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1. Introduction
In this competitive era, businesses have been facing various kinds of classical and neo-classical challenges. Common classical challenges are shortage of labour, demand uncertainly, inadequate knowledge, whereas neo-classical challenges include change adoption, customer retention and resilience in supply chain. The need for business process improvement has become indispensable to overcome mainly neo-classical or contemporary challenges and to achieve and sustain competitive advantage. Since past few decades, many progressive business enterprises have incorporated various process improvement initiatives, such as lean, six sigma, lean six sigma (LSS), to name a few of them for tackling process- and quality-related issues. However, it has been reported that the impact of these process improvement initiatives (which are generally implemented as project) on business performance is skewed towards either untimely termination or ultimate failure. To avoid failure, the authors perceived that the following top ten reasons have been frequently cited by researchers and well stated by practitioners, which need to be taken into account when deliberating about project failure risk mitigation strategies.
2. Top ten reasons for process improvement project failures
2.1 Lack of commitment and support from top management
The temporary nature of projects makes it essential to have full commitment from top management to avoid time and cost overrun and meeting the overall objectives of the projects. It is expected from management to get involved in each phase of project life cycle, specifically in conceptualization (goal setting and project selection), planning (resource allocation) and implementation (monitoring and control). To align project objectives with overall business or corporate strategy, the project sponsors (in many cases are senior managers in organisations) and project champions (in many cases are heads of various business functions) have to be supportive and committed towards the endeavour on process improvement initiatives.
The companies, who have reported millions of dollars of savings through process improvement projects, are known for their top management prowess in leading the change. For instance, Bob Galvin for Motorola, Jack Welch for GE and Larry Bossidy for Allied Signal (now Honeywell), these are just few success stories among hundreds.
Though it is necessary for top management to get involved and committed, leadership at all levels has to be demonstrated for successful implementation of process improvement projects. In addition, management plays a...
