If you’re running a small or medium-sized business, some of the language you see or hear about how to improve might leave you a bit bemused.
You could legitimately be thinking ‘what on earth does Lean, 6 Sigma, Poka Yoke, Gemba or Hoshin Kanri have to do with my business?’
I agree! There’s a lot of jargon, very long and/or difficult words and general dark art stuff surrounding business improvement and the thing is, improving your business is too important to be shrouded in a cloud of verbal fog.
Take, for example, the question ‘so how do I go about improving my Business?’
Instead of making the language a barrier, how about this simple seven-step approach:
- Define the problem and / or what you want to improve
- Gather the measures to understand how the activity performs today and how it impacts your employees and customers
- Analyse what the measures tell you and more importantly, get off your seat and go see how this looks and feels in real life.
- Working with the people carrying out the activity, figure out what would make things better and create a prioritised list
- Pick the options that work best (depending on the degree of urgency, funds & skills available) and test it to prove it’s worth investing time and money in
- Once you’re happy with the test, deploy into day-to-day operations
- Check that you’re getting the outcomes you expected and react to any unexpected ones
If you involve and empower people, communicate and commit to making ongoing improvement a way of life, it becomes easily sustainable and, best of all, pays for itself.
Jargon-free, easy to grasp and practical advice. That’s the way we work across UKBA.