Operations of all sizes can benefit from a continuous improvement strategy. Our belief is that you can integrate continuous improvement techniques simply and easily, by systematically applying common sense.
This guide will help you get started – with continuous improvement techniques that are simple, practical and don’t cost the earth! Check out our navigation below.
- What is Continuous Improvement?
- Standardised work
- The Continuous Improvement Cycle
- CI Planning
- CI Execution
- CI Reviewing
- Creating sustainable continuous improvement
What is Continuous Improvement?
Continuous Improvement (CI) is a long-term approach towards improving processes, products and services. It aims to:
- Increase efficiency
- Reduce costs
- Increase quality
Organisations that practise Continuous Improvement make small, incremental changes to existing, standardised work processes. Over time these improvements accumulate to significant gains in overall efficiency and give your business an increasingly competitive edge.
Standardised Work
Fundamental to the practice of Continuous Improvement is the habit of standardised work. When everyone follows a well-practised, consistent set of steps that are based on best practice, it reduces fluctuation in process quality. It makes it easier to spot inefficiencies, and to take advantage of opportunities for improvement.
When issues do occur, it can help you put aside time to really understand the root causes and put in place long-term fixes. Over time, this habit can iteratively increase the predictability of work and thus reduce variation in the quality of your service. Better work, delivered more consistently – that’s a winner in our eyes.
The Continuous Improvement (CI) Cycle
The goal of Continuous Improvement is to enable teams to consistently find new ways (no matter how small) to deliver more value to their customers, faster and more economically. It does this through a feedback loop of planning, executing and reviewing changes.
If improving and innovating is a priority, and for most companies, it is, then time has to be made for these activities. Keeping continuous improvement tasks small and achievable helps teams perform their daily work, alongside a limited number of change activities.
Invest time into streamlining, and improving the way work is done, so you can increase your capacity and do even more. The Continuous Improvement cycle can be summarised as follows:
Step 1: Plan
Start Small
Starting small is a considered approach if you’re new to Continuous Improvement. Early education plays a critical part in helping your team understand what continuous improvement is, and how to integrate it into their routine work. Smaller-scale pilot initiatives, where overall risk is low, are more likely to be successful and win the confidence of your team for larger-scale future ideas.
This might be a decision that you make on your own, or it might be something you want to bring in your wider team on. Here are some ideas for a place to get started:
- Something that you have recently received complaints about.
- A process that is frequently repeated and you know it is inefficient.
- A task that you feel is being carried out by different people in different ways.
Try to choose something small, where you feel you may find some quick and easy wins. Think about it, your team is far more likely to get onboard with something that can easily be identified as having been successful, than they are with something whose success is harder to quantify.
Map the Workflow
Once you understand who the key players are in a process it’s time to bring them together to map it. Every team has a process for getting things done, whether it’s formally written down or not. You’re aiming to get the process down on paper as it is now, not how you or anyone else thinks it could be done better. Continuous Improvement is based on the idea that if you don’t know where you are, you can’t get to where you are going.
“One must first understand a process before one can change it, much less, improve it.”
You’ll need: your team, in a room, with a pack of post it notes, whiteboard or spare wall, board markers, and a packet of biscuits just for good measure.
Time: you should be able to achieve this in an hour, although it’s important not to cut your team short. You’re likely to work through group politics and some high-value discussions will take place, so you’ll need to give your team the time to work through this.
Continuous Improvement Workshop
Ice breaker: to start the exercise give each team member five post-it notes and ask them to individually write down any step that is taken as part of the task on their own. It’s important that the steps are descriptive of the step, so rather than “readings” you might say “take a reading from the water meter”, and a separate Post-it for “take a reading from the electricity meter.”
Start sticking the Post-it notes on the wall or whiteboard in the order that the work is done, if they are the same just stick the Post-it notes on top of each other. Don’t worry too much about doing this the “right way.” The right way is the way that helps you and others involved understand the process.
A great place to start is simply just using the Post-it notes, a white board or spare wall, but you might want to add copies of forms and photos if they help. Once done, work through the process and let the discussion evolve. Add more Post-it notes and fill out the process until the team agrees that it’s totally mapped out. Remember you are trying to map out how things are done now, not how they should be.
Brain-Dump Continuous Improvement Ideas
As you start to come up with ideas your team will naturally start to share the daily issues they face with their work. You’re likely to come across a few ideas of how the process could be improved, or what frustrates them. Start to capture those ideas on separate Post-it notes, and start a Brain-Dump board of ideas that could be acted on to improve a process.
Useful questions along the way might be:
- How do you know what to do next?
- How do you know when to start?
- What delays you?
- Where do you get the detailed information about what you’re doing?
- What problems do you have here? (i.e. time wasted, spending too much money etc.).
- What are some potential solutions to the problems?
- How would you like that process to work?
- How can you reduce the time taken to complete a process?
- What would happen if that spreadsheet was corrupted?
Measurement
Are there any easy, top-level metrics that you can use to measure this process? Examples might be: number of customer complaints per month, visits to your website, total time taken for the task (you might want to put a nominal estimation on each part of the process). Try and come up with one valuable metric which is an indicator of how successful the process is.
Documenting Standardised Work
If you don’t have process documentation already, this is a great time to document the standardised process electronically. It’s dangerous for a business to rely on expertise that’s only in your team's heads (this is something known as tacit, or implicit knowledge), as this can lead to the development of knowledge silos. Software is useful for drawing this neat final diagram, but the Post-it method given here works better for the messy initial stages of creating the process flow.
Group Brain-Dump Ideas into Themes
Start to group continuous improvement ideas that sit naturally together or would need to be done together to be effective. You might want a specific theme for quick wins – things that you can do straight away which are quick, easy and only need minimal investment.
To Close the Meeting
As a means of drawing the meeting to a close, ask the team to put the themes into a priority order, so that they flow logically in terms of implementation.
Maintaining a Backlog of Ideas
Software is useful for keeping a record of all of the ideas your team has – something like Trello might work well or a spreadsheet. The method given here works better for the messy initial stages of creating the brain-dump – so don’t be tempted to skip straight to software.
Step 2: Executing continuous improvement plans
Now it’s time to get going on your plans; you have a ‘backlog’ of ideas that are grouped into themes in order of priority. Again, this is less about finding the perfect process and more about getting started. Over the next few weeks/months your new visual process will take more form, and solidify into a habit that’s easy for your team to maintain.
You’ll need: your team, the list of prioritised tasks so everyone can see and a spare whiteboard or wall in a central place where your team works which is divided to look a bit like this:
Time needed: 10 mins
Visual To-Do List
Limiting Work In Progress
To get started, we’re going to limit work in progress. This may seem counter-intuitive, but limiting what’s on your ‘to do’ list can help you finish more work, more quickly by allowing you to focus on a single task rather than being distracted by many.
Ask your team if they could commit to achieving just one priority continuous improvement task this week, what would it be? Get them to write it on a Post-it and stick it under 'To do'. When a task is started, move it to 'Doing' and put a name on it. When it’s complete, move it to 'Done'.
Thank everyone for their time – and make sure you mean it!
Step 3: Review
Once the end of a cycle arrives, take a fresh look back over your progress from the last week, and see what you can gain from it.
You’ll need: your team around the 'To do' list on the wall.
Time needed: 20 mins.
Activity:
Gather around the board and review the progress this week. What’s worked, what hasn’t worked, are things improving? Jump back to the Planning step, review the documented Standard Work – what’s changed? Quickly review process documentation and make sure it’s up to date with the current state.
Review the metric you chose to monitor the success of the progress – what does it measure at now? Are there any ideas that can be added to the ideas backlog and does it need to be re-prioritised? Schedule the kick-off meeting for the next cycle.
There’s no end to the process of reducing effort, time, space, cost and mistakes. Return to the first step and begin the next lean transformation. And, as always, thank everyone for their time.
Sustaining Continuous Improvement
By staying disciplined and continuing to follow this strategy, gradually, week-by-week, you'll be able to watch your team tick off and achieve small improvement tasks. As the 'tick off's accumulate, you’ll notice that the habit of repeatedly achieving small things can add up to more significant change.
Maybe the time and resources that you’ve saved from gradual improvements can justify more significant investment – perhaps new software or machinery. You might even find some business processes that can be dropped entirely, again leading to significant savings.
You might want to map-out processes in more detail. Or you might want to review another process and add it into the cycle, use it as a flexible system and mould the basic tools around it to work for your team. Maybe you need a different board for each of your teams. Start small – get some quick wins with little investment – expand the process carefully.
Want to Standardise Processes? Digitise Your Reporting
Once you’ve gotten into the culture of Continuous Improvement, you’ll find that those small wins quickly add up, and you’ll be wondering what you ever did before implementing CI. Another great (and easy) way you can improve your work processes is to go digital.
How many of your reporting processes are still paper-based? Still clunky and inefficient? How much time do your admin professionals spend putting reports together that could be better spent elsewhere? We’re betting the answer is probably quite a lot… Check out this blog that explains how forms automation supports continuous improvement.
What Do We Offer?
Here at Rugged Data, we take your paper-based reporting processes and convert them into something greater; something efficient, intuitive and easy-to-use. In short, something digital. We create bespoke mobile forms and reporting applications for your processes, whether that be for your technicians out in the field, or for your admin team in the office.
Ready to take your reporting processes to the next level? Get in touch with Rugged Data today.
