Most businesses don't have a shortage of action plans.
We create them after strategy meetings, improvement projects, management reviews and team discussions. We agree what needs to happen, allocate responsibility and put a completion date against it.
The problem isn't usually creating the plan.
It's making sure it happens.
Having worked in continuous improvement for around 30 years, I've seen initiatives begin with enormous enthusiasm only to gradually lose momentum. Actions slip, priorities change, people become busy and, before long, another promising initiative has failed to deliver what was originally intended.
For me, one of the biggest causes is a lack of visibility.
Think about how action plans often operate inside an organisation. Engineering has its projects. HR has its priorities. Finance has its actions. Operations has improvement programmes. Individual managers have their own spreadsheets, documents and systems.
Each might make perfect sense in isolation, but who has visibility across all of them?
If you're the CEO or managing director, can you easily see every important action currently taking place across the business?
Can you see what's overdue? Can you see where responsibility is concentrated? Can you identify projects that are drifting before they become problems?
Often, the answer is no.
That's one of the reasons we've developed and trademarked Confluential Action Plans within POET Systems.
The name comes from the idea of a river. Individual tributaries flow together at a confluence to create something bigger. We think businesses should look at their actions in much the same way.
Every individual action should ultimately contribute towards the wider objectives of the organisation.
Technology can give leaders the visibility to make that possible. Rather than having to open individual project plans, management should be able to look across the organisation and understand the health of improvement activity in one place.
But this isn't fundamentally a technology issue. It's a leadership issue, and it certainly isn't limited to manufacturing.
If HR is organising an important project, why shouldn't that be visible? If finance is driving an initiative to improve debtor collection, why shouldn't leadership be able to see its progress? The same applies to engineering, sales, operations or any other function.
The objective isn't for senior management to interfere with every action taking place within the business. It's to create transparency and accountability.
When everyone can see what has been agreed, who owns it and when it should be completed, conversations change.
There is less opportunity for an action to disappear because somebody isn't in the meeting or because the information sits on somebody else's computer.
More importantly, organisations become better at sustaining change.
We spend enormous amounts of time talking about strategy, transformation and continuous improvement. But none of those things happen because we discussed them in a meeting.
They happen because somebody takes responsibility for doing something differently.
A good action plan records that intention and a successful business makes sure it happens.
