Last time, we looked at building a culture of continuous improvement. Today, we’ll go further and outline 10 principles central to excellent continuous improvement.
- Better outcomes for everyone associated with the business
In an excellence culture, improvement is explicitly aimed at improving the outcomes for, and experience of, everyone the business affects. - Embed continuous improvement and make it an integral part of everyday work at all levels
Continuous improvement should be integral to everyday work and deeply embedded in management routines, disciplines and habits. This brings greater stability, resilience and adaptability in the face of challenge. The absence of them correlates with inconsistent performance – and, occasionally, chaos. - Everything is in scope
Every part of the business system should be consistently and actively managed and improved as an integrated whole rather than as isolated parts. - Increase value-add
Adding monetisable customer value should always be the primary focus: to increase profitable and sustainable sales revenue by understanding and meeting customers’ ever-evolving needs, serving existing customers better and being increasingly attractive to new ones.
Continuous improvement should be integral to everyday work and deeply embedded in management routines, disciplines and habits
- Reduce waste by focusing on right-first-time quality
With the processes tuned to optimise customer value, all wasted time, effort, friction and resource should be systematically identified and removed. But we must take care to ensure that we are indeed removing waste and not inadvertently destroying value by, for example, cutting costs and creating even more costly quality problems. - Take a systemic approach
A business is a system in which everything affects everything else. Here are three useful insights that will reduce the danger of unintended negative consequences:- Address the ‘rocks in the river’: Focus on addressing definite, genuine barriers to flow – which, if removed, will enhance the quality, delivery or cost performance of the end-to-end process
- Beware push-down-pop-up problem-solving: Check that your ‘improvement’ idea won’t create bigger problems elsewhere
- Find and address root causes – don’t just to react to symptoms or jump to solutions without adequate analysis
- Take a systematic and disciplined approach
Continuous improvement must follow a disciplined, structured and rigorous approach, based on PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) thinking, which systematically identifies and removes the root causes of waste and other problems so that they are resolved permanently. - Involve everyone
Everyone in the business should be actively engaged in continuous improvement activities. - Develop a continuous improvement mentality
Develop throughout the business a willingness to address problems, overcome setbacks, and embrace experimentation and the debate inherent in the improvement process. - Improve continuously
‘Continuously’ means three things. That improvement is:- A daily activity, an integral part of daily operations. Routine, not crisis-driven reactivity
- Ongoing, driven by the quest for excellence. The focus on improvement shouldn’t end when the issue of the moment has been dealt with
- Improving how we improve, continually enhancing the tools, skills, trust and culture that allow us to solve ever-bigger problems, and to take ever-bigger opportunities faster and better
Questions to consider:
Which of these principles does your business do well?
Is there room to improve how you improve?
Let’s get to work
Over 27 years of practice, we have developed a comprehensive, time-tested and field-proven business-improvement model and toolkit. We partner with ambitious businesses to identify strategic breakthrough opportunities in capability, performance and results, and we provide the tools, support, training and coaching to complement their existing expertise and help them achieve these.
If you’re aiming to build or optimise a business system using sound principles, values and standards to deliver consistently excellent and continuously improving results, we can help you develop and implement a strategy to accelerate progress and amplify the impact of your journey.
To get in touch, contact us here to book a free consultation.
Discover more of our tools and methodology in our book Toward Excellence.
