The continuous improvement (CI) journey offers opportunities for achieving operational excellence, with significant enhancements to a company’s bottom line and enrichment of employee morale. It can, however, be fraught with frustration if the strategy and tactics for implementation are not clearly planned and communicated.
Ideally enthusiastic, skilled and respected change agents and management across the organization will drive a culture-led CI implementation, guaranteeing top-down and bottom-up engagement and alignment. This will ensure lasting success, not a “flavor-of-the-month” perception by large portions of the workforce, including some reluctant managers.
Some organizations approach CI with basic training on the history and theory of continuous improvement and a collection of Six Sigma and Lean tools that have proven valuable across multiple processes and operational fields. These are certainly important elements of the overall plan, but when applied as standalone items without needed cultural changes, they're not adequate to drive lasting CI success.
This tools-driven approach parallels the concept from Field of Dreams
: “If you build it, he will come.”
However, if you build a complex continuous improvement structure without a supporting culture, very few workers in your organization will actually come to the CI game. However, if you change the culture to get people to come to the shared CI mindset, they will build the continuous improvement system. Broad-based ownership is key to lasting cultural change.
Merriam-Webster defines culture as “a way of thinking, behaving, or working that exists in a place or organization.” The process of operationalizing continuous improvement requires building CI into the thinking, behaviors, and work efforts at every level of the organization. At a grand scale, the execution of the CI implementation plan actually follows the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle that Deming envisioned. At an operational level, it’s important to build in specific structural elements that will ensure success.
Five key planning and execution actions are needed for CI implementation success. This “how-to guide” can be used for CI change from small to large organizations, with geographically centered or virtual teams.
With today’s capabilities for virtual information access nearly instantaneously across a room or across the world, content sharing is easy; yet, it still requires planning and systems capabilities for maximum impact in CI ownership and successful implementation.
Beyond just sharing content, operationalizing valuable information requires:
While continuous improvement is often described as a collection of small advances, it actually is most effective in driving operational excellence when it is approached as this longer-term strategic journey built on cultural change. Take it one step further and find out how you can ensure ROI from your CI approach.