Continuous Improvement (Lean)

Continuous Improvement Assessment

Depending on the state of your continuous improvement (CI) journey, we may make use of our CI Maturity Self-Assessment tool. The objective of the assessment is to measure the current and desired levels of CI performance in a variety of areas to help your senior management identify, understand and prioritize key areas requiring attention.

Continuous Improvement Roadmap

A roadmap report would highlight the gap measurements of the current and desired levels of CI performance in a variety of departments within your organization. This helps leadership identify, understand and prioritize key areas that require attention, and equips your organization with information to better direct efforts toward creating and sustaining a culture of continuous improvement. Based on our findings of the assessment, we will work with you to develop a realistic CI roadmap aligned with your organizational mandates as indicated during the assessment phase.

Continuous Improvement Deployment Methodology

Depending on long-term goals, priorities and roadmap, we then work with you to select the Lean Deployment Model most appropriate for your organization. We have designed a model to guide organizations through the Lean deployment process to achieve optimal uptake, scale, improvement and sustainment.

This Lean Deployment Model focuses on five key elements of business transformational change – People, Strategy, Processes, Culture and Systems and is based on a phased implementation approach – Assess, Mobilize, Initiate, Integrate and Sustain. This approach enables organizations to achieve and sustain operational improvement and performance and to create a culture of continuous improvement.

Too often organizations focus solely on the elimination of waste while failing to engage customers and employees – the result, the alienation of both.

Continuous Improvement Philosophy

To be truly successful, all employees must be ready to adopt Lean at an organizational level over time. Lean thinking should be based on three main principles:

1. Removing overburden – making life easier for employees and respecting people
2. Waste removal – eliminating waste as defined by the customer, not the organization
3. Levelling activities – reducing peaks and troughs of activity

Too often, organizations begin by trying to remove waste through the adoption of select tools in complete isolation of the needs of the customer, the strategic need for change and the needs of the employee. The result often is minimal delivery of value to the customer, a misalignment in organizational strategy and a failure to engage employees. In fact, the approach of focusing only on waste removal can be alienating to employees. In contrast, starting with the facet of removing overburden can result in a much more sustainable approach to the development of a culture of continuous improvement and engagement.

If applied effectively in its entirety, CI thinking becomes a way of life for an organization, changing the focus of management from optimizing separate technologies, assets and departments to optimizing the flow of services through entire value streams that flow horizontally across departments to stakeholders (including customers). Silos in organizations are responsible for up to 30% of inefficiencies; Lean strategies redress this.

Eliminating waste along entire value streams, instead of at isolated points, creates processes that generally need less human effort, capital and time to deliver higher-quality services compared to traditional business systems. Organizations are able to respond to changing customer desires with increased variety and quality while decreasing response times and costs. Also, information management becomes much simpler and more accurate, allowing for the transparency and accountability demanded in the public sector.

The development of an engaged culture of continuous improvement, which encourages people at all levels of the organization to identify, simplify and streamline the services that the customer needs, is how organizations will succeed at addressing key business challenges. Employees will take pride in their work, knowing they are making a difference to their customers because they are designing and delivering programs and services that people need and want.

Application

Our team has experience delivering Lean training, certification and appropriate support at all levels across a variety of organizations through individual Lean projects and full Lean transformations. We can provide insight, based on best practice deployments, to help staff members achieve and sustain improvements while growing internal capacity.

We focus on building internal expertise in your organization through knowledge sharing. Our aim is to support organizations throughout a continuous improvement journey

as required. Many consulting firms call themselves Lean or Six Sigma, holding a kaizen or value stream mapping event and then handing off a plan to their client to implement. At Perspect, we partner with you to transfer knowledge and advance thinking, propelling your team’s capabilities to a whole new level.

We create environments where your leaders help employees learn deeply about themselves, their processes and how they can harness them to improve your business. We design work for collaborative, enterprise-wide stability and improvement. In turn, 100% of the organization is able to contribute to its greater good. By working side-by-side with your team, we will help you unlock the ingenuity within your company, thus positioning your products and services for even stronger growth.