Critical Success Factors Simplified (Howell, 2010)

Implementing the Powerful Drivers of Dramatic Business Improvement

Critical-to-success factors (CSFs) have become essential elements to strategic planning and no business can achieve consistent success without effectively adopting them. To take full advantage of CSFs, however, an organization must first understand what they are and how they can be used to drive organizational initiatives and processes. Critical Success Factors Simplified: Implementing the Powerful Drivers of Dramatic Business Improvement provides a concise manual on CSFs that will teach you how to identify and select the right CSFs, measure their impact, and adjust them as needed to reach your goals.

In the first section of the book, Howell, a mechanical and industrial engineer responsible for award-winning initiatives in the military, public utilities industry, and private business gives you an education in CSFs, outlining the highly acclaimed Rockart CSF method. He also demonstrates two powerful techniques for identifying external CSFs, a simple process for generating internal CSFs, and a road map for creating an organization-wide CSF program. The second section of the book covers specific applications of CSFs, from strategic planning to individual pursuits.

CSFs can be employed at all levels of an organization to initiate new ideas, increase productivity, or improve customer service. They can direct a huge corporation or facilitate a departmental improvement. Fleeting success can be achieved through mere luck, but most often sustainable success is accomplished with a plan that focuses in on those factors that you must address to accomplish your objective. This book will help you create such a plan.

JLJ - the secret is out, that CSFs are powerful problem solving/strategic tools to manage your difficult problem. Whatever issue you face, CSFs can get better results for you and your organization.

ix following the process in this book can help you turn any venture into a successful venture.

p.1 Since 1961, organizations have relied on critical-to-success factors (CSFs) to define the things that must go right - whether a system, program, project, process, or job - if their organizations are to achieve their purpose, mission, or objective.

p.1 CSFs' potential is virtually limitless... Once you know which factors are critical to your organization's success, you need to determine how to ensure top performance on those factors and measure progress and make adjustments as needed.

p.1 If you follow my process, I can guarantee that your CSFs... [will] drive you to dramatic improvement and breakthrough performance.

p.2 Why use CSFs? Here are just a few of the advantages:

CSFs are simple to understand.
They focus attention on concerns and factors critical to the success of the initiative - regardless of what that initiative may be.
They can be part of the strategic planning process, system, or program implementation, improving or reengineering a process, improving job performance, or driving an individual pursuit.
They're easy to monitor, and the benefits are significant.

A significant benefit to implementing CSFs is that they're drivers... they can be used to enhance, rather than supplant, organizational improvement initiatives already in place.

p.5 Using CSFs... provides excellent focus for beginning the implementation of an improvement activity or program.

p.9 An environmental scan is just what it sounds like: a deliberate accounting of the factors that will potentially influence your business and the CSFs that will drive your strategic plan.

p.15 In this chapter, I'll explain how to identify the CSFs that can help your organization successfully tackle its goals and objectives.

p.28 At the beginning of this chapter [JLJ - Chapter 3, p.15], I promised to give you a simple, yet very effective, CSF method that can take care of 90% of your CSF identification needs. I'm not sure where this method first originated, but it's a generally practiced technique often used to generate ideas. I've added my own spin to this to make it more easy to use in identifying and selecting CSFs.

p.28 Once the objectives and targets are identified, we're ready to launch our simple method.

Step 1. Make the objectives and targets visible to the team... Step 2. Generate ideas for CSFs that are potentially pertinent to the initiative's implementation, and list where visible to the team members... Step 3. Evaluate each factor identified by asking, "Is this factor critical to the successful implementation of the initiative?" Write yes or no by the factor. The yes answers are your critical success factors.

p.33 three to nine CSFs

p.33 ask, "What is critical for me to accomplish my objective?"

p.37 How do you measure whether you are successful? What do you envision in the future that could harm your organization? Threats, weaknesses, events, etc.?

p.39 Remember, the key question is: "Is this factor critical to the success of the improvement initiative...?" If the answer is yes, then it is a CSF.

p.44 Identifying the CSF and an appropriate measure for determining its degree of implementation are key steps in improving performance of any improvement initiative.

p.45 This technique drives action. No one wants to be in the red. If they are, they will start immediately identifying what they need to do to become at least a yellow.

p.65 Remember that the CSFs are drivers, not an end in and of themselves... After you develop your performance measures, you next need to identify strategies that will lead to actions.

p.100 To improve performance, the best method to determine the CSFs is:

Understand the job
Define the objective or roles
Brainstorm and prioritize what it will take to achieve the objective or role
Assess what may be needed for improvement, for example, additional training or clearer expectations
Identify the CSFs needed to make these improvements happen and increase employee performance

p.109 Opportunities to use CSFs are tremendous.

p.110 If it is something you desire and set an objective, then CSFs can help you achieve it. Good luck in all of your pursuits, and may the things critical to you be achieved successfully.

p.111 This book has taken a widely known concept (introduced in 1961), an often misused or misunderstood tool, and shown how it should be a consideration any time that you want to improve something in your business or your life... If you are going to improve anything, always ask: "What is critical, and what do I need to do to make it happen?"

p.131 Rockart defined CSFs in several ways: "key areas of activity in which favorable results are absolutely necessary to reach goals"; "factors that are critical to the success of the organization"; "key areas of activities that should receive constant and careful attention from management"; "key areas where things must go right for the business to flourish"; "a relatively few number of important factors which a manager should focus attention."