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Quality policy deployment is also called Hoshin Planning. It creates a structure whereby strategic objectives, both short term (1-2 years) and long term (3-7 years), are aligned with the Vision and Mission of the organization. It is the responsibility of top management to define these objectives. Once these objectives have been identified, policy deployment means that each level of the organization not only knows what it has to do, but there is a written plan of how the objectives will be attained. Each level of the organization has the opportunity to provide input to the plan. The most knowledgeable front line workers are just as important as the top executives. In a well articulated plan, each employee knows what she or he needs to do, and how to meet the goals/objectives of his or her department. The department manager knows his or her role in meeting the objectives, and so forth up the chain of command. A mature company with QPD will then create measures that will tell each level of the organization how it is doing. For example, the CEO may have 8-10 measures that are rather global (productivity, market share, financial indicators, etc.). The VPs may each have 3-5 measures for each of the CEO's measures. Down the line, the supervisors may have 7-8 things that they measure that is important to their departments, and the line workers keep their own records that tell them how they are doing. This seems so counterintuitive since we cannot imagine workers keeping their own data, but remember this is a mature organization that has worked out the fear and allowed employees to be empowered to control their own work.
If the CEO sees his numbers change, he can begin his or her investigation with the VPs numbers and on down the line to see why things have changed. Of course, the CEO has control charts and is not reacting to a common cause signal, but is looking at a real change, either good or not so good. Decisions are made with data, displayed over time, and acted upon by leaders who know the difference between common and special cause variation. No games here!
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Read the article " Sweet Sound of Unison" (Harrar, 1993) for a better understanding of this concept.
