Sometimes, trying to find inspiration for continuous improvement projects can be difficult.
Many businesses use a list of things that are missing, or are problems, as a way to direct improvement activity. This can work well, up until a point. Achieving mediocrity / being OK isn’t the gold standard that most of us aspire to!
A strategy that I find useful is to have some prompts / questions up your sleeve that can stimulate the right kind of thinking.
Try this prompt
The prompt I’d like you to consider is:
We’re better than this…
I recommend that you complete the statement as a series of bullet points.
For example; we’re better than this:
- Not having the final stage of production prepped in advance
- Not telling our customers we are going to be late
- Not managing our capacity effectively
- How we manage our Standard Operating Procedures
- Defining our business goals without clarity
Feel free to include items that are problems but make sure you look at parts of the business that are doing OK but you know that they could be more effective.
Imagine that you had a customer visit your business today and saw what you were doing and said “wow!”. Look at your business again. What isn’t a wow?
Dig a little deeper
Before you charge off to attempt improving the items that you brainstorm, explore the items.
- Try flipping the issue and see if a clear improvement objective can defined.
- You may need to dig a little deeper:
- What is causing this situation?
- What is stopping your process from being a ‘wow!’?
- Do you need to ask around and find out what is going on to lead to this result?
- What options are available to improve the situation?
Manage the change
If you haven’t got a strategy for managing the change, let me suggest a few factors to consider:
- Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Be selective about what you work on and park the rest for the time being.
- Break your improvement projects down into small steps, so you can manage them on top of your day job.
- Meet regularly with your team to monitor progress.
- Review the results regularly. Do more of what is working and less of what isn’t.
- Close one improvement down, before you move on to the next one.
If you want more strategies to improve the management of change in your business, check out my free course The CI Primer.
Build your own questions
Having a set of questions, or prompts, like the one in this article is a great continuous improvement strategy.
When you have a moment of inspiration and think of a question you could ask of your business, write down the question and keep it to one side for your future improvement planning sessions.
Or, you could always use the ‘CI Bingo‘ approach that I describe in my book Effective Continuous Improvement, to generate a limitless supply of ideas.
Enjoy exploring the prompt ‘we’re better than this…’.
