Overview
Discussion - Strategy Close-Out Brief: Sustaining the Gains
You’ve spent the past seven weeks analyzing, diagnosing, and improving organizational processes. Now it’s time to shift your mindset from improvement mode to sustain mode.
This week, you’ll create a final “Strategy Close-Out Brief” for an improvement initiative—real or hypothetical—that brings together the tools and insights from this course. Focus on how the organization can sustain gains, track performance, and stay aligned with its mission and strategy.
Your Brief Should Include:
Brief Recap of the Improvement Effort: What was the core process you or your organization worked to improve? What tools or strategies were applied (e.g., Lean, VSM, ERP, benchmarking)?
- Performance Metrics Plan:
What specific metrics will you track to ensure the process continues to meet strategic goals? Why did you choose those metrics? - Kaizen Burst Recommendation:
Identify one area where a Kaizen Burst Mini Project could be implemented to fine-tune or reinforce the gains made. What makes this a good fit for a Kaizen approach? - Control & Alignment Strategy:
What structures or habits will ensure the process stays aligned with the organization’s values, mission, and long-term strategy? Think controls, dashboards, leadership behaviors, or team routines.
🔍 Frame your post as a brief to executive leadership. This is your opportunity to showcase not only what you've learned—but how you would lead sustainable, strategic change in a real-world setting.
Assignment - Incorporating Performance Metrics
This week we studied the importance of incorporating the right performance metrics to determine if our organizations are meeting their business goals. Businesses must understand which tools best fit their operations in order to ensure they are operating as effectively and efficiently as possible. In 500 words (No more than 2 pages), please address how your organization or a business you are familiar with measures the success of their organization. In addition, please explain why these metrics best fit the business needs or provide recommendations for improvement.
Please keep in mind that metrics are used in both service and operations environments. These metrics may align; however, are based on completely different processes. Examples of this are On Time Delivery (OTD). An operations floor must fulfill this metric by providing the customer with the desired product. From a different perspective but incorporating the same metric, the purchasing team could be measuring the time it took to fulfill the acquisition of a material quote.