The Deming Cycle
October 21, 2009 at 10:25 pm | In Business, Change, Improvement, Lean Process, Performance, Uncategorized | Leave a CommentTags: Improvement, Performance
Following the Second World War, Japan was struggling to regenerate its manufacturing base and a key feature in this struggle was the need to generate a culture of quality.
Their economic saviour in many ways was Dr W. Edwards Deming, an American statistician who was so influential in creating a culture of quality that Japan still has an annual quality award that bears his name. He is a venerable hero of the Quality movement.
A tool that Deming employed frequently for quality and process improvement was the Plan, Do, Check, Act process.
This later became known as the Deming Cycle.
The key principle of this cycle is iteration and feedback.
The key stages are:
PLAN - Design or change a business process with the aim of improving results
DO - Implement the change and measure the change in results
CHECK - Compare the measurements with the original performance to assess improvements
ACT - Decide on the changes that are needed to improve the process
Repeated time and again the PDCA drives any process towards a peak of improved performance. In many ways, this approach now underpins many of the process improvement approaches used in business today.
The Kaizen approach of the Lean process is an iterative improvement process
Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control (DMAIC) of the Six Sigma school is also an iterative approach.
Rummler and Brache (1991) also suggested an approach that repeated a pattern of Identify, Analyse and Improve.
And there are many more.
There are 2 key things to remember about any such iterative approaches:
1. What you measure is critical. You must get your Key Performance Indicators (KPI) correct. Measure the wrong parameter and you improve the wrong thing.
2. If you your process isn’t the correct one in the first instance then you can improve but you are only moving towards a ‘suboptimal’ peak of performance.
The graph below shows what can happen if you focus on only improving the current process.
If you start on the left hand peak, you will optimise, but you will optimse the wrong process.
You should take away from this the need to not only consider improvement as an approach but ensure you are improving the correct process. Suboptimal is exactly that!
Dare to Aspire
9 Steps to Developing an Organisation That Thrives on Change and Continuous Improvement
June 2, 2008 at 8:15 pm | In Business, Change, Improvement, Performance | 1 Comment
Change is one of the most difficult management tasks to achieve. People don’t like change and will resist it. However, the world is changing at a pretty rapid rate. It is difficult for a business to survive under these conditions unless it embraces change.
History has, however, shown that those organisms and organisations that have changed and adapted to a changing environment have normally both survived and then thrived under reduced competition.
The best way to adapt to the changes in the environment is to make everyone aware of such changes and then create an environment that supports and rewards Continuous Improvement.
Here then are 9 steps to developing an organisation that support Continuous Improvement:
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Develop a business plan and then ensure that everyone in the organisation knows and understands it. If your team know where they are aiming, they are more likely to be able to make decisions that align with that target.
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Identify the areas of your business that are most influenced by change and encourage an understand of the problems facing that part of your business. Explain the need to consider this as a business threat and create a sense of urgency in acting to address this threat.
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Identify a person to head up the Continuous Improvement Initiative. This person will lead the initiative, act as a focal point for questions and reinforce the commitment that senior management has to the initiative.
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Have this leader develop a communication plan so that everyone is exposed to the aims and the mechanisms for the Continuous Improvement Initiative.
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Implement policies and programmes that support continuous Improvement. These could be focused at individual areas of a current process (six sigma orientated approach) or focused at the entire value stream (lean process approach) for a business.
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Fund any training that is going to improve your team’s performance potential. Capability is found at the point where knowledge, skill and attitude combine, so create the opportunity for people to develop their knowledge and skills.
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Provide the facilities and opportunities for people to think and talk about how to improve. Improvement is not just about gaining knowledge and skills. It is essentially about acting, getting the team to develop a plan of change and then acting to apply it.
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Ensure that good ideas are recognised, implemented and the team rewarded, It is a truism that ‘What is measured is achieved’ so ensure you are measuring any improvement. Another truism is that ‘What is rewarded is sustained’, so make sure you reward what you want to sustain..
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Employ the KISS principle. Keep It Simple Stupid! Don’t try too many initiatives at once as you are dividing your effort. Don’t follow one change immediately with another as this can lead to change fatigue. Pick an area where change will provide significant benefit, implement a change and then allow it to become embedded before moving on to another initiative.
An excellent book to read on instigating change and continuous improvement is Leading Change by John Kotter
Dare to Aspire
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