Most people have a natural aversion to change, especially when it challenges their established work processes. This can make it difficult to gain buy-in for process improvement initiatives. To make meaningful improvements, it’s important to overcome major obstacles in process improvement interviews.
Interviews can provide valuable insights into how a process behaves, which is essential for identifying areas for improvement. That is why overcoming these major obstacles in interviews is a crucial step in the process improvement journey. It allows for a more effective and efficient approach that is supported by key stakeholders and is more likely to be successful in achieving desired results.
The interviews can be fast paced and exciting, giving you new insight that might take years to acquire on your own. That being said, there are a few things that can go wrong prior to the interview, during interviews, and gaining sign-off on the completed improvement model. Here are the top process improvement interviewing problems.
Stalling – Can’t Get an Appointment
Everyone is busy, but some people can stall for days trying to avoid being interviewed. Test their availability by using the (1 – 3 – All) technique. Start by suggesting a specific time, if that does not work then suggest three alternate times. If they decline the alternate times, tell them that you will open your schedule (which includes before work, at lunch and after work). If they hesitate you can be pretty certain that it is not really about how busy they are. They have “gotten the wrong message” or no message at all when the project was originally announced. They are worried about what this project will mean to their department, team or even their own job.
If they have gotten the wrong message (or made up their own message) ask them if you can have ten minutes to show them what you are doing. Go to their desk with your laptop and show them a process. You may want to bring up a demonstration file, like the “Hearing model” (which is provided with the software), and show them how it works. Help them to understand that you will be doing the same thing for their process. The vast majority of time they will become enamored with the idea that they can participate in the change process and an interview time can be set. If this doesn’t work you are going to have to pull rank, because somebody didn’t get the message that everyone was supposed to cooperate. Go to the senior manager or to the designated appointee and have the manager get the “message” out to the right people. Obviously, an interview under duress is not ideal, but it is better than having no information.
Defensiveness
When an interviewee takes offense or exception to questions asked about their process, it is usually because they believe that they are being pushed to do something that is not in their best interest. You may need to “back track” and determine what part of the message was not clear. For example if an interviewee believes that the process improvement effort is about downsizing (and their job will be in the wake of the effort) and it really isn’t, then you will need to make the case for why the project is important to them, the customer and the company.
In some cases they may have good reason to be defensive. If the process capture effort would show “they” are the bottleneck, they have good reason not to let people know the source of the problem. Follow the procedure of isolating one ‘entity” type at a time and gather what information you can. You may need “back into” some of the information by talking to the groups that feed them entities and to the groups they supply
Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen
Some groups will want the whole team to participate in the interview. They will say “we can get a better representation of what really happens if we interview everyone, we have everyone’s input” or “let’s get it over all at once by having everyone (or a subgroup) participate.” There are no conditions where it is advisable to have more than one person at a time in the interview. From experience we have found that it will take longer and your product will not be any better if you interview multiple people at the same time. What usually happens is that people that are normally confident will start to look to others for what happens. The group will debate, add activities, subtract activities and never come to any conclusion. In one of the top consulting firms in the US, we were interviewing with six people in the room and after an hour only one activity step could be agreed on. It doesn’t work to interview many people at the same time.
If you are placed in a situation where more than one person is in the room for an interview, do the kickoff portion of the interview and then explain that you want to interview one at a time and you will provide a model as starting point for the next interview. Then promptly toss the extra people out of the room. Don’t go on until you have the room cleared.
Process Improvement Micro-manager
Sometime the supervisor or boss will want to sit in on the interview to “see how things are done.” The problem this creates is that the process expert won’t talk freely about the process, their frustrations or recommendations for the future in front of the supervisor. The supervisor is viewed as a guardian of information that outsiders should not see. The supervisor doesn’t want people outside their department to know that processes are not running as efficiently as possible – it would make them look bad. During the interview, a questioning glance, frown or glare can kill the flow of information. For these reasons, do not allow a supervisor to sit in on the interview. Use the same technique at mentioned in “Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen” to remove extra people from the room. If they want to see how it is done, then have them sit in on an interview for an area that they are not in control of, and only if they agree to be a silent observer.