don’t periodically review the progress of your quality initiative with your team, you are  giving them a reason to slow down.”

#QUALITYtweet: Critical question: are the results of your improvement initiative visible enough to keep everybody engaged and encouraged?

Bottom line: If you don’t communicate enough and fail to keep a score of actions/deadlines/key objectives, you may fall in the ‘planning trap’ – and trust me, it is not a nice place to be in because little actually gets done!

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P.S: My post “Training and Development – A Holistic View” is featured in Carnival of HR at “HR Observations” blog. If you are looking for fresh insights on HR specific issues, posts in this carnival are a must-read. Check it out!