Most people worry about adding space as they grow, but Mark
Trushel isn’t one of those people.
Mantaline Corp. Inc., the manufacturer of which Trushel is
president and CEO, made company processes so efficient it no longer needed two
Northeast Ohio locations. The company closed its Aurora facility, moving all
operations to its Mantua location. The feasibility study and planning process
took 11 months.
“The key is that you spend the time to make sure you’re
confident that you have a good plan,” Trushel says.
Smart Business spoke with
Trushel about how to develop a plan for a large company undertaking.
How do you put together a plan?
The plan needs to be built and challenged by as broad a
cross-functional team as possible. With truly a good team effort you’re going
to get better ideas, you’re going to get more concerns, you’re going to get a
more complete product than if one person tries to sit down and think of
everything that should happen or could go wrong.
That was certainly the case in this activity. We had a couple
of teams that were involved in different points in the planning process. The
planning process was done in pieces over a number of months so that people had
time to think about it and sleep on what we were doing, reflect on, ‘No, this
is a better way. No, we shouldn’t do this. Geez, should we think about these
kinds of things.’
The plan had a lot of challenge. I really think it’s that
challenging the plan that may be more important than managing the plan through
the implementation phase. If you have a bad plan to start with, the
implementation is kind of doomed even if you’re executing the plan well.
There are always things that will go wrong. You want to try to
minimize those, and I think the best way to minimize those is to make sure
you’ve thought about all of the failures and challenges that can go wrong to
make sure that more things go right than go wrong.
How do you identify who to put in charge of the plan?
People who take a lot of ownership in what they do and have a
high level of pride that will make sure they continue to push to get the
results.
We had a couple of different people that were involved as far
as leading the plan through different phases. I think every plan needs a
champion, a good project manager to manage the project.
As you look at your team internally and think about massive
efforts that are kind of only one time — everybody probably has good managers
who can lead this kind of project — the issue is will they be so overburdened
that the results may be that the normal day-to-day customer care and service
gets neglected or overlooked.
In our situation that didn’t happen, but in hindsight the
people we had leading at various points in time were all probably unfairly
taxed as far as what the expectations I put on them and probably, more
importantly, the expectations they put on themselves. While we didn’t use an
outside project management consultant, I don’t think that’s a bad idea. You
have to really look at the situation and decide that you’re not going to use an
outsider for good reasons.
