The effectiveness of any organisation hinges on every employee taking responsibility for constant improvements to products, services, and processes. Improvements can reduce errors or waste, add value or safety, or resolve issues that slow down a process or make it unpleasant for users. All fundamental concepts of lean thinking.
Sometimes companies will engage in major improvement projects, but a continuous improvement mindset means that a professional is always looking for even very tiny opportunities improvement—and acting on those opportunities. A professional is always looking for ways to improve, even when things are going well.
Continuous improvement (CI) value proposition
The continuous improvement (CI) value proposition, while invaluable in enabling transformation and improving the customer experience, has lost some of its meaning and lustre to those not directly involved with it. It has become stale bread. Executives cannot always articulate what CI represents to their organisation or customers. Their attention is now being diverted by newer things, such as Agile. Using the Agile methodology, teams can build products and services faster, but with every strength, there is a weakness: Agile doesn’t have the framework to clearly define the business opportunity and customer requirements. Nor can the methodology ensure successful operationalisation of the solutions it devises. It is beneficial to use multiple, complementary methodologies in business transformation and continuous improvement. By using Lean Six Sigma to “bookend” an Agile product or service development process, organisations can enable accelerated transformation.
The purpose of the proposed continuous improvement strategy is to provide a structured process for enhancing existing arrangements, to gain incremental improvements through feedback. The focus is to improve the deliverables, services and processes of the organisation.
The basis of the PDCA cycle is a four-part quality lifecycle. And these actually constitute the Acronym of the PDCA cycle: Plan, Do, Check and Act. This cycle may be used to improve, for example, an online ordering service or the Service Level Management process within an organization.
The 4 Activities of the PDCA Cycle
Plan
The first step of the PDCA cycle is planning the improvements. In this step, measures for success are agreed. Gap analysis is undertaken and a plan is produced to close the gap through a series of step improvements.
Do
The second activity of the PDCA cycle will be Do which refers to the implementation of improvements. A project is initiated and conducted to implement any steps needed to close the gaps identified in the Plan phase. The project may include a number of step changes to improve a service or process.
Check
The third activity of the PDCA cycle is Check. Check is more accurately described as Monitoring, Measuring and Reviewing. The results of the implemented improvements are compared with the measures for success identified and signed off in the Plan phase.
Act
The fourth and the last activity of the PDCA cycle is Act. Improvements are implemented in this step. The improvements that have been identified are fully implemented.
Continuous Improvement Process
In the first step, the continuous improvement process begins with opportunity scouting: a systematic identification of problems in workflows and processes. For this purpose, internal workshops are usually held in the form of quality circles. These are conducted by a continuous improvement manager or coach. In the quality circle, the actual status is questioned with regard to the quality and efficiency of processes and products. At the same time, solutions are sought – for example, examples of companies that have better organised certain processes. The aim of the first phase is to identify opportunities for optimisation and improvement.
The process factors that you need to consider for continuous improvement are:
- Identify improvements. There are several ways that your process improvement group can support the identity of potential improvements within your organisation. One of the more effective strategies is to help teams adopt the practice of holding regular retrospectives. Although it is common for disciplined agile delivery teams to hold retrospectives this is often a new concept for enterprise architecture teams, programme governance teams, business transformation, and so on. I also get very good traction with value stream mapping and brainstorming sessions, which invariably proves to be far more effective than the traditional approach of creating current and proposed (business) process models that rarely seem to result in lasting acceptance of the proposed new way of working.
- Share improvements. As you can see there are multiple ways that you can share improvement ideas between teams, many of them being free or at least very inexpensive to implement. I’ve had very good experiences with internal discussion forums such as Jive, Yammer or local intranets, practitioner presentations (often called lunch and learns) where someone presents their learnings to others, lean coffee sessions where people voluntarily meet at a regular time to share ideas, and communities of practice (sometimes called guilds) who purposely collaborate to educate themselves in a given topic.
- Capture improvements. There are various ways that identified improvements may be captured to retain them over time. Possible strategies include describing each learning in a document and then managing that document in a documentation repository such as Sharepoint or more simply in a shared folder; capturing the learnings in a shared wiki such as Confluence ; describing your evolving process as pat of the CI.
- Support teams. Your process improvement team can help others to adopt process improvement techniques through training, education, and coaching. They can also facilitate team assessments and retrospectives (a great idea is to co-facilitate a few retrospectives with someone on the team to transfer those skills to them). A very effective strategy is to help a team run a process improvement experiment or two, particularly in situations where the team isn’t being supported by a coach. This helps them see that they can safely try new ideas within their environment for a few iterations to determine whether it works for them or not. Many teams, particularly those new to CI, often do not feel empowered to run such experiments and thus need help to do so.
- Organise Communities of Practice (CoPs)/Working groups. A Community of Practice (CoP) is a collection of people who share a craft or profession who have banded together to ‘learn’ from each other to develop themselves and often even the organisation. We’ve seen CoPs for testing, architecture, agile/lean, business analysis, technical debt, and many others. CoPs will often perform the activities called out by the Identify Improvements, Share Improvements, Capture Improvements, and Support Teams process factors. A CoP will often start up when one or more practitioners within your organization recognise the need for it, although sometimes it may also start to support the efforts of a corresponding Center of Excellence (CoE). Participation in a CoP is typically voluntary. Please don’t overburden staff with meetings, just for the sea of meetings. Make sure the frequency of them is suited to the organisation.
- Organise Centers of Excellence (CoEs). A Center of Excellence (CoE) is a group of people with specialized skills and expertise whose job is to provide leadership and purposely disseminate that knowledge within your organisation. CoEs are often created by an organisation to support the adoption of new technology or operating model. Participation as a member of a CoE will be part of, or the entire job for someone.
- Govern improvement. It is very common for senior management to want to know whether or not the organisation is benefiting from your investment in adopting new ways of working and lean techniques (or other potential improvements for that matter), how much things are improving, and how widespread the adoption is. The implication is that there needs to be some way to monitor and report on, preferably in a lightweight and streamlined manner, the improvement activities.
Even a brilliant strategy can’t succeed if the culture doesn’t support delivery of it. Individuals at all levels need to understand the strategy and how they contribute to the successful delivery of it; without this knowledge they will continue to operate as they always have, resulting in proposed improvements not actually becoming embedded or being implemented.
Establishing the the right culture and mindset
There are common pitfalls that many organisations can encounter when embarking on an operational excellence and continuous improvement programme. This can include, but is not limited to:
- Believing that what is currently in place is good enough and being unwilling to change
- Conversely, assuming everything is bad and it all needs to be changed, without checking what we already have and potentially missing some real ‘golden nuggets’
- Trying to do too much, too quickly, risking failure and alienating staff
- Getting complacent or over confident about progress after a small number of successes
- Engaging in too much fanfare and not enough focus on results, and thus losing staff interest at various levels
- Vanity in proxy metrics, not results (how many did we do vs. were they actually effective?)
- Disconnect between upper, middle and delivery employees and thus missing out on valuable input from each level
- Creating a small number of continuous improvement ‘experts’ instead of creating a company of problem solvers, and thus underutilising people’s talent, skills, and knowledge
- Trying to introduce every new tool or improvement into every activity, team or project.
As outlined earlier, the visible commitment of the leadership team is essential. Equally important is the need to foster positive ‘followership’; creating a sense of ownership in continuously improving the company’s governance processes and thus achieving compliance. It requires the engagement of staff throughout the business in achieving common goals and working collaboratively to grow and succeed, both as individuals and therefore as a business. The strategy and vision need to be communicated effectively at all levels, to provide a clear picture of the methods and benefits of continuous improvement. This will generate a sense of purpose the whole organisation can embrace.
Skills development will be vital across the business, particularly in terms of developing a problem-solving mindset and habit. Limiting this skill to a select few will not achieve a collective culture of continuous improvement; we need everyone to be capable of seeing opportunities to improve in their everyday activities, including being able to learn lessons and identify solutions. We are developing good tools for problem solving but these cannot deliver the improvements we desire if they are used by staff who do not understand when and how to use them. Basic training in problem solving techniques would be a valuable investment, as the return on this would be the creation of a skilled organisation that can competently drive continuous improvement.
A competent team will feel authorised and empowered to strive for excellence, and therefore motivated to make necessary improvements required to achieve this. These may range from small incremental changes (continuous improvement) all the way up to major step-changes (transformation). Involvement breeds ownership and engagement; seeking input from those who know our business’s problems first hand will provide the essential insights we need in order to address them, and allow those same people to shape pragmatic solutions in a collaborative manner. They will also feel encouraged to share existing best practices and lessons learnt, which are equally valuable in our pursuit of excellence. Issues can be resolved together and would lead to a more productive team as well as faster issue resolution.
In order to seek views and input from the wider organisation, pulse surveys could be utilised. These may be of a general nature, such as asking for details of problem solving techniques staff currently use. Alternatively they could be workstream specific e.g. how staff currently undertake a particular activity, views on the suitability of existing processes, improvements they recommend, good practices they can share, and seeking volunteers to join a working group. This would further boost staff engagement.
I would also suggest carrying out a diagnostics stage at the start of the programme that identifies that issues identified by the business. It also identified that multiple, discrete processes currently exist for certain activities, causing confusion and thus varying levels of compliance. It is difficult to create a compliance culture if standards are vague, have several options or versions or are cumbersome. A key element of creating accountability and compliance is therefore to set high standards that are simple but mandated.
The initial efforts in the strategy will be to review, rationalise and streamline our existing governance processes and activities, to create operationally excellent standards. This will include identifying activities that can be stopped, those which need to be prioritised, and uncovering existing best practices. Once we have eliminated non-value added activities and established a clear baseline for effective governance, we can transition to a mode of continuous improvement.
In combination with setting high standards of accountability, it is essential that we also create a culture of psychological safety. Organisations embarking on a campaign for achieving a culture where everyone can feel confident in the belief that they will not be punished or humiliated for raising concerns, asking questions, offering ideas or speaking up about mistakes. Uniting accountability with psychological safety will directly contribute to a perpetual learning culture for both individuals and our business; this is essential for creating a world class team, supporting responsible growth, achieving operational excellence, and ensuring we get (and remain) fit for the future.