Continuous Improvement: Re-inventing the Square Wheel

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Continuous Improvement: Re-inventing the Square Wheel

One of the ‘Holy Grails’ of Continuous Improvement is how do we share best practice? Sometimes we have specialist teams trying to overcome this hurdle. I have seen vast amounts of money spent on shared electronic libraries with worldwide access and multiple lookup functions so users can research their will to find out how their colleagues across the globe are making improvements.

What is the problem you may ask? Well, of course, sharing information this way relies on a number of steps to be followed.

The project/change/improvement has to be written up in the correct electronic format, submitted, archived, linked etc. and then it has to be searched for, found, read, understood and acted on. Spotted the waste? All these additional process steps for something which is unlikely to yield an outcome. And what is even worse?

How many people have written up their ‘failures’ the things that they have tried, but which didn’t work?

In a culture of Continuous Improvement there is nothing wrong with trialling something which has been thought through, but in reality, doesn’t quite work.

So how do we share this? How do we stop our organisation wasting effort and resource reinventing the square wheel?

Until we can plug into the Matrix I doubt there will be a perfect solution, but at the moment the best solution for me continues to add weight to the power of A3.

Written up in real time, displayed locally to where a change happens and available for all to see.

The A3 doesn’t conquer all, but for minimal additional input, a collection of A3 write-ups builds a local knowledge library of what changes have worked, what hasn’t and stops us making the same mistakes multiple times!

 

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