Work In Progress
A vital element to ensure future success is the application of continuous improvement. Continuous improvement means we accept that everything we do is subject to improvement. With continuous improvement embedded throughout your system, you are supported and enabled to lead in your journey to greatness.
To call it a culture of continuous improvement, it must be deliberate, regular, visible, and built into the system of work. It must be viewed as integral and not just on top of or extra work. There needs to be an organization-wide program that encourages everyone to regularly reflect on their work and seek ways to make it better. And most importantly, the people doing the work need to be the ones saying how the work should be done.
I remember a job early in my career when I was hired to be a systems administrator for an automotive testing lab. I was responsible for the programming of the testing machines and for the presentation of the results. Much of the work was manual and repetitive. Computers and technology were just starting to become practical for automation, and a network had recently been installed to connect everything together. Within 6 months I was able to eliminate about 50% of the work I was hired to do. This felt very natural to me because I dislike mindless and repetitive administrative work.
I was surprised by some in my family who expressed concern that I’m working myself out of a job. “Isn’t that a risk to your employment, they could get rid of you” they said. I had never thought of it that way, but still I knew it was the right thing. There would always be more challenging and interesting work in front of me. Continuous improvement has been built into the way I work for as long as I can remember. When I’m working I’m thinking, is there a better way for me to get this done.
While continuous improvement is natural for me, I recognize that some people may be more interested to preserve the way things are. Not everyone want’s to change. A continuous improvement culture recognizes this and seeks to overcome resistance. The concerns and fears must be discussed and addressed openly, and the benefits must be clear. The goal is that everyone is willing and able to contribute to the effort of continuous improvement.
Lean and Agile have continuous improvement built into their models. These models give you some of the tools and techniques to institute a continuous improvement culture in your organization. However, in my experience, the scope and how they are used are often less than ideal.
Let’s explore these models and their expectations for continuous improvement.
- The Agile Manifesto contains principle 12:
- At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly
- In Scrum, the retrospective is the event which lives to this principle.
- The retrospective happens every iteration, and the Scrum Master makes sure that improvement is happening by planning the efforts and following up.
- In the House of Lean we have the expectation to:
- Seek the highest quality, lowest cost, and shortest lead time, in order to increase customer value
- Focus on waste reduction
- Systematic problem solving
- Optimize for the whole value stream
If Lean and Agile have continuous improvement built into the system, do we need something more beyond that? In medium and large sized organizations, there may be individuals and groups who somehow escape the application of improvement. Groups outside of product development need to be included to fully address end-to-end optimization. Everyone is a part of the value stream.
In an environment of continuous improvement, everything is subject to change. And anything that hasn’t changed should be subject to more intense scrutiny. “That’s just how we do things around here” is a sign that opportunities exist.
The heart of any form of continuous improvement is the application of Plan-Do-Check-Act or PDCA cycle. Humans tend to be good a plan and do … and move on to the next thing. What tends to be more challenging is the instituting of the check and act part of the cycle. How and when do you know that the change had the intended effect? A good continuous improvement program has a a method or checklist to ensure an effectiveness check is confirmed.
Important points:
- Know your culture and use it in your strategy
- Involve everyone, educate, listen, participate -> respect for people
- Make it formal, but not rigid, to get it going; rewards can be helpful in the short term
- Align on goals; everyone working toward the same objectives
- Frequent touch points, at least weekly
- Apply PDCA loops, confirm results
- Visualize progress; everyone can see what’s being improved
- Good practices over best practices; ‘best practice’ implies that it can’t get any better; ‘good practice’ leaves it open to improvement
- Make it safe to fail / celebrate failures; not everything you try will work; make sure you learn from your failures