Billions of dollars are inefficiently spent on process improvement initiatives every year; even less is spent on addressing the organizational factors that can facilitate or hinder their adoption by organizations. This is partially due to the engineering approach to problem solving which is technology centric, the lack of understanding of the factors that drive successful adoption of new ideas, and the top-down approach to dissemination in organizations. What is needed is an organization centric approach that seeks to understand the context in which the methods and tools are to be used and how this context should influence the dissemination process. At the center of this is the compatibility between the organizational culture and the “culture” embedded in the methods and tools being adopted; two elements which were not necessarily architected with each other in mind. Much of their incompatibility results from the misaligned objectives between researchers that develop methods/tools and the practitioners that aim to adopt them.
In order to identify the enablers and barriers to adoption, we provide examples of both successful and unsuccessful examples of process improvement initiatives. From the successful adoptions – particularly at BAE Systems and Raytheon – we identify the best attributes of an organization that increase their propensity to adopt as well as the particular attributes of methods and tools that make them more adoptable. From the unsuccessful cases we identify what attributes were unique about an organization and potential pitfalls of the methods and tools being considered. Ultimately, this research is aimed at improving the adoption rate of methods and tools to ensure a higher return on investment on process improvement initiatives
