If an organization’s leadership team desires to have a major performance improvement as a result of their improvement project activities, there are common actions which should happen (but often do not). One of these actions is to clearly define the leadership and project team sponsors' Roles, Responsibilities and Accountabilities. Most organizations do a reasonable job of defining the roles, responsibilities and accountabilities of team leads and team members. But for the key supporting players, not on the team, they typically go undefined, falsely assuming that people already know from prior experience.

Teams typically follow some type of a problem-solving methodology for the technical issues involved. However, if they desire truly outstanding performance improvement, then project team sponsors have a very specific role to play in guiding teams and in holding teams responsible. The same issues exist, whether organizations are using DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve & Control from Six Sigma) or PDCA (Plan, Do, Check & Act) or some other improvement methodology. For example:

Sponsors: At the beginning of a project the sponsor is responsible for creating a team charter, selecting team members, allocating time to work on a project, etc. As a team finishes up the first step of its work (say using the DMAIC model) the sponsor has a set of questions he/she should ask to see if the team has done an adequate job for this step.

Leadership Teams: Leadership is responsible for turning soft savings into hard dollars. Often there is little accountability for making this happen. They also have responsibilities for periodic reviews of key projects/results, but often they look at long list of projects and do not properly govern improvement and key project activities.

We work with leadership teams on actions to improve the effectiveness of their organization’s performance improvement activities. It does not matter if the tools in use are Six Sigma, Lean, Supply Chain Management, ERP implementations or some other popular method. We use a standard diagnostic methodology that leaders should use at the end of each major milestone to determine the appropriate next-phase guidance for performance improvement teams.