06 breakthrough objectives

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6. Breakthrough Objectives Page 1

Breakthrough Objectives

Overview

Breakthrough objectives are the vital fewsignificant changes needed for the organization toachieve its vision.

There's a three-way test all breakthroughobjectives must satisfy.

First, a breakthrough objective must be a Stretch

target that requires cross-functional cooperationto achieve. This is important since the Hoshinprocess is about radical change made possiblethrough collaboration and teamwork.

Next, the objective should be SMART - which we first learned about in the Practical ProblemSolving course. As a review SMART objectives are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic,and time-bound.

And finally, breakthrough objectives must build significant organizational capability by turningthe Vision we learned about in the last module into reality. In other words, a breakthrough

objective must help us move closer to our ideal Vision of where we want the company to be.

Now, there are many ways to go about defining breakthrough objectives. The most obvious iswhen a specific organizational challenge or opportunity comes to the forefront.

For example, a company may have a serious quality control issue potentially leading to the lossof customers. In this case, a breakthrough objective may be focused on a specific qualityinitiative.

Additionally, there are several tools that can be used to help an organization identify highimpact breakthrough objectives.

Radar Chart

The first tool, which we learned about in the 7 QC Tools course, is the radar chart. We usethe radar chart to perform a gap analysis of where the team believes the vision elementsidentified in the previous step currently are.


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To do this we place the vision elements on the outer rim as shown below. We then have allteam members vote, using colored stickers or different colored markers, on where theybelieve each vision element is at by placing their sticker or dot on the spoke of each elementas shown here.

It should be noted, for example purposes, only 3 associates have voted here. When possiblereal data should be used to accurately quantify things but, in many cases, we'll rely on theexpertise and opinions of our team members. Once all the votes are consolidated and a singlescore for each element is calculated by averaging the results a new radar chart is completed asshown here. In Treetops situation we see that there's a large gap with the "OperationalExcellence" Vision Element.

In other words, the team feels like improvement is needed in this area. Conversely, the teamfeels the organization is doing very well with the vision element of "Our associates are totallysatisfied with their jobs" as shown in the radar chart.

Once the radar chart is complete the team can easily see what vision elements need the mostfocus enabling them to be able to narrow in on a potential breakthrough objective.

Relations Diagram

Next, in addition to the radar chart another powerful tool that can be used to identifyopportunities for improvement is called the Relations Diagram sometimes referred to as theInterrelationship Digraph.

To create a Relations Diagram the Treetop team listed the vision elements as shown below.The team then seeks to understand which elements influence others.


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To do this they simply asked whether each element causes or enables another element. Forexample, the team asked whether Employee Training & Development causes or enablesOperational Excellence to which the team all agreed it did.

As a result the team simply drew an arrow from box 2 to box 7 as shown above. Once theteam worked around each element individually their final result looked like this.

To help quantify the results the team simply counted the number of arrows in and out of eachbox. The vision elements with a lot of incoming arrows may serve as desired outcomes of thevision while the elements with the most arrows out represent the primary causes or driversof the vision.

For example, we see that element 5 - Operational Excellence - had 2 arrows in and 3 arrowsout while element 7 - Strong Financial Performance - had 5 arrows in and only 1 arrow out.

Now, at this point the Treetop team used the results from the radar chart and relationsdiagram to hone in on a vision element to focus on for their initial breakthrough objective.

After some excellent discussion the team decided to initially focus on the 5th Vision Element -Operational Excellence - since there was a large gap in the radar chart while also having 3arrows out in the relations diagram.


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Obviously this element is still far too vague to be a breakthrough objective so the teamcompleted another Affinity Diagram brainstorming session in order to indentify somebreakthrough objectives focused on Operational Excellence.

After an hour of work the team narrowed their focus to Increasing the Productivity of theirAssembly department by 45% within the next 12 months. The metric the team chose to use

to gauge success was net profit per assembler which accounted for things such as overtimeworked.

At this point the Treetop team could have chosen another breakthrough objective, or possiblyeven two more, but instead they decided to focus all of their efforts on one since this wastheir first attempt at Hoshin Planning.

With this said, we've seen companies successfully attack as many as 3 to 4 breakthroughobjectives but these organizations were extremely skilled at Hoshin Planning so for those

just starting out we'd encourage you to initially focus on 1 or 2 breakthrough objectives.

06 breakthrough objectives

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