Dan Feliciano - Lean Six Sigma Rock Star

XM SIRIUS Lousy Service Costs them a customer

2009-06-22T16:34:00.003-04:00

I recently experienced such poor service from XM SIRIUS, I had no option but to cancel my service. Sadly, no one there gave a crap. A manager was supposedly was calling me back within 48 hours and that hasn't happened in 14 days.
The worst thing about this, for the cash strapped and customer losing XM, is that they owe me a refund, money they already had in the bank.

Why would a company not listen to a customer who has already paid for the company's services.

Go figure

Stop telling me Lean Six Sigma is a strategic initiative

2009-06-06T09:55:00.003-04:00

I'm sick and tired of hearing how Lean Six Sigma is a strategic initiative. What a bunch of crap! You and I know that most people have no idea of their organization's strategy. The executives of the organization have no clue.
I believe the following quotes from Gary Harpst's Six Disciplines for Excellence (and I believe the quotes actually are Kaplan and Norton's) are truer today than they have ever been.
“An astounding 90% of well formulated strategies fail due to poor execution.”
“Only 5% of employees understand their (firm’s) corporate strategy.”
“Only 3% of executives think their company is very successful at executing its strategies.”
Nearly 80% of C-level executives say their strategies are critical to success, yet are “nearly impossible to achieve.”
Approximately “75% of business improvement initiatives to solve these problems fail due to lack of sustainability.” (Refer to “Doom Loop” of Good to Great by Jim Collins.)
“The biggest problem in business is poorly executed strategies and plans” … Gary Harpst.

Give me a break, there is nothing strategic about your Lean Six Sigma initiative or projects for the vast majority of you.

Steps to realign an organization around key goals and objectives and avoid the deleterious effects of a recession

2008-06-24T20:41:00.001-04:00

I have been preaching since the beginning of the year that you need to have a well documented strategy with well thought-out supporting goals and objectives to ensure your employees are doing the right things to move your organization forward. I even wrote a blog articulating the difference between a goal and an objective. I was surprised by the number of emails I received from readers stating that they never really understood the difference between the two.

Having well documented goals and objectives are especially important now, especially if you think we're heading into a recession. Well documented goals and objectives ensure your employees are not being distracted by insignificant, trivial activities and tasks. More importantly, the documented goals and objectives ensures that your employees know exactly what you're trying to accomplish, how it be accomplished, and how success will be measured.

Many organizations make the common mistake of stating their "goals and objectives" as ambiguous written themes. Such as, "be vendor of choice", "improve employee engagement", "provide unparalleled service", and blah, blah, blah. To make matters worst, the organization then allows mangers to define how they will comply with the goal and communicate it their subordinates. Its also not uncommon for managers to rewrite the company's goals in their own terms that may or may not have the same meaning of the originally poorly written organizational goals. Consequently, as goals are cascaded through the organization the meaning and intent is lost in the various translations and rewrites.

Unfortunately and too frequently, I have seen managers write goals that directly opposed goals of another department or team. Talk about zero sum gain.

Here is what I what you to do in order to be successful even during recessionary times.

* Revisit your current goals and objectives, if they exist. Ensure they are clear and measurable. You can’t drive change using written unmeasuraable themes, however, you can drive towards a clear, well-defined measure. If each objective doesn’t have a measure, establish one, now, and its baseline.

* Make a list of all current initiatives that are underway and or planned within the organization. All initiatives, you will be surprised or more accurately disappointed by what your people are working on or think is important.

* Map every initiative to the organization’s goals and objectives. This will be difficult and frustrating because you will immediately get a sense and magnitude of how much effort and time has been squandered by your employees.

* Review each initiative to determine if it’s strategic or urgent. If the initiative is neither strategic nor urgent, consider canceling the initiative. Don't make the mistake of allowing trivial projects to continue simply because they approaching completion. Kill them now! Develop new initiatives that may have been overlooked and or urgent.

* Prioritize the new list of initiatives and determine how to resource and fund the initiative.

* Re -communicate goals, objectives, measures, and key strategic initiatives.

Good luck!
In the future, I will be blogging about other techniques to recession proof your organization.

Customer Loyalty and Retention

2008-06-17T19:40:00.001-04:00

In the book titled, Double Digit Growth author Michael Treacy identifies a handful of factors that have been associated with double digit growth. One of the factors is customer retention. Probably, not a surprise to most of you. However, the question is how do you retain customers and which customers do you retain?

I, for example, tend to be brand loyal. For some unknown reason to me, I believe that if I purchase products of the same brand the products will be compatible with one another. Moreover, it’s my ridiculous belief that if I were to have a support issue, somewhere in the company’s CRM, I will be noted as a brand loyal customer thereby entitling me to preferential treatment or dispensation. Silly me!

In the past few months, I bought a HP Widescreen laptop model 9700 with all the bells and whistles. Recently, I noticed one the little rubber a foot on the bottom of the laptop is missing. I promptly called HP for a replacement little rubber foot. Go ahead and flip your laptop over and take look. All laptops have these little rubber feet.

Guess how much HP charged me for the replacement rubber feet. Go ahead… I want you to guess.

HP wanted $99.00 US dollars to replace those little rubber feet. Not the bottom of the computer. Just the little rubber feet.

Do you think I will ever buy another HP product? No way! Knowing myself, I now harbor the belief that HP couldn’t care one bit about customer retention. Gas is a deal at $4.25 US a gallon compared to the price of little rubber feet replacements.

What are you thoughts? Been gouged lately!

Dan Feliciano - Lean Six Sigma Rock Star

M (802) 316-4063
www.DanFeliciano.com
Dan@DanFeliciano.com
www.linkedin.com/in/danfeliciano
http://danfeliciano.blogspot.com/
Skype: dan.feliciano

You don’t need Change Acceleration Process (CAP) training… you need organizationally defined measured communicated, aligned goals and objectives!

2008-04-09T14:41:00.003-04:00

A friend of mine mentioned that his organization was engaging a consulting group to do CAP training for all it’s employees. Please!!

Listed below are some commonly accepted definitions / explanations of CAP;

Change Acceleration Process (CAP) – CAP is a change management strategy and set of tools that ensures effectiveness of change through cultural acceptance. The skills and tools contained in CAP guide co-workers through the process of accepting change, from creating a shared need, shaping a vision and mobilizing commitment, to teaching them how to make change last, monitor processes, and change systems and structures to ensure the process can move from its current state to an improved state.
Change Acceleration Process (CAP) participants will learn the tools and techniques to become CAP facilitators and help fellow employees accept and accelerate these rapid changes.

Course Objectives: By the end of the CAP workshop, students will:
Be able to explain the “CAP Model”
Have practiced using and facilitating various CAP tools
Have applied some CAP tools to your department/organization
Have coached other participants in effective tool use, delivery, and facilitation
Share best practices

Change acceleration process (CAP) is a set of principles designed to increase the success and accelerate the implementation of organizational change efforts.

create a shared need for the change
understand and deal with resistance from key stakeholders
build an effective influence strategy and communication plan for the change
Drives fast, yet sustainable organizational change.
Promotes a positive environment for driving change in human behaviors, eliminates resistance and engages all those affected by the change.
Complements the technical strategy with the human strategy.

All this CAP stuff is very interesting to me. However, if only 5% of organizations employees understand the organization’s strategy, what are the chances that the person asking you to change really understands what needs to be changed and why? It’s not that people don’t like change… they don’t like ambiguity and punishment.

Organizations need to focus on creating and communicating strategies to the employees. Done correctly, creating goals, objectives, measures, targets, and identifying and resourcing key initiatives, organizations face less resistance to change. Especially, if the organization cascades the highest level goals, objectives, and measures to all the people within the organization.

If you want to accelerate change, it can be done easily by creating goals, objectives, measures, targets, and identifying and resourcing key initiatives for your organization and then cascading the measure and initiatives to every person throughout the organization.

Why are Goals and Objectives Important?

2008-04-09T11:16:00.002-04:00

You see it, hear it, read it, and often repeat it, “…the economy is doing down the drain, … competition is fiercer than ever and cutting into our profits, … lay offs are eminent, … you need to do more with less, and blah, blah, blah!”

So what are you doing to ensure your organization’s survival! Are you just complaining about the situation you got yourself into or have you decided to take a logical rational approach to improve your survival?

Why previous post about productivity resulted a flurry of emails to me asking me, “why I felt understanding productivity and goals and objectives are so important?” You have to be kidding me.

A frequently referred to set of statistics from Kaplan and Norton state;

9 of 10 companies fail to execute strategy
Only 25% of managers have incentives linked to strategy
Only 5% of the work force understand the strategy
85% of executive teams spend less than one hour/ month discussing strategy
60% of organization don’t link budgets to strategy

If these facts are remotely representative of most organizations, what the hell is everyone in your organization working on? You don’t need more resources, you just need to have them stop working on unimportant, non strategic activities and start working on the tasks that support your strategy.

According to Barney and Griffin, organizational goals serve four basic functions;

they provide guidance and direction,
facilitate planning,
motivate and inspire employees,
and help organizations evaluate and control performance.

Organizational goals inform employees where the organization is going and how it plans to get there. When employees need to make difficult decisions, they can refer to the organization's goals for guidance.

Goals promote planning to determine how goals will be achieved. Employees often set goals in order to satisfy a need; thus, goals can be motivational and increase performance.

Evaluation and control allows an organization to compare its actual performance to its goals and then make any necessary adjustments.

How many of you honestly know your organization’s goals and objectives? How many of you know where to find the organization’s goals and objectives? What criteria are you using to ensure you’re making the right decision and subsequently, optimally allocating your scarce resources?

For organizations, managers, and employees to be successful more emphasis needs to be placed on making sure every employee and every manager knows what he or she needs to accomplish in the present and future. When employees understand needs to be done to succeed, it's much easier for them to contribute. It's also tremendously easier for managers to do their jobs, to improve productivity, and to manage proactively, rather than waste their time stamping out small fires after the fact. Clear purpose helps everyone succeed and, bottom line, that's what we all want.

Organizations need to coordinate the work of individual employees and work units, ensuring that everyone is pulling in the same direction. Individual performance goals provide the fabric that allows this kind of coordination to occur.

According to Locke and Latham, goals affect individual performance through four mechanisms;

goals direct action and effort toward goal-related activities and away from unrelated activities.
goals energize employees. Challenging goals lead to higher employee effort than easy goals.
goals affect persistence. Employees exert more effort to achieve high goals.
goals motivate employees to use their existing knowledge to attain a goal or to acquire the knowledge needed to do so.

Setting individual performance goals provides a framework for translating the goals of the organization into smaller chunks that are then assigned or delegated to individual employees. This needs to be done for an organization achieve their overall goals to the extent that each employee does his or her part in completing the right job tasks in effective ways.

When an employee knows what needs to accomplished and what is expected, it's a lot easier for that employee to work without constant supervision. Also, by helping employees understand how their individual work contributes to the overall goals of the organization, we enable them to make their own decisions about how to spend their work time so that their work is consistent with the priorities of the organization. The consequences are employees know what they must do, how well they must do it, and why they are doing it. Resulting in a team that is knowledgeable and therefore empowered, to do the right things with much less supervision/oversight. The teams can make decisions relevant to their work without having to consult the manager on every little question.

Clear goals and objectives allow employees to monitor their own progress all year 'round and correct their efforts as necessary. If employees know what they need to accomplish, they can look at their results as they go and identify barriers to achieving those goals.

Believe it or not, most employees want and need to know four things about their work so they can contribute and feel comfortable about where they are in the organization:

· What do I need to accomplish?

· Why am I doing what I'm doing?

· How well must I do it?

· How am I doing?

If you want to know how to get started, give me a buzz.

Do you know the difference between a goal and an objective?

2008-03-30T21:50:00.008-04:00

As a consultant, I have the fortunate opportunity, or misfortune depending on your perspective, to review many organizations’ goals, objectives, and supporting initiatives. Despite the size of the organization, it’s obvious that most organizations large and small, public or private don’t understand the difference between a goal and an objective.

For some reason, unknown to me, this drives me crazy. I expect most business people, especially senior level executives to use the terms goal and objective correctly. Perhaps it’s my deeply held belief that in order for organizations to achieve success they have to be able to effectively communicate their goals and objectives and that these goals and objectives will be cascaded down through the organization. Silly me.

A goal is a brief, clear statement of an outcome to be reached within a timeframe such as 3-5 years. A goal is a broad, general, tangible, and descriptive statement. It does not say how to do something, but rather what the results will look like. It is measurable both in terms of quality and quantity. It is time based. It is achievable. It is a stretch from where we are now. Above all, it is singular.

Goals can be described or defined as “Outcome statements that define what an organization is trying to accomplish both programmatically and organizationally.”

As an illustration, some common business goals are, grow profitability, maximize net income, improve customer loyalty and etc. Notice the brevity of these statements.

In comparison, an objective is a specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time-bound condition that must be attained in order to accomplish a particular goal. Objectives define the actions must be taken within a year to reach the strategic goals. For example, if an organization has a goal to “grow revenues”. An objective to achieve the goal may be “introduce 2 new products by 20XX Q3.” Other examples of common objectives are, increase revenue by x% in 20XX, reduce overhead costs by X% by 20XX, and etc. In contrast to a goal, notice how the objectives are more specific and provide more detail.

A goal is where you want to be and objectives are the steps taken to reach the goal.

As I write this blog, 2008 Q1 has come to end and I bet many of you don't have any idea of your organization's goals and objectives. If don't know them, how do you know if you have been working on the right projects/things?

What the heck does "Productivity" mean?

2008-03-21T23:53:00.008-04:00

I'm often asked to define productivity and its algorithm. Also, I often hear productivity, production, and capacity used interchangeable. For some reason this drives me nuts because they all have different meanings.
I hope my write up below helps you understand what productivity means.

What is productivity?
Productivity is the ratio of outputs (goods and services) divided by one or more inputs (labor hours, FTEs, capital, expenses).

Improvements in productivity can be achieved by either increasing output without increasing the inputs, decreasing inputs without decreasing output, or increasing output and decreasing inputs.

Output implies production (quantity) of goods and services while input means land, labor, capital, management etc. Productivity measures the efficiency of the production system. Higher productivity means producing more from a given amount of input or producing a given amount with minimum level of inputs.
In other words, the more the output from one worker, one machine, or a piece of equipment per day per shift, the higher is the productivity (producing more output with the same resources).

In strategic operations management, productivity and production are two different terms. Productivity is the ratio between total output and the total inputs used in the production process. Production is an absolute; it refers to the volume (quantity) of output. Production volume may increase but productivity may decline as a result of inefficient use of resources. More efficient use of inputs may increase productivity but the volume of production may not increase. Production refers to the end result of production system whereas productivity reflects its efficiency.

Some of the potential benefits derived from higher productivity are as follows:
1. It helps to cut down cost per unit and thereby improve the profits.
2. Gains from productivity can be transferred to the consumers in from of lower priced products or better quality products.
3. These gains can also be shared with workers or employees by paying them at higher rate.

Cost for Six Sigma program for Erie County climbs to more than $1 million

2008-03-19T20:51:00.002-04:00

The Buffalo News is reporting that "The price of Erie County’s efficiency effort — the much-touted Lean Six Sigma program — is mushrooming to more than $1 million."
Come on, you don't have to spend a million bucks to get a good Lean Six Sigma program up and running.
Alfred Hammonds Jr., Six Sigma Director, wants train hundreds of employees over the next two and a half years. Come on, you don't need to train hundreds of people to have a successful six sigma program. I would start with a few well trained, coached, and mentored Black Belts to see if the culture can sustain and accept the discipline of six sigma. Six Sigma isn't for everyone.

Achieving Double-Digit Growth

2008-03-19T20:28:00.003-04:00

In his blockbuster book "Double-Digit Growth How Great Companies Achieve It – No Matter What", Michael Treacy claims companies can achieve double-digit growth by applying the following five disciplines.
• The first discipline - keep your existing customer base
• The second discipline is - take customers away from your competitors
• The third discipline is - establish a position in growth markets or segments
• The fourth discipline is - enter adjacent markets
• The fifth discipline is - invest in unrelated businesses

What have you done to keep your existing customers, especially the profitable ones? Do you even know who are your profitable customers?

What have you done to differentiate yourself from your competitors? Hopefully you haven't commoditized your products by competing on price.

80 percent of the organizations that regularly use the ‘Balanced Scorecard’ (BSC) reported improvements in operating performance

2008-03-19T20:19:00.003-04:00

Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com recently ran a story indicating, "According to recent survey of more than 1,000 organizations, 80 percent of the organizations that regularly use the ‘Balanced Scorecard’ (BSC) reported improvements in operating performance and 66 percent of them also reported an increase in profits. Correspondingly, a significant majority, 61 percent, reported improvements in bottom-line financial results."

My question to you is, how many of you have a balanced scorecard for 2008? Probably not many.

More importantly, now that we're a quarter into the fiscal year, how many of you still don't have goals and objectives. Once again, probably most of you.

American Society for Quality Vermont Section Earns Top Honors

2008-02-27T10:08:00.004-05:00

As you know, I'm the chair of Vermont Section 0012 of the American Society for Quality (ASQ). We recently received the following notice:
The Vermont Section 0012 of the American Society for Quality (ASQ) has earned the 2006-07 Section Management Process Total Quality Award, one of the highest honors a section can earn in the Society. 90 of 255 ASQ sections earned this award for the 2006-07 year.
Read the press release

Creating a Balanced Scorecard Recent Program Comments

2008-01-18T17:23:00.000-05:00

You missed a great presentation on the Balanced Scorecard that I recently gave to over 30 people at a recent Vermont ASQ event.

Here are some of the comments;
"It’s always a pleasure to hear you speak. I continue to learn volumes from you, and enjoy your special flavor of humor" - Mike

"It was great to see you yesterday and hear your enthusiasm again! I had forgotten how charged up you get about quality and just plain good business practice! ;-)" -

Click here for the presentation

If you're interested in great Strategy Mapping and Balanced Scorecard software click here. If you have problems with the software or need assistance setting it up contact me.

Reduce your transactional backlogs and transactional cycle times by 50% each in 45 days! Step 2

2008-01-13T22:44:00.000-05:00

Get a list of all open backlogged (open transactions).
For each transaction calculate its age.
Sort the transactions in descending calculated age order.
Find someone, anyone, who can help you get this report everyday, if not, in real time.

More to come!
What do you think the next step is?

Read this article on Little's law.

Danz Next Event - Building a Balanced Scorecard: "Identifying Key Performance Variables"

2008-01-08T18:15:00.001-05:00

Date 1/17/08
Building a Balanced Scorecard: "Identifying Key Performance Variables"
Balanced Scorecard methodologies have emerged as a proven and effective tool to capture, describe, and translate organizations' strategic goals, into meaningful objectives at corporate, divisional, and individual employee levels, thereby allowing for the strategies to be successfully implemented. During this exciting event, you will learn how to create a draft scorecard for your function or process, and learn more as we discuss:
* Basic concepts of balanced scorecards and how it can be used to improve organization performance
* Key concepts behind an effective Strategy Map
* How the Balanced Scorecard methodology can be used to drive Operational Excellence and Organizational Alignment

For more information contact slick1122@comcast.net

When: Thursday, January 17^th 2008

Time: 5:30pm Registration

Place: Windjammer in South Burlington

Cost: $20 ASQ and TPC Members); $30 for non-members Buffet Dinner will be provided!

Has anyone completed Step 1?

2008-01-08T18:03:00.000-05:00

Come on! Someone has to send me an email or a post about what they learned in step 1. After I hear from someone, I will post Step 2.

Reduce your transactional backlogs and transactional cycle times by 50% each in 45 days! Step 1

2008-01-05T16:40:00.000-05:00

Ok, you want to want to be a Lean Six Sigma Rock Star. This is the first step in reducing your transactional backlogs and transactional cycle times by 50% each in 45 days.
Have your employees who resolve your customer issues, cases, complaints, bugs or whatever, document all the tasks they do in a month and how much time is spent doing each task. To make it easy, create a spreadsheet for them to populate.
Examples of tasks are; answering email, training, meetings, special projects and so on.
After they have done so, review the document to understand how much time they spend doing other things rather than the primary activities and tasks they were hired to do.
What are thoughts? What have you learned? What percentage of their total time is doing things they weren't hired to do?

Simplified Strategy Planning for outrageous success

2007-12-27T10:59:00.000-05:00

Do you want to have a fabulous year? Do the following and your organization will have more success this year than in any previous year!

Step 1: Review and refine your organization’s vision

Step 2: Create meaningful and strategically essential organizational objectives (a vital few) that align to your vision

Step 3: Align your organization’s performance metrics to the organization’s vital few objectives listed in step 2 (cascade these measures to every function, team and person throughout the organization)

Step 4: Identify strategic initiatives that are required to achieve your organization’s vital few objectives

Step 5: Assign ownership and accountability of each of the vital few objectives and associated initiatives to an executive that reports to you (do not allow the executives to delegate ownership of the objectives)

Step 6: Let the fun begin!!!!

Communicate, communicate and communicate the status of the vital few objectives in every communication produced. Don’t let the organization confuse other non-critical activities with your vital few objectives.

Need help, with a strategic planning methodology, tools, or software, give me buzz!

Anything not worth doing is worth not doing well. Think about it.
- Elias Schwartz

So you want to be a Lean Six Sigma Rock Star

2007-12-24T08:28:00.000-05:00

I will be publishing some steps you can to take to reduce your transactional backlogs and transactional cycle times by 50% each in 45 days. I know this can be done my team team has done it many, many times. Believe it or not, you don't need a lot of fancy tools or training to do so.

But first, you have to be believe.

Second, do you have the courage to face and address the bias in your facts.

Stayed tuned for more.

Sustaining the Gain

2007-07-23T07:42:00.000-04:00

At a recent ASQ meeting we were brainstorming training programs to offer during the coming year. We got your typical training ides; Lean, Six Sigma Yellow Belt, Six Sigma Green Belt, and other standard ASQ certification primer classes. I was hoping for newer and more exciting programs.

I then asked the group this question, what issues are our members and their businesses facing? From meetings with other members and local organizations, I believed that many organizations were having difficulty sustaining the results from the projects that had been completed. I believed that we should be offering classes around sustaining gains.

I asked the team to brainstorm ideas on why some project results were not sustained. We then affinitized the results into 3 themes; Leadership commitment, Culture, and lack of process / operations acumen. No surprises here.
In the coming weeks, I will dissect each of these themes into further actionable themes.

However, at a high level, I believe leadership commitment is a result of a couple things, the leadership merry go round (leaders are in their current assignments for short periods of time and are not considering the long term implications of their short term draconian policies. The next leadership issue, is the lack of strategic planning and communication of the plan. How many of you can name the top 3 strategic imperatives for your organization and the metrics being used to monitor the progress towards the strategic imperatives.

Culture is the organizations coping mechanism to the constant change in leadership
and lack of a clear organization strategy.

Lack of process / operations acumen, I believe that they're many people in the roles of process / operations managers or leaders who don't have formal training in managing their process or operations, I believe this to be especially true in transactional functions.

What are you thoughts?

Are the stars aligned?

2007-07-20T17:55:00.000-04:00

I have a challenge for you.
Can you name your companies top 5 Strategic Goals?
If so, you're most likely one of the few people who can. But I doubt you know them.
Most people don't have a clue what their company's strategy is or it's key goals.

Why is that?

If you don't know your companies most critical strategic imperatives, how do you know if your work isn't counteracting / damaging the companies strategy?
Hmmm....

You need to immediately go and find out what your companies key strategic imperatives are and determine how you can help the company achieve its goals.
So, where do you start?
Find the companies strategy document. Every company should have one. Yeah right! If one doesn't exist, post your resume on Monster.com immediately.

The strategy document should contain, ha ha ha, goals, objectives, measures (yes, measures that should be tracked), targets, and key initiatives that your company will supposedly execute to achieve its goals.
Once you have researched the strategy, align your work with the companies key initiatives.
Got it.
If you don't, give me a buzz. We can work through this together.

Sony Service Stinks

2006-11-20T13:43:00.000-05:00

Google
I have been trying to install Sony's Sonicstage software that came with my MP3 Walkman for 3 days. What a fiasco. I can't get the software to run I get an error message. I tried chatting with Sony techs and they gave me the same script each time and no one gave a damn about correcting my problem.
Buyers beware. If I can't get Sony help before the winter holidays I doubt you will get help after the holidays.

I would never recommend a Sony product to a friend, family, or collegue.

Six Sigma Master Black Belt

2006-07-28T23:38:00.000-04:00

I recently had an "oh $hit" moment.
A friend of mine with a prominent consulting firm asked me if I could recommend a Master Black Belt as a strategic management consultant. After all, I know at least a 100 MBBs. Guess what, I could think of a few and that's stretch.
Could you?
Unfortunately, many MBBs are clueless and neglectly incapable of assisting executives in clarifying their strategy. So how is it these MBBs are responsible for selecting strategicly important projects. They're not and they can't.
Why is that?