By Reuben May, Delivery Manager, Verista
If you are a leader responsible for sustaining, improving, and accelerating your team, department or division, but you have finite resources, you are not alone.
Today, leaders are tasked to increase productivity without increasing headcount. Recruitment and retention on their own are challenging enough. So, implementing improvements to operations and having time to be innovative at the same time may see like an impossible feat. The status quo seen in many environments does not have to be the story you tell. What if you could flip the script? A key starting point is developing your team’s goals, so they directly tie back to your sites/divisions goals and metrics. By aligning project objectives, metrics and performance with measurable impact to the company’s goals, justifying your spend can become clear to management.
Metrics-Based Examples of How to Align and Justify Spend That Results in Innovation and Improvement
For example, let’s say you know it will take 3 senior experienced engineers several months to study and improve your production process, plus 2 technical writers 3 additional months to create protocols and update procedures to allow you to improve your production line efficiency by 25%. It quickly becomes clear that you can’t afford not to improve your efficiency. Furthermore, if you factor in that raw material costs are increasing, you can quantify the amount of raw material you will be wasting.
Another example…You know that it will take 2 experienced quality professionals at least 2 months to review existing process deviations or production investigations to develop a top-3 preventive action path forward that will increase your “Right First Time” by 37%, resulting in fewer lost batches and missed deadlines. Plus, imagine the headlines you could make for your company if this improvement resulted in no stock outs.
Unlike the examples above, you may face the difficult challenge of not being able to attribute measurable value to your organization’s bottom line. If some of your projects or initiatives fall in this category, it may have a negative impact on your funding, whether or not it seems fair. In these instances, another path to consider involves getting funding of your program from continuous improvement or capital budgets. Again, you must align your team’s goals with the goals of these teams. If you can develop metrics that improve operations through improvement projects or capital purchases that clearly demonstrate how your team is positioned to meet the organization’s future goals, it’s a win-win for all parties.
Structuring a project to accelerate your team’s performance and create greater value for your organization will help drive your organization to consider augmenting your team.
Summary
Rather than focusing solely on meeting your budget, being able to see an alternate path that advances not only your organization’s goals, but also your entire company’s performance, may help justify critical resources who create innovative solutions and ROI. Once you get buy-in that your team’s performance could provide greater value to the company at large, the next step is deciding which projects you take on and who you bring on.
This step comes with many complicated decisions as to who is qualified to help as well as recruitment challenges. Collaborating with the right partner to help you both justify budget and resources, along with prioritizing which initiatives provide the most value, could make the crucial difference in your project or team augmentation’s success or failure. The right strategy, expertise and skill can take you exactly where your team’s goals need you to be – ultimately helping you and your company realize your team’s alternate future.
Consider partnering with a trusted vendor that has a proven track record, is an industry leader and has the domain expertise you’re looking for. Ask Verista how we’ve helped meet our Clients goals and how we can do it again for you by emailing us at [email protected].
