12 Common Mistakes to Avoid
Advanced quality methods such as Lean-Six Sigma have much to offer healthcare. Then why is it that there are more failures than success? Below is a list of the 12 most common errors senior leaders make when introducing Lean-Six Sigma to their organization.
-
Senior leaders view Lean-Six Sigma as a training exercise alone.
-
Leaders fail to design an adequate Accountability structure suitable for performance improvement.
-
Leadership's over-reliance of benchmarking and productivity measures as a solution when neither offers solutions nor insights that tell managers what to improve.
-
Senior leaders combine the goal setting step and identification of solutions into one step rather than establishing the goal first.
-
Leaders rely on total system redesign
-
Lean-Six Sigma is not tailored to healthcare and is introduced with all the industrial jargon and potentially alienates clinical staff
-
Leadership allows the methodical data driven methods of Six Sigma (DMAIC) to slow down progress and create analysis paralysis. The result is analysis is valued over implementation and action.
-
Leaders and managers foster an over reliance of best practices rather than develop solutions that work in their facility.
-
Leaders fail to create a framework for prioritizing and separating the urgent from the strategically important.
-
Leadership does identify resources and assign accountability for a communication plan. It involves a failure to launch a sustained communication effort.
-
Leadership fails to establish a firm expectation of an ROI and a deliberately create a mechanism to tracking tangible gains in performance.
-
Leadership does not place the responsibility for change with the process owner rather places accountability solely on the performance improvement department of Black Belts to drive change.
