X-Matrix Hoshin Kanri template

Hoshin Planning Xmatrix Excel template for Hoshin Kanri Strategy Deployment

X Matrix template for Policy Deployment

Why use your Hoshin Kanri template

To develop & implement strategic plans and unique competitive advantages benefiting from input & ownership from all levels of the organization in a way that greatly accelerates organizational learning and leadership development.

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' or 'strategic deployment'.

Hoshin Kanri 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

 

Sample X matrix example

Note: Your company might have a different label for 'Action Programs'.
Maybe 'Strategic Projects', or 'Strategic Initiatives', or whatever.

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how

How to do Hoshin Planning

First — take a few minutes to get oriented

Before you get started, we suggest that you take a few minutes to digest two concepts that are foundational to the Hoshin Kanri approach to strategic planning:

1. Nested Experiments
2. Catchball

Nested Experiments

Teams	Nested Experiments
Hoshin Team Usually the management team in charge of the business unit (the business unit might be a company, division, product line, location, department, or value stream)   Might also include high-level representatives of other stakeholders, such as parent or sibling organizations, suppliers, customers, unions, etc.   The Hoshin Team Leader is either the leader of the business unit, or at least someone who reports directly.	Long-term Strategic Intent Define your Mission, Vision, SWOT Analysis, competitive positioning, core competencies, in a flexible long-term Strategic Plan that ideally features a Big Hairy Audacious Goal. Scan the environment to define the most important challenges for strategy to address — using financial projections, Value Stream Maps, and Lean Assessments, and other strategic planning tools.
	Mid-term Strategic Initiatives (3-5 yrs) Identify, analyze, and prioritize no more than 5 breakthrough Objectives to eliminate gaps between vision and current capabilities. Create intermediate state value stream maps. Create the Hoshin Team Charter. Populate the Mid-Term X Matrix Measures & Targets, and Action Programs — and the bottom 2 correlation sections. (leaving Action Items and Responsibilities blank) Preserve ideas for lower-priority Potential Future Improvements.
	Annual Hoshin Do everything you did for the mid-term Hoshin, but this time narrowing your focus to Objectives that can be accomplished in 6–18 months. Complete the entire Annual Hoshin X Matrix (including Hoshin Team Action Items, and the Responsibilities sections, and all 5 correlation sections). For each Action Item on the Annual Hoshin X Matrix, create a proposed Team Charter, and assign members of the Hoshin Team to be full or part-time members of the Tactical Teams. Each Tactical Team must be led by a Hoshin Team member.
Tactical Teams (optional) You can have any number of intermediate layers of teams — and you can call them anything you want Chartered by the Hoshin Team to design & shepherd initiatives to develop or improve essential competitive capabilities and core competencies.	Tactics to develop competitive capabilities specified by the Annual Hoshin Each team goes through a round of catchball to involve all managers to improve the Annual Hoshin and negotiate the terms of agreed-upon Tactical Team Charters.
Operational Teams (optional) Chartered by the Tactical Teams to design & shepherd initiatives to develop or improve specific processes, products, or services.	Operations 3-6 month projects — defined by the Annual Hoshin and the Tactical X Matrices Each team goes through a round of catchball to involve all supervisors and team leaders to improve the higher-level X Matrix and negotiate the terms of agreed-upon Operational Team Project Charters.
Action Teams Chartered by any of the above teams to implement specific improvement events and daily continuous improvement. If your team isn't involved in the creation and deployment of an X-Matrix, then your team is an Action Team. An Action Team simply means "next step is implementation; no more planning".	Kaikaku and Kaizen Events Clearly defined projects that can be completed in 1-12 weeks to apply new tools and methods to daily standard work. Can be any mix of A3 Projects, 8D Corrective Actions or any other types of projects.
	Daily Kaizen Daily habits and systems for problem solving, idea generation/implementation, and the continuous improvement of daily standard work. This is where you will use most of your lean tools, and templates for your lean management system.

How to use your

Hoshin Kanri template (continued)

If you are the (top-level) Hoshin Team

Step 1) Complete your plans for the first 3 Nested Experiments

Follow the instructions in the Nested Experiments table (above) to complete your plans for the first 3 Nested Experiments:

Step 2) Play Catchball

Be prepared to truly listen to the ideas and concerns that trickle up from the other layers of Hoshin Planning — perhaps revising the top-level Annual Hoshin based on feedback.

Step 2) Finish completing your Team's X Matrix

1. Transcribe Objectives from the Annual Hoshin

   (see tips on the Sample sheet of your Systems2win Xmatrix template)

2. Use Value Stream Mapping and your Lean Management System to identify, analyze, and prioritize breakthrough Strategic Challenges.
3. Create a proposed Team Charter and perhaps more detailed project plans for each Action Item that your team commits to accomplish.
4. Establish Measures & Targets for your team's contributions.
5. Transcribe Action Programs from the Annual Hoshin — editing & adding as per the tips on the Sample worksheet
6. Define Correlations. There is a strong urge to skip this step, but it is foundational to one of the primary purposes & benefits of Hoshin Planning — understanding (and testing) cause and effect relationships.

7. Do not skip this. Perhaps use Cell Comments to record dissenting opinions.
   The conversation is more important than the result.

8. Assign part-time and full team members and a leader for each Team Charter / Action Item.

Step 3) Present each proposed Team Charter to the next-higher hoshin team

Expect about 20 minutes per Team Charter plus extra time if proposing significant new resource requests

Step 4) Revise the next-higher X Matrix and this team's project plans

Expect a half hour discussion of the relationships between the proposed team plans and the next-higher hoshin plan, and another quarter hour to document agreed-upon changes.

Step 5) Publish your results

It is common to publish both printed and electronic forms of the same document:

• Use a plotter to publish a large printed version—somewhere very visible to everyone in your Department or Team. And replace it often enough to keep it fresh.
• Publish the electronic version on a server where all of your team members can share it and follow links to related documents.

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template

How to use your

X Matrix Hoshin Kanri Template

aka Policy Deployment Matrix, Hoshin Plan template, or X matrix template

Before getting started

Your leaders might personalize your master template.

Find and open your template

Save your working document

following the usual document storage and naming conventions established by your leaders

Open a Blank Sheet

Rename your new sheet.

If English is not your preferred language

Switch to your language, just like every Systems2win Excel template.

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Now your team is ready to start using your

X-Matrix template for Hoshin Planning

Perform Hoshin Kanri and Catchball

Your team(s) will then perform Hoshin Planning — following the instructions in the next section.

Working closely with other planning teams (above and below your team's level on the organization chart), each work team actively participates in the creation (and ownership) of their own x-matrix.

Each team publishes their Hoshin Plan (and other related documents) where every team member can find them often printed on large plotter paper, and taped onto a highly visible bulletin board, as well as also allowing people to download the electronic version from a server which is updated more often, and is where team members can follow hyperlinks to related documents.

Refer to the Help and Sample sheets of your X Matrix template for additional helpful guidance.

If policy deployment has never been a strong competitive advantage in your company, then this Hoshin Planning tool can take your strategic planning (and especially implementation) to previously unimaginable levels.

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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 just about any type of change:

• Improve your 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

Although the Bowling Chart template was originally introduced for hoshin deployment, it is also an excellent tool for managing any type of time-phased project.

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tools

More templates for Hoshin Kanri

As part of the actual hoshin planning process itself...

your teams will use mostly the X-Matrix template, the Team Charter templates, the Team Roles template (to define YOUR Hoshin Team structure and responsibilities), the Balanced Scorecard, the Bowling Chart, and various Project Management templates.

But at some point, you're going to expect your teams to actually accomplish their strategic objectives, right?

Not just plan them... but actually accomplish them.

And everyone in every hoshin team at every level of your organization is going to have different needs for different types of lean tools and methods to make it easier for them to accomplish their unique inter-related assignments.

At that point... wouldn't it be nice if your leadership provided a well-organized toolkit with dozens of the most popular lean tools that different team members might find useful?

All professionally developed, with consistent standardized ways of doing things, so that when a person learns how to use any one tool — he or she knows how to use all 150 other similar tools.

Wouldn't that be nice?

Welcome to Systems2win.

Here are some...

Popular process improvement tools and methods

that different members of your hoshin teams might find useful in different phases of your policy deployment cycles:

Why not try them?

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Reading

Suggested Reading and Resources for

Hoshin Kanri Policy Deployment

• Hoshin Kanri for the Lean Enterprise, by Thomas Jackson
• The Basics of Hoshin Kanri, by Randy Kesterson
• Balanced Scorecard, by Robert Kaplan and David Norton

More Suggested Readings

 

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This X Matrix Hoshin template comes with

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