One of the greatest challenges faced by organizations seeking to develop a culture of Continuous Improvement is sustainment. Too often, people revert back to business as usual after they have received training or certification or finished a kaizen event or workshop.
The mechanisms for sustaining improvement beyond a managed event often don’t exist. This article covers three powerful methods for building and sustaining Continuous Improvement into perpetuity using the Impruver Continuous Improvement software.
Impruver is the only Continuous Improvement software designed for CI leaders to maximize their impact while building a thriving kaizen culture. The all-in-one infrastructure of Impruver helps people throughout the organization with tools, training, automation, rewards, coaching, and many other resources that are often too scarce to effectively achieve the company’s CI goals.
The following video provides 3 Methods for Sustaining Continuous Improvement using Impruver:
This article covers the following topics:
- The Flywheel
- Gamification / Bank Account
- Countermeasure
1) The Flywheel
The Flywheel is a process that helps Impruvers to develop scientific thinking through perpetual coaching cycles. It applies PDCA / PDSA to the user’s most important goal or priority.
The Flywheel structure is managed using a cohort-style format with between 3 – 5 Impruvers (LSS Green Belt Level), a 1st Coach (LSS Black Belt Level), and a 2nd Coach (LSS Master Black Belt Level).
The cohort meets regularly (usually weekly) to walk through a coaching cycle that includes questions similar to Toyota KATA. A 1st coach might ask the following:
– What is your Goal?
– What is your Current State?
– What obstacles are you facing?
– What was the last thing you tried? What did you learn from it?
– What will you try next?
The Impruver Storyboard facilitates this process perfectly. It also includes a “Notes” feature that allows you to include text, photos, videos, or any other supporting material to append your story. Leaders can engage their teams in a way that drives one improvement per week. However, this frequency can be increased to daily or decreased to quarterly depending on the nature of the coachee’s work.
This is a simple process that is built to scale throughout your entire company and integrates into weekly 1:1s between managers and their direct reports.
Here’s a video that walks through the usage of the Impruver Storyboard:
The Flywheel is a simple process that is designed to be integrated into the organization’s natural reporting structure. Each leader coaches their team, one member at a time, through a series of questions using the Socratic method to help them develop a Continuous Improvement mindset. With the Flywheel, each person makes one improvement per cycle, usually set at a weekly cadence. This mechanism assures with 100% certainty that Continuous Improvement activity will sustain as long as leaders remain engaged as coaches.
2) Gamification / Bank Account
It can be very challenging to overcome the inertia of status-quo operations when trying to sustain Continuous Improvement. CI requires people to step out of their comfort zones and take risks. For organizations that do not have a system of gamifying Continuous Improvement, the risk of proposing or making changes is often not worth the reward.
Impruver gamifies Continuous Improvement behaviors such as making improvements, completing projects, and achieving goals to encourage more kaizen behaviors. This gamification system serves as a measure of the organization’s kaizen culture as coin generation can be made visible so that trends in CI activity can be recognized.
Coins can then be traded for rewards within the Impruver Bank Account. Leaders can set up rewards of any type, for which their team members can purchase with their coins.
Examples of rewards might be poker chips for the company’s annual casino night, game credits for a team event at Dave and Buster’s, or raffle tickets to be used at the company picnic. There are limitless possibilities for how rewards can be set up and offered to people as an incentive for Continuous Improvement behavior adoption.
Here’s a screenshot of the Bank Account feature in Impruver:
Here’s a video that provides a more in-depth explanation of how Impruver Gamifies Continuous Improvement:
Whoever said that Continuous Improvement needs to be boring and miserable! With the Impruver Bank Acccount, Continuous Improvement leaders can create fun rewards for those who adopt the kaizen mindset and behavior pattern. This gives leaders a lever they can pull to speed up CI activity on-demand. It also creates a positive reinforcement mechanism that helps to sustain Continuous Improvement
3) Countermeasure
The next feature that helps to sustain Continuous Improvement is called the Countermeasure. Countermeasure is a powerful tool that integrates with practically every business intelligence software such as Power BI, Tableau, Domo, and hundreds of others to help deliver meaningful and impactful actions to performance failures.
The way Countermeasure works is that it pulls in Alerts from your business intelligence system. From there you can program the appropriate tool, owner, and due date to respond to performance failures. For example, if downtime exceeds 15% in one day, you can create an automatic response that Carlos Wilkins complete a 5 Whys within 6 days on this issue. Every time this performance failure occurs, the countermeasure is automatically assigned and followed-up on by Impruver.
Additionally, the owner will receive the following:
- An Impruver University course that corresponds to the assigned tool
- The tool will be automatically created and assigned to the owner
- AI coaching to properly use the tool
- The owner will earn rewards for submitting the tool and completing follow-up actions
Here’s a video that explains how this feature works in more detail:
Countermeasure is a simple, yet powerful tool to sustain Continuous Improvement. It is often applied after a kaizen event or Lean Six Sigma certification is achieved. This helps to respond effectively when KPIs fall outside of acceptable thresholds.
Check out this article for a more detailed explanation of How to Sustain Continuous Improvement Using the Impruver Countermeasure.
Impruver is the ultimate tool for CI leaders to develop and sustain Continuous Improvement within their company. As the #1 Continuous Improvement software, Impruver automatically provides the training, tools, coaching, and other mission critical resources on-demand and at scale.
Check out this article on How to Build Operational Stability to learn how to stabilize operations quickly and createa solid foundation for ongoing improvement.
