Strategic planning and deployment need Daily Management as support

Anyone who works in the corporate world knows that many companies spend a good part of their available time drawing up plans. Especially in the last quarter of the year, many meetings consume the resources and energy of various work teams, absorbed in their annual planning cycles.

They put together detailed strategies that require long, sometimes exhausting discussions, as well as hours and hours of work so that ideas, analyses, objectives, targets and actions can be formatted and put down on paper, in spreadsheets, in expectation contracts, in control systems…

The big problem, however, is that when people try to put these plans into execution, they often fail to generate the expected results. This, of course, brings frustration and countless problems.

Why does this happen?

In many cases, it is not because the strategic guidelines were poorly drawn up, but because, after they were drawn up, there was no proper strategy deployment, nor any connection to the company's day-to-day operations, adapting them to the new desired reality.

Many companies design a significant redirection of their business, positioning, value proposition and so on, without, however, taking care to prepare the basic routines in the work units so that they deliver the expected performance in this new context.

In the lean system, Daily Management – also known by the acronym DM – plays a fundamental role in keeping the routine running as planned, reaching the established targets and carrying out continuous improvement. When, through strategic actions, objectives, processes and ways of working change significantly, DM needs to be updated, connecting the people at each workstation to the new objectives.

Without this, the risk is creating a “giant with feet of clay” and jeopardizing the achievement of the planned changes because of basic problems. In many companies with traditional management, based on command and control, Daily Management is a kind of “missing link” that is almost never put into practice to connect the envisioned strategy to its operationalization in the companies' day-to-day work.

There are many DM practices that can be adopted in an organization's daily routine so that what was envisioned in the strategic plan becomes reality.

For example, the practice of holding quick meetings, of 20 to 30 minutes, held daily in the gemba, with the leaders present and supported by information from the visual management boards. This practice should show, in a simple, clear, instructive and up-to-date way, how the operation is going – what was planned versus what is actually happening. And what is planned, at the most elementary level of work, must be fully connected to the priorities that have been set and deployed, making clear each person's contribution to the established direction.

In this way, DM makes it possible to verify whether the right work is being done, at the right time, looking at the appropriate numbers, in accordance with what had been planned. Thus, DM is able to link the envisioned purpose to the control variables and to the chain of help, generating structured, everyday problem solving.

In this context, problems, when they arise, will always be identified and dealt with quickly and effectively by everyone in the organization. Without DM, on the other hand, failures will either not be discovered or will only appear at the end of the cycles. By then they will be bigger, at times “uncontrollable,” and harder to overcome. And this, obviously, ends up jeopardizing results.

It is important to reinforce that the role of leaders is fundamental for DM to be efficient. They must engage people through their behavior, presence and readiness to help solve the problems that cannot be solved at the first level, as soon as they arise.

Thus, in quick and objective meetings, leaders and their teams should discuss which problems prevented the targets from being reached, the “root causes” of these problems and the ways to eliminate them, in order to put a definitive end to the failures and achieve the objectives.

This is a different view of management, which presupposes participative leadership that is present where things happen, combined with a culture of solving problems quickly, where they occur and by the people involved.

DM enables speed in decision-making. It generates constant alignment with what was laid out in the strategy. It ensures engagement and focus at the different levels of the organization. It encourages and empowers everyone to carry out activities aimed at maintaining the parameters established in the strategy deployment. And thus it invariably brings consistent results, while laying solid foundations for the company's future.

So, reflect on this: in your organization, do the planned performance leaps often fail to materialize because of deviations that occur in the execution of actions and in day-to-day operations, according to the new processes established?

Establishing, or deepening, Daily Management can be a way to make the achievement and maintenance of the established objectives more robust. So don't forget to improve this aspect as well, as a way of sustaining the planning for next year and the years that follow.