How an Organization can Become Proactive - Assignment Example

Download file to see previous pages As Shukla (2005) defines, organizations demonstrate reactive behavior when process improvement is a reaction to historical performance data. In reactive approach, when performance is below the baseline, the gap or deviation in the process metric needs to be analyzed for root cause so that it can be removed and performance can get back on target. So attempts to remove or replicate a deviation that occurred in the past are being made as a reaction to those changes. In the reactive state, the team looked at cause and effect. In proactive mode, attention shifts to the "likely cause" and "likely effect." Lean teams in this phase spend time shaping the future: looking for potential problems and opportunities and ways to avoid or exploit them. After the potential problem analysis, the team addresses the likely cause of a process performance decline by taking preventive actions. If despite preventive actions, the likely cause does occur, the team is prepared for damage control with planned contingency actions. Potential opportunity analysis helps teams explore the future for better-than-planned process performance, helping them promote the likely cause so process performance exceeds expectations. They take promoting actions to capitalize on the potential positive effect. When things do go better, they are prepared to take full advantage of the opportunity. For example, a company has Support Departments which reacts to users’ complains about network performance. A reactive approach is to react on each user’s request asking him or her to wait while the network is unloaded. Proactive approach, in this case, is to purchase and install new network equipment that is more costly and takes more time. But proactive approach advantages in strategic outlook because as a result number of users’ complains in Support Departments decreases. An organization could use outsourcing for managing network security. ...Download file to see next pages Read More