March 08, 2009

targets

Sometime ago I had a discussion in this blog with the Deming idea that one should not put targets on production. It took a while for me to fully understand and agree that the problem were not the targets themselves, but individual production related targets were wrong. For example, having the idea of continuously improving a company is a target because you will have to measure and identify that those measures are improving. That is the target, improving.

However everything you study and see asks for measures. Study for KBAM one of the procedures that is recommended is to have measures and to attach those measures to results and numbers. And those measures/targets have to be SMART, (what means they should be specific...). So that is an important balance. You need to have objectives and some degree of objectivity is needed , some target is needed. But that has to be real and collective, and has to be thought in such a way that will stimulate everyone to drive honestly together, everyone to work as a system toward this guiding objective.

So that is the hard thing, have objectives that help the system to improve, have the people to know what to do and that actually bring performance benefits that are real and not only created to achieve short term advantages.

 



: 08 Mar 2009 21:57 |  Tags:    |  Comments (2) |  Report a problem

- 2 comments by 2 or more people Not publicly viewable

  1. Paul Roberts

    Francisco, I fully agree with what you write. Deming was against arbitrary targets, not the aims and goals associated with improving a system. Arbitrary targets are those set by people who do not understand that any process or system will give an output that it is designed to give (less any drop in performance due to degradation). That output will vary over time due to variation. If we wish the system to give more to meet a higher target or goal something has to be done to fundamentally improve the system and this improvement has to be supported with resources.

    12 Mar 2009, 09:37

  2. yes. The thing is that getting to that degree of understanding and showing it on usual hurry of organisations is going to be hard, but I believe achievable. Besides that, all real good things are hard and slow anyway…

    12 Mar 2009, 21:21

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