Obeya stands out as a powerful management tool bringing people together to dynamically question the matters that generate generating value for a company.
As a reminder, a management obeya comprehends 6 to 7 panels reflecting the vision and the path to achieve it supported by performance indicators and problem solving.
Obeya, a thinking model
Lately, I have helped a regional director of a large utility company and its territorial directors to set up management Obeyas in line with the national Obeya of the executive committee.
What struck me the most in the creation process of the Obeya was the difficulty to translate the company’s vision into words describing what the local successes should be. Time is seldom devoted to reflecting on the meaning of a company’s strategy and rather applied at launching multiple projects without being certain of their contribution to any operational or qualitative benefit. The reformulation exercise brought up interesting discussions on key topics such as how do we evaluate the quality of a contract, what are the success criteria to be considered and how do we look at our activity from the end customer’s point of view? This Hansei time allowed to challenge the current way of looking at the business and refocus the attention on added value core activities as defining KPIs to monitor them.
On the field, it meant conducting a thorough contract analysis to list the expected commitments and evaluate their advancement status. One of the simple learnings was: never take a situation for granted and confront beliefs with the reality. The outcome is often harsh, but it opens doors for rebuilding a strategy to restore service quality. In our case, it helped identify requirements that had been forgotten and translate them into operational actions. Another breakthrough came out in the nature of the exchanges that took place during the monthly Obeya meetings. They shifted from slide reviews to operational concerns due to the information and graphs shown on the panels. Sharing customer verbatim allowed to highlight recurrent pain points and led managers to plan field visits (gemba) to go and see how the job was done and understand the underlying reasons of the discontent. Besides, the practice of gemba procures a space to explain why improvement is important and links the need for change with operational activities. By giving sense to the job, managers replace people contribution at the heart of the business mechanism.
In the end, what makes an Obeya a perfect management tool?
- It concentrates all the needed information in one single space to take the right decisions towards higher customer satisfaction.
- It unlocks discussions as they are based on figures and facts from the field. An Obeya displays 5 to 6 KPIs to monitor success.
- It ensures people stay focused on the topics that matter to the business
- It brings management to the field to go and see why things happen and initiate change based on the knowledge of the operational people.
- It unveils complex business problems which are dealt with through the A3 problem solving practice. These should be listed in the Obeya and followed weekly.
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If fou feel that an Obeya could help clarifying a business situation and take the right decisions, contact us to learn more.
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