Continuous Improvement: There’s a better way
Stop using these measures (by themselves)
Every company and job applicant claims some version of ‘Continuous Improvement’. Have you ever really thought about what you’re saying to your audience when you make this claim?
How do you back it up?
In every industry and in every generation there are certain phrases that are almost like a religious chant; you’re unholy if you don’t say them. So people learn to say them, regardless of whether they believe or understand them because they have become in and of themselves a signifier of what is good and true and holy. Such unbridled abuse of words makes them lose meaning, and seriously devalues them. If you were literally about to die, how could you possibly convince anyone that that was the case; the words ‘literally about to die’ are already taken up to describe any level of discomfort above a mild cold.
The words ‘Continous Improvement’ suffer the same ailment. They’re used so much that it is now unclear what they actually mean, companies who don’t really know if anything has changed, let alone improved, use them just as companies that have gone through a long sustained period of deliberate improvement. It isn’t clear to the casual observer which company is better, just from that phrase. Given that you’re part of company B, the long sustained period of deliberate improvement company, you definitely want to differentiate yourself from the posers, by presenting a concise, compelling story to your audience, much like the phrase was meant to be, before it was abused.
It’s time to find an alternative. You need to find a way to do what the words were supposed to; a way to demonstrate your improvement and present it in a concise, digestible way. Companies have been doing this since Excel was invented by showing graphics showing the growth in things like revenue, sales and customers, etc. Those are better indicators of continuous improvement than just the words. However, they’re all after-the-fact pointers to the effects of improvement, rather than measures of the actual improvement. Those things improve as a result of continuous internal improvement, sometimes. There are some ways to irrefutably measure the actual improvements themselves, and that might be better proof of it. The problem with the actual indicators is that they are not as neatly standardised and simple as the other measures. However, the simpler proxy measures could be influenced by things other than continuous improvement, like one great salesperson (who could leave at any time), one customer (e.g. government) increasing their budget in your industry, or a turn in the economy (which no one company has control over). The other problem with measures of continuous improvement is that they are — unlike their proxies — difficult to calculate after the fact, the data is not necessarily readily available and well collected and stored in one place and cleaned and analysed and — let's just go with the sales figures. If you really want to get an understanding of improvement in your delivery; you have to plan it.
Any analysis of a measurement requires more than is obvious. You need to decide what you want to measure or improve first, before you start, then define what information will reveal the improvement, then devise a way to collect, capture and store that information. All this before any project work has started, then at the end, you’re in a position to simply collate and analyse the data to understand the impact of your initiatives. The reason companies resort to the after-the-fact pointers (besides them being sexier) is that all this work is already done for you, by other departments; sales and finance already need to keep concise records of these movements, also known as doing the books. So at the end of the term, it’s just a matter of emailing Bernadine from accounting to run the quarterly reports. Another reason they are favoured is that they are really good marketing material. Everyone loves success and if your company can present a compelling story of growth in a way that your audience can readily understand, then that is the smart move. However when it comes to sales, some clients will want a little more than that, and even if they don’t ask for it, showing them some solid project evaluation measurements might be the thing that tips the scales in your favour. Imagine if you could demonstrate to a client exactly what you changed in a project that is similar to the one they need help with, in numbers. My guess is that that sales graph that marketing loves will look even more compelling to potential clients, and now you’re stuck in a virtuous cycle.
One way companies that continuously improve do so is by monitoring and evaluating their progress and feeding that back into the business. “What gets measured gets improved.”
