Professionalizing Strategic Systems Management for Business and Organizational Success

Chapter 1 – Intro to the 3-leg CCIM stool The Three-leg Change and Continuous Improvement Management (CCIM) Stool is a conceptual tool to be used by both middle and senior management. It is focused to improve communications and processes that are driven by the ever-changing needs of business environments. Middle-managers can use it to help them ferret out operational challenges and applications associated with changing tasks within their divisions and to keep processes up to date and keep their divisional units efficient. Senior management can use the information obtained by their middle-management to help communicate updated divisional requirements which can help point to new opportunities in their companies or organizations. Background Without exception the business executives I talk to agree that businesses today and those of only 10-15 years ago are vastly different. Not so much in the vision, but also in the way they must enact those visions. How the vision is communicated or secured across the organization (the who, when, and why) can either detract or contribute to both the effectiveness and the efficiencies of the organization. Associatively, the information needed to attract, retain, and solidify those visions is impacted by faster and faster technology introductions and are further exacerbated by quicker and quicker attacks from competitors. Those advances require quicker and more creative ways to deal with them. Also, the combinations of those changes increase the challenges for stakeholders, senior, and middle-management for small and medium corporations everywhere. More and more industry leaders are at the breaking point. Many opt toward not making decisions due to those ever-increasing informational bombardments and begin to draw toward uncertainty and find themselves planning for short-term wins. While it may seem comfortable, the problem with focusing on short term wins that no longer support the long-term survivability of the company, organization, or corporation can lead to lost value and obsolescence of your product or service. Also, those senior managers who attempt to focus on the future of their companies or organizations often rely on Lean, Lean Six Sigma, ISO, Balanced Score Sheet, Best Practices, Operations Research Systems Analysis (ORSA-Army), and so on, as attempts to correct shortcomings. However, they often serve to provide limited and short-term business solutions. Therefore, they are not the panacea of business solutions. Until these solutions are applied throughout the organization, and in a way that can be systematically sustained throughout the organization, the benefits they often yield are short-term and often fail. Additionally, a short-term focus can lead to a melancholy drive to improve the company, unsuccessfully support efforts to thwart competitors, and, if repeated often enough, it can enable those business planners an excuse when they are unwilling to perform. So, how do stakeholders, senior and middle-managers stay focused toward short-term wins that support long-term engagements across their organizations and corporations? This book introduces a solution. By enhancing conceptions across the organizational whole, each challenge is separated into segments of short and long-term goals. Then the connectiveness of the segments are explained in a clear but flexible way so senior and middle-management can apply then to help make organizational and strategic decisions. The three-legged CCIM Stool is a concept to help explain how each leg of the Stool supports the profits, efficiencies, and effectiveness of the company while aligning the organization to a systems and continuous improvement approach that is sustainable. Also, functional areas, depicted as legs, are supported by lateral rungs which keep the legs from shifting into resource losses and unsustainable organizational profits. Further, the three-legged CCIM Stool depicts ranges of flexibility enough to withstand small changes within the environments that are different for each company. It is critical that business leaders understand the inner workings of the whole of their company or organizational systems before making strategic operational decisions. Each leg, and each supporting rung, will be described and how they interact with a continually progressive explanation of those interactions as the chapters unfold. Revealing the individual parts, as part of the whole, will add to the senior and middle-managers concept of systems dynamics and how each decision can interact, adjust, or impact the other. However, it must be noted that every contingency can never be rationalized, controlled, or planned for. When soothsayers are many, rational possibility should prevail. This book will provide some insights to provide an individualized strategic planning direction to go forward, and then offer some guidance towards the depth for which it must occur, to remain competitive. Further, it will enhance communication between your company’s management teams as they explore the reason for co-dependent communications, both in functional and operational structures, across your organization. As depicted by Engle (2013) and supported by Saberton (2018) when approached this way, both independent silos and group think intertwine to support corporate profits and long-term sustainability. Chapter 10 - Change and Continuous Improvement Management What is change and continuous improvement management (CCIM)? What is the difference between change management and CCIM? When should CCIM be used? How do companies or organizations develop supporters for CCIM? When shouldn,t CCIM be used? All good questions, and all deserve good answers. So, let us take a pragmatic stab at explaining these in this section. According to Ratenjee (2018), leaders expend enormous resources to influence changing their organizations. However, statistics represented by Ewenstein (2015), suggested that even when management is invested in change, that fewer than 30% of those efforts are sustained. Change management represents only the middle ground, if sustainment and continuous improvement is the goal. Change management acts as the conduit from updating performance and making it part of the culture, represented by continuous improvement. Challenges are many and change and continuous improvement management is hard, so why do we do it? Because the outcomes are worth it! It is often the efforts enacted through CCIM reveal where the organization is failing. Also, it is quite often not comprehended by the stakeholders of the company until too late, otherwise.