Another Good Initiative

New initiatives are important at work to improve the existing work processes or initiate new process. Initiatives can be new products or another sub-product. Organizations usually encourage employees to present new initiatives frequently. Some organizations evaluate their engineers or experts by the number of initiatives they produce every year. I was discussing this issue with a consultant once, and he complained that some organizations evaluate the engineers’ yearly bonus on number of new “money-saving” projects. These organization end up with multiple projects by the end of the year waiting for execution.

The problem with “opportunity” initiatives or “money-saving” initiatives is in their evaluation. Many initiatives promise to solve the organizational problems, save $$$, or introduce found breaking products that will make the organization the best in its market segment. Very few initiatives produce %90 of promised result. Most of the initiatives stray in a side track or end up as an embarrassing memory. Initiatives should be supported with a strong change management  plan and good management support or it will be one of the arrows in the attached figure!