For organisations planning structural or strategic changes, deciding what should change and what should stay the same is a necessary, but often difficult, step. It can be a struggle to delay drawing organisational charts for long enough to think objectively and strategically about organisational functions and how best to achieve them. The KSSMI framework helps to analyse current and possible future activities and functions in a structured way.
This KSSMI Quick Guide offers simple steps to guide analysis of each current or proposed function. Following this process leads to one of five recommendations for each function or activity:
- keep – things that are currently working well and are in the right part of the organisation, and that we should keep doing just the way we are
- improve – functions that are still needed and are in the right part of the organisation, but could be done better
- stop – things we should stop doing because they are no longer required, or are already being done elsewhere
- move – things that would be better handled by someone else, perhaps in a different part of the organisation or an external provider
- start – currently unmet needs that we are well placed, and resourced, to meet.
Once the KSSMI model has been applied to identify what should change and in what way, an organisation or team can develop appropriate next steps to progress changes in each of these five areas.
These next steps may include:
- prioritising the functions and activities identified for that organisation or team
- developing business process improvement projects for functions that could be improved
- making transition arrangements for activities or functions to be stopped or moved
- initiating new activities and functions.
KSSMI can be applied by individuals, or collaboratively in workshops or forums. At the level of activities for teams, or functions for whole organisations, it offers a simple, easily understood framework for assessing which activities or functions to keep, stop, start, move, or improve.
Applying KSSMI in combination with the Functional Focus framework gives organisations or teams simple tools to identify the activities or functions that they must do, may do, can do, and should do, and then analyse each of those possibilities using KSSMI. That analysis helps answer the crucial question of what a team or organisation will do in the future.