Breakthrough Objectives

Overview
Breakthrough objectives are the vital few significant changes needed for the organization to achieve its vision. There's a three-way test all breakthrough objectives must satisfy. First, a breakthrough objective must be a Stretch target that requires cross-functional cooperation to achieve. This is important since the Hoshin process is about radical change made possible through collaboration and teamwork. Next, the objective should be SMART - which we first learned about in the Practical Problem Solving course. As a review SMART objectives are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound. And finally, breakthrough objectives must build significant organizational capability by turning the Vision we learned about in the last module into reality. In other words, a breakthrough objective must help us move closer to our ideal Vision of where we want the company to be. Now, there are many ways to go about defining breakthrough objectives. The most obvious is when a specific organizational challenge or opportunity comes to the forefront. For example, a company may have a serious quality control issue potentially leading to the loss of customers. In this case, a breakthrough objective may be focused on a specific quality initiative. Additionally, there are several tools that can be used to help an organization identify high impact breakthrough objectives.

Radar Chart
The first tool, which we learned about in the 7 QC Tools course, is the radar chart. We use the radar chart to perform a gap analysis of where the team believes the vision elements identified in the previous step currently are.

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To do this we place the vision elements on the outer rim as shown below. We then have all team members vote, using colored stickers or different colored markers, on where they believe each vision element is at by placing their sticker or dot on the spoke of each element as shown here.

It should be noted, for example purposes, only 3 associates have voted here. When possible real data should be used to accurately quantify things but, in many cases, we'll rely on the expertise and opinions of our team members. Once all the votes are consolidated and a single score for each element is calculated by averaging the results a new radar chart is completed as shown here. In Treetops situation we see that there's a large gap with the "Operational Excellence" Vision Element. In other words, the team feels like improvement is needed in this area. Conversely, the team feels the organization is doing very well with the vision element of "Our associates are totally satisfied with their jobs" as shown in the radar chart. Once the radar chart is complete the team can easily see what vision elements need the most focus enabling them to be able to narrow in on a potential breakthrough objective.

Relations Diagram
Next, in addition to the radar chart another powerful tool that can be used to identify opportunities for improvement is called the Relations Diagram sometimes referred to as the Interrelationship Digraph. To create a Relations Diagram the Treetop team listed the vision elements as shown below. The team then seeks to understand which elements influence others.

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To do this they simply asked whether each element causes or enables another element. For example, the team asked whether Employee Training & Development causes or enables Operational Excellence to which the team all agreed it did.

As a result the team simply drew an arrow from box 2 to box 7 as shown above. Once the team worked around each element individually their final result looked like this. To help quantify the results the team simply counted the number of arrows in and out of each box. The vision elements with a lot of incoming arrows may serve as desired outcomes of the vision while the elements with the most arrows out represent the primary causes or drivers of the vision. For example, we see that element 5 - Operational Excellence - had 2 arrows in and 3 arrows out while element 7 - Strong Financial Performance - had 5 arrows in and only 1 arrow out. Now, at this point the Treetop team used the results from the radar chart and relations diagram to hone in on a vision element to focus on for their initial breakthrough objective. After some excellent discussion the team decided to initially focus on the 5th Vision Element Operational Excellence - since there was a large gap in the radar chart while also having 3 arrows out in the relations diagram.

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Obviously this element is still far too vague to be a breakthrough objective so the team completed another Affinity Diagram brainstorming session in order to indentify some breakthrough objectives focused on Operational Excellence. After an hour of work the team narrowed their focus to Increasing the Productivity of their Assembly department by 45% within the next 12 months. The metric the team chose to use to gauge success was net profit per assembler which accounted for things such as overtime worked. At this point the Treetop team could have chosen another breakthrough objective, or possibly even two more, but instead they decided to focus all of their efforts on one since this was their first attempt at Hoshin Planning. With this said, we've seen companies successfully attack as many as 3 to 4 breakthrough objectives but these organizations were extremely skilled at Hoshin Planning so for those just starting out we'd encourage you to initially focus on 1 or 2 breakthrough objectives.

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