Skill

These are on-going efforts to improve the performance, efficiency or effectiveness of products, systems, services, processes and ultimately people as well, through incremental margin gains opposed to breakthrough or revolutionary events

Competency

Expert

Competency Level

75%

Knowledge (Theories, Ideas & Concepts)

Through Professional/Personal Study Gained Through Experience
  • PDCA - DEMING Cycle (Plan, Do, Check & Act), Six Sigma, DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, Control), Route Cause/Fault Tree Analysis, Ishikawa/Fishbone Diagrams.
  • Total Quality Management, Lean Tools (Value Stream Mapping, Standard Work, Poka-`Yoke, One Piece Flow, TPM, KANBAN Demand Pull, FMEA, SMED Quick Changeover).
  • Toyota’s Kaizen, 5 Whys, 5S (Sifting, Sorting, Sweeping/Cleaning, Spick and Span, Sustain) Visual Management.

Skills & Application of Knowledge
in Real World Situations

Together with Responsibilities/Accountabilities
  • Align continuous improvement activities with strategic objectives – recognising the need to make quick wins to make an impact quickly, maintain senior stakeholder buy-in for credibility and maintaining momentum. Transformation Manager responsible for Business Change.
  • Recognising the culture, speed and size of continuous improvement activities – not every organisation has the skills, resources and expertise to launch a large scale continuous improvement programme, so there is a need to start small, evolve and adapt. Engineering Manager on a large Transformational Programme.
  • Blending the best practices from many different methodologies (Six Sigma, Lean, Kanban, Value Stream Mapping, Business Process Re-engineering, Gemba Walk) to deliver results. General management practice across many teams and many organisations.

What does Continuous Improvement Involve? 

Selected Challenges & Approaches

Together With lessons Learnt
  • Capacity when staff are focused on their day jobs – Although everyone should be undertaking continuous improvement, they will need time and resources to do it. Create the right conditions, provide the training, monitor, coach, support and help them every step of the way in order to stop them reverting back to type or going back to the old ways.
  • Integration into the organisations culture and create a new strategic execution culture – Ensure the vision, mission and values are all clear together with the objectives set, then use change agents to work into the culture, assist with communication, reinforce communication and evangelise your communication.
  • Focus in the data and not on emotions – Breaking down the barriers to change, whilst embracing disciplined process management, measures, metrics and the rigour of data-driven decision making.

Selected Achievements & Successes

Together with Any ‘So What’ Statements of Insights
  • Undertaking gap analysis and then creating a burning platform to help companies move from the AS-IS state towards to TO-BE state in a controlled and measured manner. Creating projects, training and objective roadmaps that sequentially build on successes in support of the company’s strategic objectives.
  • Leading a particularly difficult manufacturing problem that was creating a significant amount of waste and defects, and coming up with a series of options. The use of daily stand-ups where the team was help to account helped drive the programme forward far faster than any of the normal processes that were being undertaken at the time.
  • Every great idea requires a business case to demonstrate the objectives, expected outcomes, ROI in order to document and record the options, thought process decisions and assumptions and the preferred option(s). Continuous Improvement does not mean going around process, it means understanding the challenges and working a programme to overcome them.

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