Suppose
you were working for a company who wanted to become a more profitable one. You assemble the CEO and other key members of
his or her staff to develop an effective plan to achieve this goal of enhanced
profitability. After much discussion and dialogue, this group agrees on a
Goal as “Highly Profitable Company” and place it inside the Goal box (see
partial IO Map below). As mentioned previously, this goal has been written as a
terminal outcome that this company has already achieved. The next layer of the IO Map is the Critical
Success Factor (CSF) level. Like the
Goal, the CSF’s (normally no more than 3 to 5) are worded as though they were
already in place. You ask the
question, “What must we have in place if
we are going to achieve our Goal?” The first response you is “We know that we
must have highly satisfied customers,” so you place the response in the first
CSF box. The next response you hear is “Throughput must be high and
growing,” so you place this response in the second CSF box. A third response
you hear is, “A stable and involved work force,” so you add it to the third
box. The fourth response you hear is that “Operating Expenses must be low and
stable,” so you add that one to the fourth CSF box. The last response you hear is, “Minimal raw
material inventory,” and you add it to the fifth CSF box. This group believes that if these five CSF’s
are achieved, then they will surely become a highly profitable company.
Directly
beneath the CSFs are a series of Necessary Conditions that must also be in
place in order to achieve each of the CSFs. So once again you start by asking
the same question as you did for the CSF’s, “What must be in place to achieve
each of the CSF’s?” and you place each response inside a new entity box
directly beneath the appropriate CSF box.
For example, suppose the first response you hear is, “In order to have
highly satisfied customers, we must High On-Time Delivery,” so you add it to
the first NC box. Remember, the
NC’s represent actions that must be completed to achieve each individual CSF
and form the basis for your company’s improvement plan. You then might ask, “Is this all we need to
have highly satisfied customers?”
Another response might be, “We need excellent Quality and Customer
Perceived Value,” so you add both of these to the boxes below the first CSF.
At this point, you continue asking the same question for each of the other
CSF’s to accumulate the first level of NC’s (see partial IO Map below).
So
now you have all of the CSF’s and the first level of NC’s, but you’re not yet
finished. Suppose that someone asks,
“How are we going to achieve a high on-time delivery rate?” Where do you display the answer to this
question? It is perfectly acceptable to
have more than a single level of NC’s, so if you received an answer to that
question as, “We must have Buffer Management in place and functioning.” You then create another box below the high
on-time delivery one and add the buffer management comment to it. When your
team is satisfied that it has identified all of the NCs (at all levels) to
achieve each of the CSF’s and ultimately its Goal, you then turn to the next
phase of how to use the IO Map to analyze your organization’s state. In a fully completed IO Map you should have
3-5 CSFs and no more than 2-3 layers of NC’s. Please understand that these
are guidelines, so you could have more than 5 CSF’s and more than 3 layers of
NC’s, but not many more of each. Here is
our completed IO Map.
In
our next posting we will demonstrate how to use this completed IO Map to assess
your organizations current reality with respect to achieving the goal of
becoming a highly profitable company.
Bob
Sproull
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