Managing Slowdown in Improvement Projects

Process improvement projects depend on the active participation of managers and senior engineers. At the telecom company Ericsson, change agents were frustrated that requests to participate in improvement projects often precipitated behavior from colleagues that hampered progress. However, rather than accepting slowdowns, the change agents started to ask why managers and senior engineers reacted this way even though Ericsson is highly committed to process improvement. In this article, we show how to analyze slowdown behavior, increase commitment and reinforce progress.