MEMBER TAKEOVER
Exploring the DMAIC approach to change
Ellis Rees FCIPPdip, strategic account director UK and Ireland, ADP, discusses one of the tools (DMAIC) that can be used to implement change
F or many years I’ve realised the to senior leaders. Quite often I had a ‘gut’ feeling something wasn’t right, or needed a way to implement a change and a plan that would do this. In the world of Six Sigma (techniques and tools introduced by Bill Smith while working at Motorola), there is a tool called DMAIC . DMAIC is made up of the following five need to use data to drive decisions, especially when you need to pitch processes when defining a project: l D efine the system, the voice of the customer and their requirements, and the project goals, specifically l M easure key aspects of the current process and collect relevant data; calculate the ‘as-is’ process capability l A nalyse the data to investigate and verify cause and effect l I mprove or optimise the current process to create a new, future state process
l C ontrol the future state process to ensure any deviations from the target are corrected before they result in defects. This all sounds very technical and complicated, but DMAIC can be as complex or as straightforward as you want to make it. Here, I’ve used an example of an issue you may find in the payroll department: Define Generally, feedback from board level, when they speak to employees, is that the employees aren’t happy with the response times from the payroll department. The payroll team say they’re spending too much time on queries they feel the employees should be able to resolve. This starts to define a problem statement – i.e., employees are unhappy with the service from the payroll team, mainly around time. This needs to be resolved so that employees are happy
with the level of service from the payroll team. The payroll team feels it’s not able to provide a full value-added service. Measure We now have a statement, but we still don’t know how big a problem it is – is it just one employee speaking to the chairman or hundreds speaking to directors? The next stage is to get data out, such as current ‘as is’ process i.e., what’s happening now. In this case, what is it employees aren’t happy with? We cannot make assumptions. To start with, you need a baseline measurement, to which we can work an improvement to. For example, draw a side of desk poll or transactional survey to get the data out with a possible example outcome in the table below:
Reason for call
Number of calls
Change of circumstances
15
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) query
1
HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) query with my tax code
35
Overtime incorrect
42
7
Pro-rata incorrect
| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward | December 2022 – January 2023 | Issue 86 28
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