Open Orbit Lean Six Sigma Forum

Best Practice Tip: Congratulations! You have completed a holistic analysis of a challenge your business is facing. You are now ready to present your findings and recommendations to your stakeholders. We recommend you follow this approach to maximise use of the tool and minimise the need to translate all this good work into a slide pack – this itself can save you hours of re-work and also keep all the analysis in a re-usable and standard structure.

• Set some context for your audience using the Project Outline section, focusing on those fields that are useful for any given situation. Spend less or more time on this, depending on how familiar your audience is to why you are doing this project in the first place.
• Explain the Diagnostic Map, outlining the happy path and selectively talking about various connections of metrics, causes and solutions. Explain the priority ratings. Expand and collapse each tile as you speak to it, and give some context by re-iterating the comments entered. Pause along the way, and check for understanding and agreement.
• You need not expand and collapse every tile – use judgment to selectively bring out the most important points, especially points where you need your audience to make a decision. But also talk about things you are addressing anyway, without waiting for permission! If you are anyway proceeding with some of the solutions because there are well within your remit to decide, then bring that out too.
• At the end, invite the audience to ask questions and expand more tiles while you answer them. The more you use the interactive expand / collapse feature, you will not only focus their attention but also indirectly convey the benefits of reviewing this on-line. Once people can see the benefit of the interactive display, they are less likely to insist on being sent a static slide pack. That will save you time and effort in future.
• You can also refer to the summary section of the diagnostic map - where you should have the extract of the key message that you want to showcase. Also, any supporting attachments in the footer section can be referred to if required.
• Thereafter use the Fishbone to demonstrate how your root cause analysis is holistic across all factors.
• If you have data behind your metrics, use the Performance Gap report to show relative priority and justify your priority ratings.
• Finally, show the Solution Actions section and walk them through the proposed action plan with owners and dates.
• Do remember that the above is for first time review, once your audience is aware of the context, you need not repeat the whole thing again. Based on the stage you are in the project use your judgement to redirect the conversation to the correct artefact. For example, if you are through with the diagnostic and analysis, and are focussed on implementing the solution you should directly move to the action plan and use the filters to show the progress.

So far, we have seen how to set context – or provide map coordinates – to the GPS algorithm; then create a symptom-cause-remedy hypothesis; then build a happy path of hand-offs and then pull it all together into a diagnostic map. Open Orbit is a place to think, and you are allowed to change your mind! At any stage in the analysis, if you feel one of these choices should have been different, you can make the change without negating the work done till that point. The algorithm simply picks up the new data and starts adjusting its recommendations from there on.

The information entered on the diagnostic map can also be used to generate the Fishbone diagram and the Performance Gap report. These are the core diagnostic tools in Open Orbit, and will help you save significant time and effort in taking your project through to a point where improvement actions can be debated and agreed between stakeholders.

The tool contains many more features, to help with collaboration between users and to enable project tracking and reporting. These will be covered in separate training modules.

You can also view a short video that will help you navigate the tool better: Open Orbit Tutorial Video

We hope you found this module of Open Orbit training informative and useful. Algorithmic guidance for process optimisation is a unique and leading edge approach, and we wish you every success in using this technology and deriving business benefits from it. Open Orbit, where Clever Meets Simple!

• User Guide: Getting started
• Context Setting: Intro and framing the problem
• Diagnostics: Metrics/Cause and Solutions
• Process Model: Diagnostic Map
• Reports and Tracking: Gap Report/Fish Bone Project Tracking
• Presenting your project: Real time governance and Conclusion
• Using Open Orbit for RPA study: Diagnosing your process for RPA