“Cash for Clunkers" Doesn’t Have to Be a Lemon
Over the weekend my father-in-law decided to take advantage of the Cash for Clunkers program and went car shopping.
Unfortunately the Dodge dealer he went to in his home town of Paris,
Illinois informed him that they had put the program on hold. Apparently
they had sold five cars and had yet to be paid by the government. He
then contacted another dealer in Indiana and was told that they had
also stopped honoring the program. They had sold 38 cars and had yet to
be paid by the government and were not sure if they would be paid.
Thus, despite all the assurances and actions by congress and the
President, poor execution by the bureaucracy is stifling the program.
Simply
passing legislation does not guarantee results. Just as in the ARRA
legislation, now under fire for not delivering the intended outcomes,
organizational credibility is always a casualty in these situations. It
is important that the extended infrastructure in such transparent
initiatives be ready to implement the legislation. It is eerily similar
to the problems that have plagued effective strategy execution in
troubled corporations and spawned pundit pablum about how to
effectively implement strategy.
One of the key reasons for
missteps of any new legislation is the lack of focus on processes.
Great people with good intentions working in bad processes still yields
bad results. The responsibility to ensure new legislation delivers
results falls to the executive branch, Cabinet Secretaries and the
agency directors who report to them. These leaders must understand the
capabilities of their (1) people, (2) processes and (3) technology to
meet the unique requirements of each new law and react to deliver
results “out of the box."
Leadership must work together with the
experts embedded in their organizations to find rapid, fact-based
solutions to identifying and closing process gaps that often lead to
failed execution. And while this is easy to say, it requires a lot of
elbow grease, empowerment of associates and effective leadership to
make it all work. Fortunately there are tools and methods from industry
that can meet the needs of leadership even in these extraordinary times.
Leaders
must challenge old thinking and get cross-functional teams into a room
in a Kaizen fashion to dissect the new laws and policies, identify
implementation requirements and chart how they might impact current
people and processes. They must then compare this to current
capabilities and complete a “gap analysis.” From this point it is
possible to create a roadmap to close any gaps that exist before the
new law/policy becomes a reality.
Next they must adopt tools
such as Lean and Six Sigma in combination with cross-functional process
reengineering teams to rapidly close these gaps. This has been done in
government as well as industry – particularly at the state level –
within days or a few weeks.
Finally they must put in place
performance management tools to measure the processes and the outcomes.
Front line tools such as Hour-by-Hour charts and visual management
similar to what is in place at Toyota and other “Lean” companies can
quickly highlight how effectively processes are working. In addition
such tools as scorecards tightly coupled with appropriate metrics and
KPIs can be used to measure the effectiveness of the legislation. And,
of course, technology is a key enabler in eliminating process waste and
robust performance measurement. It is often said that adversity creates
crisis to drive change in an organization. At no other time in recent
history have we had more adversity and yet we continue to see the types
of results that have tarnished the reputation of government. Now is the
time for change – not just in policy and legislation but in the
internal machine that is the federal government.
Keep climbing!
