Developing Excellence from Day 1 in your Startup

The Challenge:

As a Startup, you most likely think that Excellence is not something that you need to worry about much. After all, excellence does not matter so much if people the product does not get traction and all focus is generally on maintaining funding, features and the marketing supporting marketing growth.

Now, it is worth considering a few different perspectives:

• Excellence should not cost you money or time, it is a question of attention,

• Excellence should not slow you down, it is not about aiming for perfection in everything, but knowing what to worry about now and what may be left for later,

• Excellence will make you faster in fact, because we continually question wasteful tasks and steps and look to keep alignment and simplicity at the heart of your business,

• Lack of excellence will bite back, most likely when you find traction and need to scale. At that time, you would want to be in a position to accelerate the release of new features and the last place you want to be is battling through stability issues and disappointing your early customers,

• And most important of all, if you believe in the future of your startup, it is very worthwhile creating a culture of excellence from day one, as it is much harder to retrofit if you have not developed with it (1)

(1) and if you need proof, look to compare the level of excellence at scale of companies like Toyota and companies that have tried driving improvements through the adoption of Lean.

Our Differentiated Approach:

Our approach is not to dictate what you should do or how you should do it, but to create the context in your business that those discussions happen and alignment results.

We are guided by a very simple and fundamental principle that people will work at a standard and take ownership and initiatives if they are involved in setting and continually improving the standards. It creates a culture that sharpens the critical spirit and attention to details as well as drives a collective accountability, all very critical aspects of a high-performing team.

In practice, we organise times when people reflect on what to improve and reserve some bandwidth to do those improvements. We look to do this within operational teams and across the whole organisation. It is a simple organisation to create, yet it requires very skillful and disciplined leadership, which we help you develop.

We can offer some training to your teams if you wish, but the best approach is to work straight from the practice and embed the education as we go along:

• We review the state of quality from data available, quality boards, and work organisation boards, and we "Go Genba" (ie. Visit several team sessions, from planning to retros) to take stock of the engagement ownership,

• From this review, we'll engage with various levels of leadership to understand their radar and proactiveness on excellence about the product as well as the ways-of-working and engagement/attitudes,

• We work with leaders (and Champions) to shape Excellence sessions (or Kaizen / Continuous Improvement sessions) in the operating model and start running them,

• We support you in determining the visualisation of improvements, so they become an integral part of the work,

• We can facilitate the initial sessions, bringing some education, uncovering challenges, and converging initial actions to improve, and we quickly move to support your leadership in running such sessions.

Embedding the practices in the standard ways of working requires repetitive effort, but the organisation becomes a better place when it does.

Expected Outcomes: 

Our approach brings a continuous improvement culture as a DNA of the organisation (which is the only way to make it sustainable). It will result in:

• Better Agile retrospectives at the team level concluding with improvements that the teams will make, 

• Measures of quality that inform the attention to detail, daily choices and better performance,  

• Reduction in disruption and technical debt contributing over time to better Flow, 

• Kaizen (Continuous Improvement) events at multiple levels of the system: product level, domain level, and cross-functional level, to create cadences and develop an organisation that improves itself continually as a DNA, 

• Education of people to challenge themselves towards a better quality and generally raising the standards, 

• Most importantly, a new energy and mutual accountability for quality and the belief in everybody that they can make a difference, 

Warning!: Kaizen is for the long haul, and it is not easy. Expect hard work and to be challenged. 

Please explore Henko Services that support those outcomes, or get in touch to discuss »