“Driving Forward, Pursuing Excellence”™
Improvement and Change
“It is in changing that we find purpose” – Heraclitus
Regardless of the size of your organisation, Improvement and change is best described as being 3 layers or platforms.
Continuous Improvement (CI) acts as the foundation layer, and it is the most critical to success of all other changes and the growth in the organisation. CI is the responsibility of everyone within the workforce, identifying small adjustments to continuously improve their working processes, identifying and removing inefficiencies or wastes. It is also here that ideas for Business Improvement are often formed and initially developed. However, CI is often confined to individual business units within the organisation, or even within individual teams.
Business Improvement (BI) requires a more co-ordinated approach, and often ties together different CI streams, and identifies changes and improvements that can be made across different parts of the business that feed in to each other. Successful BI needs to be properly controlled and managed, including an in-depth process mapping of the business activities in order to ensure that positive changes in one area, will not have a negative impact in others.
Change Management sits at the top of the pyramid, and involves wholesale step changes to the way a business operates. This could be a new product line or service, installation of new equipment, relocation of resources and assets. Generally this will involve a Project or Change Manager, with the change project having a clearly defined start, middle and end.
After the change project has been closed out, the Continuous Improvement activities need to be revisited and used to further improve the running of the organisation – and so the cycle goes on……..
Improvement of any type needs to have a structure if it is going to be effective, and tools like Lean, and Six Sigma (or DMAIC) are designed specifically to provide that framework and standardised method of working that improve the chances of a successful outcome.
SBECS Ltd offers services across the range of Change and Improvement fields, including End-To-End project management, Change and Improvement consultancy, staff coaching and process mapping & modelling.