- 11
- AUG
- 2010
Procurement GPS – Life in the fast lane
Author: Ian George - Categories: Procurement Strategy
Throughout my career I've always been struck by the trepidation with which leaders approach the subject of improving their procurement organisations. When I think of change, I envisage the great outcomes that have been achieved. This is what motivated me to develop Procurement GPS. To be honest, I probably wouldn't make a great CPO, but there again, they often don't make good improvement practitioners. But wait, I hear you say, what if we worked together? Now you're talking my language, read on my new found friend!
Before you start, make sure your people understand the need to pragmatically improve things. Build your close alliances with the ones who are like the old soldiers from the Great War, proud of what they have done, but definitely not boastful. It doesn't matter how fancy the tools at your disposal, if you don't have good people around you who can command the respect of others, then you are going to struggle.
With so much opportunity, it is difficult to know where to start. My advice would be to engage with the boss, because if it interests him or her, then it's going to absolutely fascinate you. GPS looks at the organisation through a procurement lens and helps people see what is possible and how to get there. Once you have this picture, then it's time to go over the top!
Having the big picture and a 'bulletproof' strategy to match doesn't mean that implementation needs to be engaged in a whirl-wind of activity. Where I grew up in England they had a delicacy called 'cow pies'. If you could eat a whole one then you got a certificate and didn't have to pay. The way to eat these was, wait for it, one mouthful at a time – nice and steadily over the whole evening (so they tell me). GPS has been specifically designed to maintain momentum and simultaneously deliver tangible benefits as you work your way through the programme. But, like the pies, get into the habit of finishing the projects. Too often people get bored or keep adding new things to do. If there's more to do, then it's probably a new pie for another day.
Above all else, be bold; the truth is few people know how to do everything that they commit to. Procurement GPS acknowledges this; making accessible improvement skills that are dynamic enough to help you work out the next level of detail as you make progress. As TS Eliot once said: "Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act, falls the shadow." Monsters don't live in the shadows, they live in our heads and prevent us from achieving great things. GPS will give you the confidence to exorcise those demons and it has dealt with some big demons in the past (although now isn't the time to get personal).
Come and join with us and many of your fellow CPOs here and remember, there's safety in numbers.
Comments
Nick Reeks
Thu 12 Aug 2010 22:30
Taking a test run of this next week - looking forward to see how it operates in practice .
Steve Hall
Mon 16 Aug 2010 14:16
Enjoyed the post Ian and I'll be watching to see how GPS progresses. I was wondering whether you thought that there are many examples in the past of benchmarking processes that companies have adopted as part of a change process being inadequate for what they were trying to achieve? You often hear of the same few companies brought in to facilitate this kind of transformation - have they been missing something?
Ian George
Wed 25 Aug 2010 16:42
I think your suggestions are bang on the money Steve. It seems that many organisations sense a problem in a certain area of their business and then go out to find the best player in that area. The risk of this approach is that it often substititues the act of getting to the detail of WHY they have a problem. If you can clearly artciulate a requirement then the solution often presents itself. The benefit of working in this way is that the solution will often be simpler and a better fit to the peculiarities of your own ways of working. A good example has been Toyota (until recently) whereby only the stupid didn't understand the critical need to adopt lean (an impoverished version of The Toyaota Production System). What people failed to realise was that it took Toyota 60 years to get to where they are today. Consultancies promise to deliver the same in a two year turn around project. I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions. Talking about Blue Peter consultancies (here's one we did earlier), benchmarking is great for highlighting better performance than yours (the sell) and prescribing the approach (this is how we would do it - because this is the only way we know how to do it). There is no subtitute for clearly defining the issue to be addressed, spending time planning a solution, testing and refining it and then implementing it full scale. It's an approach that works and the benchmark data says it takes less time than shoe-horning in someone else's premade recipe and then trying to sort out the consequences after the event.