How to Organize, Manage, and Implement Continuous Improvement Initiatives

Projects: Productivity Improvement

The most fulfilling aspects of the roles I’ve had in the past are to either be part of or responsible for the conception and implementation of a new project, or to take on a challenging operation and turn it around. The prospect of matching an actual go-live with paper models and calculations can be daunting, but even more so is the recovery of an operation that’s failing customer expectations and floundering in the red sea beneath the bottom line. Contrary to a new solution, a running operation’s people have already been hired, equipment already purchased, and infrastructure conceived and constructed – so it makes it all the more challenging to organize and mobilize within certain constraints.

I think all of us have faced this at some point in our careers, and some of us may be in the midst of it right now.

Typical questions are:

- What should we tackle first?

- Why those topics?

- Who should be responsible?

Luckily there are methods to make sense of the madness and they don’t require much beyond planning, prioritizing, tracking, and perseverance. This would be my approach.

*Download an Excel file with formats for steps 1, 2, and 3 at the end of the article.

Step 1) Planning – gather information to prioritize and focus

Meet separately with your team and internal and external stakeholders and list the current burning issues and potential future solutions and scenarios.

- Get into the details of the process / information flow and make your own observations

- Be clear on each topic, but keep it brief

Step 2) Prioritize – organize to track and control

The intention is to know where to concentrate. As much as we would like to, it’s just not possible to focus on everything all at once. Attention divided increases lead-times. So, it makes sense then to identify those topics that would add the most value in an acceptable timeframe.

1. Take the list you made and sort it into 7 buckets:

a. Long-hanging fruit – those items that are easy to understand, approve, and implement with little to no effort or cost

b. High, medium, low impact – in accordance with the tangible change the initiative could bring, whether cost is involved or not