Does Your Improvement Program Need Continuous Improvement?

Continuous Improvement of Your Improvement Program

Does your continuous improvement need continuous improvement? Of course! And that’s the topic of this article. What do we explain here?

• What is good enough?
• How To Improve
• Sponsorship
• Program Analysis
• Root Cause Analysis
• Never Stop Improving

What is Good Enough?

Your program is good enough. Why not rest on your laurels … After all, your safety, quality, six sigma, lean, TPM, patient safety, or other improvement programs are good enough. Right?

You should leave well enough alone. Your company meets the minimum regulatory requirements (and maybe exceeds a few). Everyone has heard the saying:

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Sit back, relax, and wait for a crisis to cause you to jump into action.

What? Wait for a crisis? Sure. That’s what people who are complacent do.

Of course, during a crisis, heads may roll. Plant managers get transferred to “special projects.” Safety, operations, & maintenance managers get fired. And companies get a black eye from the negative press. You know the names of companies that have waited for a crisis to start improving. They are famous (in a bad way) around the world. Ben Franklin would remind them that they are:

Penny wise; Pound foolish.

Think about the risks of waiting for a crisis to improve and you may decide that complacency is a bad idea.

How To Improve

To improve, you need a plan. It should be written, measurable, and sponsored by senior management. To be a sponsor, senior management must believe in continuous improvement of the improvement program. You must get the right senior manager sponsor and they need to see the plan as their plan. If the plan is their plan, they will pay attention!

Three things to consider:

• Sponsorship
• What to improve first
• Root cause analysis

Get Sponsorship

Why is getting sponsorship difficult? Because management has limited attention. A limited number of “silver bullets.” They must pay attention to the most recent crisis, plus the current hot topic from their boss. Plus, there are always budget troubles and production snafus to worry about.

Their crisis focus keeps them from being proactive and focusing on long-term improvement. They may forget what’s important, proving the saying:

When you’re up to your a## in alligators,
it’s hard to 
remember that the objective
was to drain the swamp.

If you’re lucky, you have progressive management that thinks ahead. They support, or even require, continuous improvement of improvement programs.

But what if you are unlucky? You must make improving the improvement program a crisis. That’s what I had to do when I was working at a plant where the plant manager said:

“I don’t need a prioritization system
to prioritize improvements,
I need a prioritization system
to prioritize my crises!”

I made improving the improvement program a crisis by having the regulator require it and then getting it tied to 50% of the executive’s annual bonus. If the improvement program failed to improve, he lost ½ of his bonus. Now that’s a crisis!

My methods may sound too extreme. If they are, what do you plan to do to get adequate sponsorship?

Program Analysis

What do you improve first?

Good question. To answer that question you need to network and benchmark state-of-the-art improvement programs to identify areas to improve.

I’ve heard people say, “We do Lean” or “We do Six Sigma.” “We don’t need to improve.”

Six Sigma was developed in the mid-’80s. That was before most people had even heard of the internet. Many of your young engineers were born after that!

Six Sigma programs need to be improved just like any other improvement program.

What about Lean? It’s older than that!

All managers in charge of improvement programs need to network with industry leaders to learn new tricks and refine their improvement systems.

Where can you find leaders across a variety of industries in one place? At the Global TapRooT® Summit.

The Summit is famous for bringing improvement experts, industry leaders, and people who want to benchmark across industries together. When is the next Summit? March 9-13, 2020, near Austin, Texas, at the Horseshoe Bay Resort.

Root Cause Analysis

All improvement programs need a state-of-the-art root cause analysis system.

Improvement programs use root cause analysis both reactively to solve problems and proactively (audits/assessments/observations) to prevent problems from becoming incidents.

TapRooT® is the state-of-the-art in root cause analysis. TapRooT® is continuously improved. If you learned TapRooT® years (or decades) ago, you’re behind the times! Catch up!

What should you do to make sure you are up-to-date? First, make sure you have the most recent TapRooT® Books. See this LINK.

Next, read the book:

TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis Implementation –
Changing the Wat the World Solves Problems

What’s next? Take the all-new Stopping Human Error Course before the 2020 Global TapRooT® Summit. I guarantee that you’ll leave with ideas to improve your root cause analysis and improvement programs. We even end the Summit with a “Developing a Roadmap to Success” session.

Never Stop Improving

Don’t become complacent and let the next major accident happen at your facility.

Do all you can to keep improvement progress happening. Resist complacency! As Winston Churchill said:

Never, never, never give up!

Make continuous improvement your top priority and know that success will follow.

(This article was modified and reprinted by permission from the Root Cause Network™ Newsletter.
Copyright 2019 by System Improvements, inc.)