Briefly describe how to deploy a Continuous Improvement effort. What Continuous Improvement Is (and How to Use It) Ben Mulholland April 6, 2018 Business Processes, Processes, Productivity No process is perfect; there’s always room to improve. Unfortunately, many teams have no way to identify, test, and deploy the changes they make, meaning each tweak is a roll of the dice. The savings can be massive, but you need a continuous improvement program to make sure that the changes you make won’t make your operations a whole lot harder. “1 in 10 improvements save money… [each saving, on average,] $31,043 in its first year of implementation. 1 in 4 improvements save time… [each saving, on average,] 270 hours in its first year of implementation.” – KaiNexus, The ROI of Continuous Improvement Most successful changes will also make your employee’s jobs easier (or more pleasant) to perform. You’ll be saving time and money, but you’ll also be getting far better value out of your current efforts and operations. However, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start from the top.What is continuous improvement? Ever corrected a spelling mistake in your processes or manuals? How about adding a new step to qualify a task that wasn’t recorded before? What about updating your method to take advantage of better tools or software? All of these and more are examples of continuous improvement. Continuous improvement is a method to make sure that your processes, methods, and practices are as efficient, accurate, and effective as possible. This is done (surprise, surprise) by periodically examining and improving your processes to smash bottlenecks, use the best software, and take advantage of the most efficient methods. If you’ve ever heard of lean, kaizen, Six Sigma, or DMAIC then this will sound familiar, as continuous improvement is based on similar principles and forms a key part of both of those practices. This is because the primary objective of any changes is to reduce waste and streamline your work. While there are many different methods for achieving continuous improvement (such as process innovation and the Deming cycle), all can be classified into one of two groups; incremental or breakthrough improvements. Incremental vs breakthrough improvements Continuous improvement is largely practiced using two disciplines; incremental and breakthrough improvements. These can be used interchangeably, but the best way to deploy a thorough continuous improvement program is to combine the two. By doing this you can quickly deal with smaller issues while giving larger items the care and attention they deserve.Incremental continuous improvement Incremental continuous improvement is all about making small tweaks to a process, method, or practice to improve it as problems are found. This usually costs less and can be done much faster than using the breakthrough method, but there are a few risks and downsides to doing so. Imagine that you’re working through a regular document.

1. Briefly describe how to deploy a Continuous Improvement
effort.
What Continuous Improvement Is (and How to Use It)
Ben Mulholland
April 6, 2018
Business Processes, Processes, Productivity
No process is perfect; there’s always room to improve.
Unfortunately, many teams have no way to identify, test, and
deploy the changes they make, meaning each tweak is a roll of
the dice.
The savings can be massive, but you need a continuous
improvement program to make sure that the changes you make
won’t make your operations a whole lot harder.
“1 in 10 improvements save money… [each saving, on
average,] $31,043 in its first year of implementation.
1 in 4 improvements save time… [each saving, on average,] 270
hours in its first year of implementation.” – KaiNexus, The ROI
of Continuous Improvement
Most successful changes will also make your employee’s jobs
easier (or more pleasant) to perform. You’ll be saving time and
money, but you’ll also be getting far better value out of your
current efforts and operations.
However, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start from the
top.What is continuous improvement?
Ever corrected a spelling mistake in your processes or manuals?
How about adding a new step to qualify a task that wasn’t
recorded before? What about updating your method to take
advantage of better tools or software?
All of these and more are examples of continuous improvement.
Continuous improvement is a method to make sure that your
processes, methods, and practices are as efficient, accurate, and
effective as possible. This is done (surprise, surprise) by

2. periodically examining and improving your processes to smash
bottlenecks, use the best software, and take advantage of the
most efficient methods.
If you’ve ever heard of lean, kaizen, Six Sigma, or DMAIC then
this will sound familiar, as continuous improvement is based on
similar principles and forms a key part of both of those
practices. This is because the primary objective of any changes
is to reduce waste and streamline your work.
While there are many different methods for achieving
continuous improvement (such as process innovation and
the Deming cycle), all can be classified into one of two groups;
incremental or breakthrough improvements.
Incremental vs breakthrough improvements
Continuous improvement is largely practiced using two
disciplines; incremental and breakthrough improvements. These
can be used interchangeably, but the best way to deploy a
thorough continuous improvement program is to combine the
two. By doing this you can quickly deal with smaller issues
while giving larger items the care and attention they
deserve.Incremental continuous improvement
Incremental continuous improvement is all about making small
tweaks to a process, method, or practice to improve it as
problems are found. This usually costs less and can be done
much faster than using the breakthrough method, but there are a
few risks and downsides to doing so.
Imagine that you’re working through a regular documented
business process (such as client onboarding) when you come
across a problem. It’s not a big enough issue that you need to
drop everything and hold a meeting to consult your team about
it, but if left alone it could cause confusion for the next person
performing the process.
In this case, it’s much better to correct the mistake yourself and
make a note to bring it up at your next meeting. That way you

3. can continue through the process without grinding operations to
a halt or interrupting someone else’s work.
This is incremental improvement – making small changes or
corrections to a process or method without having to review the
entire operation. For example, you could correct a spelling
mistake or update a link in the process template to make sure
that the operation continues to run smoothly and help your team
stay at peak efficiency.
Again, while this is generally the quicker and cheaper of the
two methods, you run the risk of ignoring how much your
changes will affect by not including the rest of your team.
That’s why you need to be certain that your changes will only
improve the process in some small way, and mention what
you’ve done at your next team meeting.Breakthrough
continuous improvement
Breakthrough continuous improvement involves making large
changes to a process or method, usually by reviewing the item
with the rest of your team and deciding on what to do as a
united front. This tends to cost more (in money and time) than
incremental improvement, but results in bigger revisions and is
sometimes necessary for processes which need to significantly
change to remain relevant and accurate.
For example, let’s take our client onboarding example again.
You’ve incrementally updated the process to correct spelling
mistakes and keep things running smoothly, but then your team
starts using a different CRM. This significantly affects the
process, and so a large update is needed to make sure that it’s
still relevant and useful.
As such, you’ll need to call a team meeting for everyone
involved or affected by the client onboarding process. This will
let everyone see what needs to change and make their own
suggestions based on their experience and current practices.
Sure, it’ll take longer than going in and changing the process
yourself, but by hosting a breakthrough meeting you’re letting
everyone stay up to date while making sure that the process is

4. as good as it can be with the new developments.
The benefits
The benefits of continuous improvement are simple; it lets you
constantly better your practices to make your team and business
more efficient, accurate, and effective.
Let’s say that you’ve already documented your processes and
are enjoying the level of consistency this gives. Every task is
performed the same way every time, and so it’s easy to predict,
track, and ensure a certain level of success.
Despite this, nothing is perfect. There will always be room to
improve your processes and methods, be it through small tweaks
or re-engineering the whole approach to supercharge your
operations.
Is a new employee confused by the instructions for a task?
Improve them so that every new hire (and maybe some existing
employees) will understand their duties better and get up to
speed quicker. Is your current toolkit or software letting you
down in some way? Swap it out for something better to let your
team scale with your success.
It’s a simple concept, but the effect of having a set program for
bettering your processes is so great that there’s practically
nothing that can’t benefit from it.
However, with such a simple (and potentially vague) concept, it
can be hard to know how to reach those benefits. How exactly
should you go about improving your processes and practices to
make sure that you’re not, in fact, making things worse?
How to deploy continuous improvement
While it’s entirely possible to use continuous improvement by
altering your processes and methods whenever you notice a
mistake or bottleneck, it pays to have a set plan to follow. A
process for improving your processes, if you will.
Thankfully, the method for doing this is simple:
· Make small, incremental tweaks on the fly

5. · Arrange a meeting to discuss larger changes
· Clearly identify the problem or improvement
· Plan potential solutions
· Test changes in a non-live environment
· Monitor changes after deployment
Or, if you prefer acronyms, it can be shortened to “TIPTD”:
· Tweak
· Identify
· Plan
· Test
· DeployMake small, incremental tweaks on the fly
Incremental improvements are easy to handle, as all you have to
do is make the change when you spot the problem. The trick
comes with knowing when a change is small enough to avoid
bothering the rest of your team.
The easiest way to do this is to ask yourself two simple
questions:
· “Would I want to discuss this change if someone else was
deploying it?”
· “Could this cause any problems or confuse my team?”
If the answer to both of these is “no”, then go ahead and deploy
the change immediately. Remember to make a note to mention
the change in your next meeting though, as this will make sure
that everyone is up to date on the state of your process.Arrange
a meeting to discuss larger changes
If the answer to either of those questions was “yes” then you’re
going to have to put off any changes until you can arrange a
meeting with everyone involved in the process
Significant changes need this level of care for two reasons:
· Large changes made without consultation confuse everyone
and lead to mistakes
· You might not be able to predict everything the change will
affect
As soon as you find a problem or change that you think would
be beneficial, arrange a meeting with the team who performs the
process. This should be as soon as possible, as the process will

6. remain broken (or, at best, inefficient) until you can talk about
what’s wrong and correct it.
In the meantime, if the problem is a damaging one then create a
temporary solution which will plug the hole and let your team
know what you’ve done. If you want to suggest an improvement
instead of fix a flaw, wait until the meeting to change
anything.Clearly identify the problem or improvement
In the meeting, it’s important to clearly identify the problem
that needs solving or improvement that needs making.
There’s no special trick here, other than making sure that
everyone who is affected by and uses the process in question
clearly understands what’s wrong with the current process. At
the very least you (as a group) need to agree on:
· What the problem/improvement is
· The issue’s scope (where it starts and ends)
· What it affects, and how
· Which processes or operations may have already been affected
by this issue
· Whether the affected issues were important enough to warrant
damage control or extra attention
Once you’ve got that cleared up you can move onto the next
step of the meeting…Plan potential solutions
After clearly identifying and defining what needs to be changed,
the team needs to agree on the best solution to the issue.
If it’s a problem, mistake, bottleneck, or hole in the process,
everyone needs to work together to plan out the best way to fix
it. For example, if a packing team is struggling to pack boxes
for delivery fast enough, it might be better off changing their
method to one piece flow instead of batches.
If an improvement is being suggested to an already functioning
process or practice then it’s going to take a little more work
from whoever put it forward. In this case, it’s up to them to
convince the rest of the team why the change would be
worthwhile and why it’s worth uprooting the current method.
For example, if you wanted to suggest managing your
operations with business process management software

7. (like Process Street) instead of tools like Microsoft Word, you’d
need to list the huge number of benefits of doing so. After
hearing how much easier it would be
to run, manage, edit, automate, and track your processes and
tasks, there should be little question that the change is worth
it.Test changes in a non-live environment
Once the changes are decided it’s a good idea to test them
instead of deploying everything straight away. The best way to
do this is to try and emulate a live environment and monitor
performance relative to the original process.
While it’s not always possible to do this, by testing the changes
before committing to them you’ll be able to catch any problems
with the new method that weren’t predicted in the meeting. A
lot can change when taking processes from theory to practice,
and now is the best time to avoid creating more potholes than
the one being repaired.Monitor changes after deployment
Once the changes have been made all that’s left to do is deploy
and monitor the process going forward. If everything was tested
thoroughly then there shouldn’t be any issues, but again, there’s
always a chance that any changes will break something further
down the line or cause long-term issues.
If nothing goes wrong then it’s time to move onto the next
process and apply continuous improvement all over again.
Otherwise, you’ll need to call another team meeting and go back
to the drawing board for the latest problem to surface.
Improvement resources to dive deeper
Continuous improvement may be a simple concept, but in
practice, there are hundreds of ways in which you can carry it
out, and many hundreds more mistakes that can ruin an
otherwise solid plan. However, with at least the basic care and
measures laid out above you can improve your processes
without running that risk.
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8. Ben Mulholland
Ben Mulholland is a Content Marketer at Process Street, and
winds down with a casual article or two on Mulholland Writing.
Find him on Twitter here.