Continual improvement

Continual improvement is aligning services and resources with changing requirements of business using improvements on products, services, or their related components. During this practice, methods and technics are developed and published among the organization to embed the improvement culture inside the organization. Commitment to this practice prevents routine activities to stop the improvement activities. A team may (, or at least a small team should) always work especially on this practice but all of the members of the organization should be involved in thinking and activities with the goal of achieving that. 

It’s the practice to select a few methods of improvement based on the organization’s strategies and use them for the organization. Of course, the organization should be ready for alternative methods and use them if finds them applicable for itself.

 The key activities of this practice are listed here: 

• Making the culture of the improvement across the organization 
• Assign time and finance for improvement activities. 
• Discovery and registering new opportunities to improve. A document called CIR is used. It could be a separate CIR for each team or part of the organization, or a united CIR could be used across the organization, but it should be segmented in order to make it possible for everyone to use relevant parts of it. CIR is the abbreviation for Continual Improvement Register 
• Analyze, assess, and prioritizing opportunities.
• Plan and implement
• Reassess and reanalyze the results after the improvement
• Coordinating the improvement activities across the organization 

Figure 5.2