Assignment Ioanna Singh

Visualization Tool

Challenge   In the large organization I currently work, my role is to act as a facilitator between the different  departments, with the main ones being Sales, Quality and Production but also Accounting, Shipping  etc. Since I arrived in this organization, we have had several issues of non-quality reported by our  clients but each one of the teams was blaming another department and as a result a tension has been  growing between the teams.  As I was trying to map the AS-IS (existing) situation of the current process, I noticed that there wasn’t  a clear process with each team’s actions and responsibilities, in order to be able to identify quickly  and clearly which step of the process was responsible for the non-quality.  After a discussion with the top management, we decided to have a workshop with the managers of  each department in order to address the problem.    Selection    I knew that the workshop would be a challenge as the situation was unclear for quite a long time and  after having discussed with all the Managers in advance in order to have their feedback on the  situation, I realized that they had a very similar way of seeing the process but each one of them  expressed the responsibility of each action in a very different way and it was probably the reason why  the tension was growing.  Given the situation, I chose to use the Visualization tool, which I believed would help clear out the  situation and draw a process where every manager would agree on, with clear objectives for each  department in terms of performance.    Application    I asked each one of the managers, as pre-workshop assignment to take pictures or prepare diagrams  of each step of his/her team’s actions as he/she was seeing it integrated in the whole business  workflow and assigned to each department a color frame to put around the pictures.  The day of the workshop I drew on a big whiteboard the whole process of the company (beginning  from production, to quality controls and through all the process to packaging & shipping) without  assigning a responsible department to each step of the process. Throughout the day we positioned  the pictures each one of the managers had brought on the process line. It was clear to see the area of  action of each department thanks to the color frame. There weren’t any conflicts on the actions part  of the process but the fact that we had it drawn up, it was easier to identify where each team’s  responsibility was over. With the help of the top management, we marked a performance objective  for each one of the critical steps in the process where non-quality could appear and agreed on a  measurement procedure. At the end of the day we had a clear process with clear performance  objectives for each one of the departments.     Insight     This workshop and the application of the Visualization tool showed me that often people express  themselves differently and this can cause lack of comprehension and tensions. It also showed to the  managers of the company how important communication is, especially in times of crisis. The  feedbacks I got were also very encouraging as they said they would definitely use the Visualization  tool when facing a challenge in their respective teams.

Approach    In a similar situation where I need to bring people under a consensus, I will definitely use again the  Visualization tool, which is in my opinion, the best way to share with a large group of people who have  different ways of seeing things by using more than just words.

