Home Run - Defined

Many breakdowns within a company are related to communication and delegation. With "Project Perspectives", I demonstrated my approach to building an improvement initiative. With "What Does a Home Run Look Like", I am demonstrating how to ensure that the initiative gets completed.

Once the topic is run through "Perspectives", you will have a lot of information that needs to be organized into tasks to be completed. In order for the initiative to be graded, we need to have a set of measurable goals. To develop this list, we build "What does a home run look like".

It should specifically state each part of the project. For example purposes, lets use "Blood From a Turnip". Here Resicom wanted to drive down costs without cutting people, so we created a contest. A Home Run checklist for this could include:

1. All entries to be submitted by... (must have a deadline so that you can have closure)
   
2. Each participant shall prepare all of their entries in a single Microsoft Word document using Helvetica font and 12 point size (consistent format will help limit editing down the line when building a report)
3. Each entry shall have a name that summarizes the initiative
   
4. Each entry shall have a clear description of what your plan would be to get the initiative started (ensuring that more thought is put into the idea and the recipient has some sense of direction for the improvement)
   
5. Each participant shall email me the .doc document by the due date (method for submittal)
6. No entires can involve cutting staff as a method of driving down costs
   

Now each of the people that are participating in the contest have something to be graded against. Not their ideas, which comes later, rather their completion of the task of generating the ideas. I can ask: were they submitted by specified date; were they in the right format; were they submitted with a name and description; were they sent to me in the proper format; were they within the parameters set (anything except cutting people/salaries).

If the answer is yes to all of those items, then the delegation of the tasks was successful. If the tasks were delegated to the right people within your organization, then the quality of the entries should be good. The focus of this posting is the delegation piece, a future posting will be on training, which will focus on the quality piece.