Policy Deployment Hoshin Planning

The Policy Deployment Matrix comes from the Hoshin Planning approach to strategic planning.

Hoshin Strategic Planning

The Japanese characters for Hoshin translate as "shining needle", "direction", or "compass". And Kanri means "management", but Hoshin Kanri is most often translated as "policy deployment".

Most importantly - it is an organizational learning method - to deploy the PDCA scientific method - systematically and relentlessly designing and testing nested experiments - deep through the tissues and layers of your entire organization. It is a systematic way to develop and continuously improve your unique competitive advantages.

Several of our customers have told us that this tool has caused nothing short of a revolution in their company.

Why? Because in the past, their strategic planning process has been a mostly "ivory tower" academic exercise - where once a year all of the executives get away to huddle together to dust off the Strategic Plan that no one has looked at in 11 months, and come up with some new grand plans that no one will be able to remember a month from now.

And now that each Department has started started using this policy deployment software, every person in every work team can clearly see and understand how what they are working on today correlates to and supports the overall strategic objectives that every other team is working on in their own ways.

For the first time, people really "get it"

They truly understand (and are motivated buy) how their team's To Do List fits in with their company's overarching strategic objectives.

Policy Deployment Matrix

When we originally released this policy deployment tool, we called it a "spiral", because you start by filling in your Strategic Objectives and Measures & Targets (which can either be simply copied from or dynamically linked to your team's Balanced Scorecard), and then you spiral your way around to complete the Action Programs (the implementation of which often require cross-departmental coordination), and finally spiral to the top of the matrix - which serves as a high-level shared To Do List for your work team.

The most important thing to notice about this Hoshin Planning tool is that each department or work team creates its own. And each team publishes it where every team member can find it - often printed on large plotter paper, and tacked on a highly visible bulletin board, and usually published on a server - which is updated more often, and where team members can click hyperlinks to related documents.

If policy deployment has never been a strong competitive advantage in your company, prepare yourself to enter a new era.

Use Hoshin Kanri to manage just about anything

Although the Policy Deployment Matrix is most commonly used as a way to manage strategic change initiatives,
once your people get the knack, it also proves to be a powerful tool to manage must about any type of change:

• Integrate value streams
• Integrate your supply chain
• Manage a portfolio of related brands, products, or value streams
• Launch a new product or service
• Manage lean six sigma projects and strategic change initiatives
• Manage any complex project that involves cross-functional cooperation

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