Last week we learned about OPIP – the Operations Performance Improvement Plan. Now let’s look at how SmartSheets can help us manage those plans.
The first step in building the OPIP is capturing the projects that we want to work on to reduce our costs by entering them into SmartSheets. First, you name the project, and then lay out the steps. Because SmartSheets is a step-by-step outlining tool, it’s easy to list the major parts of the project and then list subordinate tasks required to complete the high-level project.
Once you have laid out all of the tasks in the order in which they need to be done, you can assign completion dates. Now, it is easy to enter dates; however, you should pick realistic dates that still challenge you to keep on track and complete the project. If you are relying on other people to complete steps of the project, you should check with them to make sure they do not have a conflict or a competing priority.
A helpful feature of SmartSheets is the Gantt view, which shows you the timeline that you have created. This view allows you to easily check for conflicts, verify resource utilization and ensure that you are not overcommitting your resources. In other words, you should check to see whether you have tasked the same person or team with too many tasks due at the same time.
Organizing the work in this way not only helps your own efficiency, but it also helps your team. I remember back in high school how much I hated doing outlines. Today, by contrast, I find them extremely useful in organizing my thoughts and work. This tool allows you to work in outline form to get the rough plan entered and then refine it as you understand better what you want to get accomplished and understand all of the tasks and teams involved.
Here comes the hard part of the OPIP process: prioritization. Unfortunately, the tool cannot help you determine what you need to do when.
We each have limited time and resources to work on process improvements, but they need to get done. So how do we determine which to do first? For our company, we are going to prioritize them by getting the biggest improvements first. This maximizes the use of your resources.
To identify the biggest improvements, you need to determine the value of each of the improvement projects that you want to work on. This value should represent the measurement of the impact of the improvement, and this should be a numeric value. This number could be the return on investment (ROI) where the cost of the project is outweighed by the monetary savings it produces over time, so the value you would use would be the savings, or the value would be number of hours saved or a cycle-time reduction target. Any of these values can become a target for you and your team to go after.
Once you have established a value for each project, you should rank your improvement projects from the biggest value of return to the smallest. That gives you the priority order in which to work your projects and maximize your resources. At that point you simply work the biggest savings projects first. This avoids assigning people to time-consuming tasks that don’t generate much return when their time could be better spent on a project that will help a lot of people or generate a lot of savings.
Once you have determined the priority order for your projects, you can go back to the tool (SmartSheets) and rank those projects through scheduling. Schedule the projects with the biggest savings first. That way your team is working on the most important project first. I think you get the idea.
Your team can then use SmartSheets to see what tasks they have to carry out and report on their progress. You can use the tool to see, in one place, where everyone is at. Managing your OPIP inside the SmartSheet tool makes your life much easier by having one repository for your plan.
Everyone will have projects they will be working on, which means everyone will have plans and need support. You will need to talk with people outside your department to make sure that they can support your plan. For example, several parts of the company might all want to add a training component to their plan, but you will need to check with the Training Department to make sure your request doesn’t require the same resources at the same time as another OPIP.
To wrap up, I want to add one very important comment on the OPIP. If you are managing to your plan, it will be evident. That should build your confidence. If you have planned well and are meeting your deadlines, you will complete projects and your team and the company will benefit. This is what I am looking to see when I meet with managers about their business.
When I have a meeting with a manager (i.e., a supervisor, manager, director or vice president) about their business, I am evaluating their performance based on what and how they tell me about how they run their business. If the manager is making their numbers and can demonstrate through the use of the tool that they are managing improvements, then my confidence will grow as well. If the opposite is true, then my confidence in that manager will decrease. As I said near the beginning of last week’s blog, as business managers, we should constantly strive to find ways to improve how our business, department or process runs and performs.
I hope these blogs help you understand what an OPIP is, why we are using them and how to build them in Smartsheets as we start using OPIPs to improve our business.
See you on the deckplates!
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