Here in the Office of Continuous Improvement, we are always striving to continuously improve in all of our activities. Recently, we were introduced to another opportunity to grow through a new practice (to us) called Incremental Improvement.
Most often, our work consists of large massive sweeps of improvement, tackling large projects and issues with Kaizens. This calls for the scheduling large increments of time around multiple busy schedules. Daily office work usually includes dedicating chunks of time to a project until it’s complete, before moving on to the next project on the agenda.
Incremental Improvement focuses on smaller solutions and actions when tackling large projects, and allows for completion through small steps and not leaps and bounds. It allows for easier implementation of ideas, which meets less resistance as any changes are slowly made and adjusted to. Changes implemented are less risky, and allows for PDCA on a smaller scale. Overall, the improvements made are done by the staff collectively, as they all have the knowledge and power to implement more beneficial improvements.
Right now, the Office of Continuous Improvement is working on a Lean Lending Library project, where we’re making a standardized activity check-out. This would allow anyone to come in and check-out a learning activity and have all the information and materials they would need in order to do the activity. We could see right away that it definitely would be a large project, but were ready to get down to business!
At first, we wanted to just start tackling it head on, and initially figured someone would be assigned to work on the project with it as a priority. However, after being introduced to the concept of Incremental Improvement, we began looking at how we could break the monster project into smaller steps instead. Now we’re steadily going through each step, bit by bit. Small amounts of time are consistently made for us to work on the steps of the project, in comparison to someone working on it for large chunks of time when they’re able to.
Already, the progress we have made is tangible, though there is still a lot more work to do. I personally have found that this large project is not so daunting now that it has been broken up, and is continuously being worked on bit by bit. I’m very excited to see the end results of our Incremental Improvements!
Incremental improvement is a way to slow things down into small, one-step-at-a-time next steps in order to actually speed up the progress toward goal. It also allows us each step of the way to reflect on flowing value to the customer.
Too often we focus on large chunk, kaizen event-driven improvements. Managing for daily improvement with small incremental steps using close-in target conditions is a great way to level the work and flow the progress.