Resources, especially people’s available hours, are always scarce, and businesses can think up things they want to do far in excess of available resources. Excellent companies spend a lot of effort in analysis and discussion up, down, and sideways in the organization to come to a consensus on what two to four key breakthroughs must be achieved in the next three to five years. Becoming Lean may be one; another may be exploiting E-commerce, for example.
To achieve just these, so that the positive impact in the bottom line is significant will soak up a lot of resources, and hard decisions will have to be made about projects to cancel or not start at all.
Having made the hard, or sad, decisions, the organization must do a thorough job of project planning, verify the availability of resources, and iterate the process until the plan is feasible. Rigorous project management is critical. Then there must be regular reviews in which any deviation from the plan is considered a major problem worthy of top management attention which must be solved to get the breakthrough back on track.
This discipline has several names: the original Japanese Hoshin Kanri, the English translation, Management by Policy, Policy Deployment, or the hybrid, Hoshin Planning.

One of the greatest difficulties in successfully implementing orchestrated breakthrough is to get different functional departments to work together. Departments tend to have their own views of what is important and, left to themselves, would pursue their own initiatives regardless of the impact on the organization as a whole. Any selected breakthrough, or “Hoshin”, will require the commitment, support, and participation of all functional departments. Mechanisms must be devised for consultation and action that cut horizontally across the vertical departmental organization. Cross-functional project teams become prominent, while the functional department hierarchies play a low-key supportive role.
As departments learn to coordinate and communicate at many different levels, the quality of breakthrough planning and implementation will improve.
In the literature, this subject is referred to as “Cross-Functional Management”

World-class companies have daily disciplines in place to ensure that performance does not backslide, but instead continuously improves.
A prerequisite is a system for measuring the right performance indicators and taking action on the results. There need to be appropriate measures in place relating to Lean, Employee Involvement, and Quality and Customer Satisfaction. Negative trends must be reversed, and improvements must be maintained.
Locking in improvements and maintaining performance takes a lot of discipline in defining the standard, or current best method for doing things, and making sure everyone learns the standard way.
Continuous improvement means viewing that standard and the performance measures associated with it as a starting point for further improvement, either incrementally through a lot of little ideas, or in a big jump as the result of a breakthrough. Following any improvement, the standard is updated and communicated.
The data from performance tracking represent an important part of the input to deliberations about which areas to target for breakthrough, especially when compared with benchmark data from world-class companies. 
 

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