Continuous Improvement: how to do things faster, better and with less effort

With the complexity and pace of change in today's corporate environments, keeping on top of processes and tools is not just a nice-to-have: it's critical. Neglect it, and your team will soon be bogged down with more and more admin: losing time, losing motivation and bringing less value. Sound familiar? Continuous improvement can help by simplifying and improving workflows to save time and effort, reducing errors and boosting productivity. The approach largely emerged from post-war Japan under the term Kaizen, and is particularly associated with Toyota. Kaizen focuses on relatively small incremental changes that collectively lead to significant improvements over time.

Kaizen often comes alongside a Lean approach, meaning a focus on reducing waste (Muda in Japanese), though Kaizen can also deliver better quality products, or increase safety or employee satisfaction. In a corporate context, improvements may involve reducing the number of steps or decision points in a process, changing how teams communicate, making small improvements to existing software tools. For example, you might find that the same team is being asked for an approval at two stages in a process where one will suffice, or that the information needed to support a decision is not readily available to the decisionmaker. In such cases a small improvement like removing an unnecessary approval or ensuring access to the information needed, can, in a small way, simplify and speed things up. And those small improvements can quickly add up. Again, the focus is on making small incremental changes on an ongoing basis, not major projects like organisational restructuring or bringing a new ERP system, which would need a different approach, typically higher in the organisation.

Setting up and managing a Continuous Improvement project

Setting up and running a Continuous Improvement project is surprisingly easy: build the team, make a tracker, hold a kick-off session, list the items needing improvement, identify objectives and solutions, assign owners, and circle back regularly. Let’s look into each of these steps, with a few hints and tips as we go:

• Build the team. You may be tempted to gather a few team members and use a hierarchical chain of command, but I would suggest the exact opposite: invite the whole team and encourage participation from all those doing the work. The aim is to maximise both the improvements identified and the number of people available to help with them. The ideal is heavily informed by Agile principles: people should be enabled to "lead from every seat", regardless of rank or responsibility. In addition to your own team, you might also bring in close business partners responsible for the processes and tools involved.
• Make a tracker. This should be a central repository available to everyone on the project; a spreadsheet in the cloud (for example on Google Cloud or Office 365, etc.) will do nicely. In line with the Agile approach, make it open for all to edit/update. The tracker should include a Name for each issue, a Description of the issue, the Objective of any improvements, the Date of when the issue was logged, and Who it was logged by. It should also have sections for Notes on possible ways to resolve it as well as an Owner, the latter being in charge of getting that particular item to resolution. Finally it should include a Status, for example Open/In-Progress/Fixed/Closed (no fix). Finally, I suggest you add two or three known issues to 'seed' the tracker and show how it is used.
• Hold a kick-off session, and log any initial items needing improvement. At this session you will present the tracker and the continuous improvement approach, emphasising that everyone can identify problems, and that resolving those problems will likewise need the team's involvement and ownership. Next, invite the team to suggest items needing improvement, adding them to the tracker as you go. While people will be tempted to suggest solutions, it's best to keep discussions of solutions to a minimum to avoid losing too much time on that and missing the chance to add further items to the list. Whatever you do, avoid judging other people's additions or suggestions, and try to keep the team from doing so likewise, as that will discourage people from bringing ideas.
• Identify objectives, possible solutions and owners. After you have listed the potential items for improvement, go through them with the team to ask for clarity where needed, identifying the objectives and potential solutions where applicable. Don’t get bogged-down discussing any one issue: the moment that starts happening is the time to assign a team member to own that item, and to move on. Make sure that the objectives are SMART, that is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound, and that there is a clear path for the owner of that item to follow to achieve it, as well as an indication of the timeline in the Notes section.
• Follow Up and Carry On. You may find the initial session needs one or more sessions in quick succession to add further items to the list or follow-up on issues identified. Schedule these as needed, encouraging the team to update the tracker ad-hoc between sessions. Following those, the sessions can follow a regular cadence (for example monthly to begin with and quarterly later on). Each session should follow the same basic structure: members should be invited to add any new issues encountered, filling out the tracker and assigning an owner. Then the Open items should be discussed to note any progress or obstacles, and how to move things forward. If an item is fixed, or if there's no fix available, the Status should be updated accordingly in the tracker to take it off the list for subsequent meetings.

And that's it! Generally a lot of small low-hanging fruit can be identified and addressed in a short time, with more complicated items needing further discussions outside of the team, managed by their owners. The main thing is to keep momentum, so you can make the team more productive, one step at a time.

This approach has brought some great results to the teams we implemented it in, removing obstacles, reducing pain points, filling in gaps and generally making everyone’s life easier while speeding up the work. I’d be interested to hear your suggestions, though: how does your company or organisation manage such tool and process improvements? Do you have such a project or something else altogether? Let me know in the comments!

Incidentally, this subject is one I was first introduced to by the excellent Felipe Martinez , in the Operations Management module of the Executive MBA Course at the Vysoká ?kola ekonomická v Praze (thanks Felipe!). Finally, I highly recommend you get in touch with Executive Director Vojtech Oplestil if you want to hear more about the course, or reach out to me for a chat about it.