Continuous Improvement

A Continuous Improvement process is an incremental and ongoing approach to improve products, processes or services. These efforts generally seek to achieve incremental improvement over time or try to achieve breakthough improvement as an immediate result. Delivery processes are constantly evaluated and improved to increase their efficiency and effectiveness. W.Edwards Deming, a poineer in the field of quality saw it as part of the system whereby feedback from the customer is taken and evaluated against the organizational goals to seek ways to improve the processes and organization in turn.

It is mostly the management that initiates a continuous improvement process as they are the ones who take decisions regarding how to design and implement the process. A continuous improvement process usually involves observing a process or phenomenon, isolating the variables which affect the process and changing the process, observing the results and taking action. If the results are beneficial, the team continues with the change and looks for the next area that needs improvement. If the results are not what the team expects, it is generally discarded and something new is implemented to improve the process. A CI process is nothing but a quality control process which can cut costs dramatically for an organization as it focusses on doing things right the first time and always.

The ultimate aim of a continuous improvement process is organizational renewal. A continuous improvement process typically involves a large number of employees in an organization in contrast to innovation efforts which typically involve only experts in the field. Although the CI process might seem slow and the results small, these very small wins when put together would become responsible for a complete turn around in the organzation. For example if an organization wants to cuts its printer paper budget by 50%, by putting a process in place to check the amount of printer paper alloted to each team