What is the formula for excellence?

Have you ever wondered, what went wrong with that project or initiative? It was such a good idea. Why was it met with such resistance? Why did it fail?

Perhaps it had to do with lack of acceptance…

Excellence = Quality x Acceptance

This is a useful framework to remember whenever you are about to start a major initiative or project. One of my Six Sigma instructors said Excellence = Quality X Acceptance (E = Q x A) was the most important concept in Six Sigma. This simple equation can explain many of our struggles.

What does this mean? Practically speaking it means that if you had the best idea ever and Q = 10 but that idea were only accepted by half the people (A = 5), then it would only be E = 50 which is a failing grade!

Here is how this framework is widely relevant:

Excellence for Business Leaders = Business Case x Stakeholder Acceptance

Excellence for R&D and Product Managers = New Product Design x Customer Acceptance

Excellence for Project Managers = Project Management Skills x Change Management Skills

This Six Sigma concept originated out of a desire to improve quality and efficiency but is much more widely applicable to any major initiative or project when you stop to think about what it really means.

-          This equation is a multiplication equation, not addition.

By this principle, for anything to be successful the acceptance rate must be over 5 and this is assuming the quality is a 10.

-          Excellence is not easy to achieve.

An idea that has Q = 9 and A = 9 would result in a score of E = 81.

Be aware that by the Pareto principle, achieving over an 8 or 80% becomes more time consuming so you can see how achieving true excellence is no easy feat!

-          From a time standpoint, in many cases it is better to work on increasing a low acceptance score rather than spend more time refining a good idea.

-          There will be exceptions to this for certain industries like healthcare where an extremely high-quality score is necessary, however for most initiatives, leaders would gain more advantage by spending their limited time and resources on improving acceptance rather than improving a high-quality score.   

Application

As you start the year and think about the initiatives and projects that you and your team need to accomplish this year, remember to:

(1)    Include time at the beginning of the project to put together an “acceptance plan” as part of the overall project plan. The time spent at the beginning to gain a thorough understanding of all major stakeholder needs, will be well spent, and save you time and a lot of headaches later.

(2)    Build-in time at each milestone in your project for acceptance – in large organizations it can easily take a month or two for acceptance at each milestone. Typically, the largest the organization, the more time is needed. This is from the time the team has decided what should be done until all major stakeholders are on board. If this time is not factored into the overall project timeline, then what can happen is the team rushes to push out the product or change initiative and close out the project to meet the deadline, but it ends up not being used or fails to perform.  

What other measures can be taken to improve acceptance? I’ll discuss this in part two of this series and explain three useful change management frameworks that you can use to increase project excellence and success.

For more #formulas&frameworks, check out this blog on the formula for trust.

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