Embedding Agile to Reinforce Quality Journey

“Leaders will need to role model agile principles and drive the change needed, infusing NWoW by changing leadership behaviours, such as focusing on value and customer’s needs…” – Farehana Hanapiah, Senior Vice President of Group HRM, PETRONAS.

Moving with Time

In our quest to be the trusted and valuable partner to our stakeholders, we at Group Human Resource Management or GHRM have been constantly pushing our boundaries, innovating the way we do things.

With the ever-shifting industry landscape, there was an urgent need for us to move in tandem with the world and look at reshaping our business portfolio to ensure our resilience, growth, and sustainability in years to come. We began to redefine our end-to-end talent journey and retool our human capital equation by enhancing our core capabilities and at the same time, develop new ones to ensure our talents thrive in any environment as we continue to support business priorities.

We took off on our transformation journey with an aspiration to redefine talent experience, including the enhancement and expansion of Global HR Services roles and scope of services. With a strong culture of continuous improvement embedded in PETRONAS’ DNA, GHRS was ready for the transformation.

Supporting with Quality

Acknowledging the need to be focused in improving the talent experience through the New Ways of Working (NWoW), and provide the vital thrust in our journey to deliver quality to those we serve, we established a dedicated unit in GHRS in 2016 to drive quality culture across the Group. The same team is also responsible to lead process excellence through quality assurance and continuous improvements—adopting Lean Six Sigma (LSS) methodology which complemented the existing PETRONAS 5 Quality Principles (5QP) then.

We knew at the outset that having a clear intent was not enough to ensure success of our Quality Journey, and that it must be supported by a structured and robust implementation plan and nurtured through an enabling environment. To create such environment, commitment from all levels is key.

A clear tone from the Top Management on the intent and purpose in driving the Quality Journey resulted in full commitment by all members in GHRS. At the Management level, we demonstrate our commitment to Quality through active participation in all Quality trainings and activities. All of us are Yellow Belters, and we are included in all Quality competitions such as the 5S competition and are subjected to the same evaluation criteria as everyone else in GHRS. We also demonstrate our commitment in supporting LSS projects with our active involvement as the project owner or advisor.

The commitment of the Management is also demonstrated in the Quality Steering Committee (QSC) that sits once a month to assess, evaluate, and monitor all ongoing improvement projects at GHRS. To date, the QSC has evaluated a total of 190 projects, with cost savings of RM29.4 million and manhour savings of over 298,000.

But of course, we could not have achieved all these milestones without the core ingredient in the mix – our people. We have always been committed in our investment in people, and on this journey, we continue to invest in capability building in Quality. To date, GHRS has amongst us 124 Yellow Belters, 41 Certified Green Belters, and 3 Certified Black Belters. 

GHRS’ capable workforce, coupled with use of Quality tools resulted in successful implementation of various process excellence improvement projects. The marked improvement in the quality of our service delivery is clearly felt by our customers through the consistent positive customer experience translated into remarkable customer satisfaction index in 2021 such as Pulse Survey of 3.49/4 and NPS +53.

To add to the feather on our cap, we also achieved the highest LSS maturity level in PETRONAS for four (4) successive years (2018-2021).

Achieving these successes create the tipping point where everyone in GHRS is fully onboard this Quality Journey. 

When the Rubber Hits the Road: Our Exciting Journey Continues

At GHRS, we want our people to be fully engaged in, and be excited about the Quality Journey.  To keep the momentum of the Quality Journey, it is imperative to have everyone in GHRS to have the sense of ownership and self-drive their own development on Quality related areas.

We introduced a platform for eveyone to participate actively in co-creating Quality projects and activities. This helps maintain traction in our journey by keeping our people continuously engaged, strengthening the Quality Culture and most importantly, aligning expectations & directions. Some of our key initiatives include:

• Deployment of an internal site, ‘QSpace’ to showcase and promote our Quality Journey;

• Annual Quality Day where we recognise and celebrate our people’s commitment, contribution, and success towards Quality;

• ‘MyKaizen’, a competition to solve and successfully deploy solutions for ‘low hanging fruit’;

• 5S competition for all staff, where external judges provide outside perspectives and staff learn from the experts.

Incorporating Agile: A Hybrid Approach

When the Agile approach was introduced as part of the NWoW, we seized the opportunity to utilise a hybrid approach of combining these two complementing methodologies. Agile drives LSS project execution at pace, offering the opportunities to decompound project complexity and high-priority business values incrementally, while LSS provides a structured approach for problem solving.

In addition, Agile provides opportunity for our people to experience ‘fail fast’ concept; where they can freely experiment and learn while trying to reach the desired result. The fail-fast environment demands our people to be equipped with Analytical skills, where they could interpret data, integrate new information, and make data-driven decisions.

With the introduction of Agile to complement LSS in the GHRS Quality Journey, GHRS staff can explore different methods of implementing continuous improvement at pace. 

Epilogue

We have come a long way in our Quality Journey in GHRS.

From implementing the PETRONAS 5QPs to LSS, and now the hybrid approach of LSS and Agile, we continuously push our boundaries in delivering quality services that delight our customers.  After all, our customers are at the heart of everything that we do.

All our successes in delivering quality services at pace were achieved through the collective efforts of everyone in GHRM. More importantly, through the visible participation and strong support by the GHRM Management, we have created an enabling environment for Quality Culture to thrive.