Prema Chaudhari

Process improvement project identification is largely categorized in 2 categories viz, Top -Down Approach and Bottom-Up Approach. The decision of selecting the approach depends multiple factors such as organizations strategy, culture, management control, customer demands etc. Let us now get an understanding of both the approaches, which approach is best suited for Lean and Sigma Projects and some examples around the same. Top-Down Approach: Top-down approach helps in understanding the organizations strategy and key business objectives. It helps in understanding the big picture and projects following this approach are mostly connected with the business strategy and driving the larger business agenda. As the name suggests ‘Top- down’ approach projects are driven by the voice of CEO or senior executives in the organization. Since these projects are directly linked to the business strategy, they tend to gain high visibility and publicity in the organization. Project selection is done by the senior management and the selection criteria is around financial impacts or wider organizational level benefits. Considering the magnitude of the problem these projects usually tend to span for a longer period. Other key aspect that needs to be considered is the organizations CI culture, typically organizations where the CI culture is driven by the leadership to the grass root level witness more top-down approach projects. Change management for Top-down projects is easy to be managed and results in very less resistance and conflicts. With all the above considerations, a Top – Down approach is more favored for Six Sigma Projects where strategic vision is used for CTQ identification and then processes are improved. An example of Top- Down approach in the HR world is around improving the talent acquisition strategy of an organization. The CTQs will be cycle time for recruiting and reducing hiring costs and the key processes that will have to be significantly improved could be candidate application process, vacancy management process, retention process etc. Other example which we can relate to in the recent times is improving the % of COVID-19 vaccinated population in a country where this CTQ was driven top-down by the governments and strategic goal was to reduce the number of active COVID patients. Bottom-Up Approach: Bottom-up approach projects focus on resolving tactical problems and challenges of the primary processes. Synonymous to its name, bottom-up projects usually are initiated at the operation level within an organization and the employees working directly in such processes are involved in these projects. Typically, bottom-up projects are more related to cost reduction, non-value add elimination and more pointed towards the operational aspects. These projects may not directly link to the organizations strategy however the project leads have to translate these into strategic problems in order to get buy in and visibility from the senior management. Organizations where the CI culture is strong and inherent see a lot of bottom-up projects. These projects span over a smaller period and needs strong change management processes. One of the other benefits of using this approach is that the employees feel empowered and feel more connected to the organization. The core principle of continuous improvements through Lean fits very well in the bottom -up approach. Few examples of bottom-up approach projects are reducing wait time in vacancy creation process, eliminating nonvalue added activities from a document verification process to name a few. Conclusion: With the above explanation examples, one cannot explicitly define which approach should be used for which type of projects. For any organization to drive continuous improvements senior management support is needed along with having an inherent CI culture at the grass root level. There should be a balanced approach where depending on the project goal, type of problem and linkage to a wider strategic vision one should be free to choose the project methodology. It should be a win win situation for both the management and employees with appropriate use of problem-solving methodology.