There are 3 ways to do this. The most common way is to randomly assign some target that doesn’t take into account what the business needs or the availability and ability of the resources needed to achieve the target. This never works unless the target Is so ‘wimpy’ as to be achievable simply by hoping for normal variation and cherry picking the ‘before’ and ‘after’ time point. This approach is not improvement, it’s just waste.
Targets should be set either by what the business actually needs or by prioritizing the metrics in order of effect on the business. Make sure you have the resources and they have the skills and leadership support to achieve the targets.
remember there are 4 ways to achieve a target:
1. Negotiate the target so that it’s easy to ‘achieve’
2. Negotiate how the metric is measured to make it easy to ‘achieve’. This is also known as ‘manipulating the data’.
3. Lie
4. Actually improve the process performance