The ‘Shewharts’ Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle (also known as the PDCA cycle) can be used to drive sustainable continuous improvement in every organisation. The PDCA cycle is an organic approach that is applicable to any work that has to be performed. It helps to ensure the work is achieving the intended results and that the processes and resources improve to provide even greater value to the customer and improved outcomes for the organisation.
More importantly, all improvement should be linked to and aligned with the organisation’s strategy. Some organisations lose focus on what matters and also embark on expensive improvements that yield little benefit.
The improvement planning is a critical stage whereby we must ask ourselves:
- What needs to be improved?
- Why does it need to be improved?
- How do we ‘know’ that it needs improvement?
- Will the improvement be cost effective and sustainable?
Only when we have confirmed the basis and foundations of improvement can we launch into the improvement process. But these days there are so many ways of implementing improvement it is difficult to have confidence if we are investing time, energy and money in the right direction.
We also have to consider if our organisation and the people in it are aligned, skilled and ‘improvement ready’. if not, any proposed improvement could be fraught with disaster and end up with a loss of face taking a significant amount of time to recover and restore the faith of the very people you would like to be engaged in the improvement. Ownership of the improvement is essential.
The one day Facilitating Continuous Improvement course provides vital insights into facilitating specific improvement programs and arms participants with the tools, techniques and knowledge necessary to plan, conduct, select and implement improvement initiatives.
This course is ideal for organisations and individuals considering, implementing organisation wide improvement programs, or promoting more effective improvement practices within their organisations. Click here to register or learn more.