Continous Improvement - Direct Links to Organisational Resilience

The continous improvement journey is geared to organisations constantly improving their operational systems, products/services and appeal to clients.

Everyone in the organisation needs to work together to suggest ways that an organisation can improve.

This improvement can usually be achieved in incremental steps.

These suggestions need to be translated into improvements for the operation of our organisation which we should all be aware of.

How can we deliver continuous

Imrovement?

The management of the organisation needs to communicate its values to its staff and even further! This must be the start of the process.

Everyone needs to contribute to improving what we do.

We need to increase involvement by:

Instituting Cross departmental Improvement groups

Setting up problem solving teams- these should be targeted on addressing particular emerging issues in defined areas

Quality circles - ideas emerging on how to increase quality in service provision and delivery should be delivered

These need to be broad based and cross departmental teams contributing to this process. They should be properly facilitated.

All staff should be made aware of changes and challenges coming down the track and this process should be part of normal horizon scanning within the organisation.

Any gains from such a process would include:

• Better practices and procedures

• Cost savings

• Improved Services

• New Services replacing older services

• Improvements to the operational resilience of the organisation

We need to know:

• What we are trying to improve

• What changes we need to make to achieve the improvements

• How we will know that improvement has been attained

• What has worked and what hasn't

This improvement process needs to take account of problem solving techniques which include:

1. Analysing the improvement requirements

2. Identifying alternative approaches to meeting those requirements

3. Choosing valid omprovement approaches

4. Defining the criteria for those valid approaches.

It is crucial we can identify the relative Importance of improvement processes and which process is most effective for our organisation.

There needs to be a consensus process to achieve the above and benchmarking improvement processes both within and across organisations can clearly help here!

To deliver successful continuous improvement the following are pertinent:

Management needs to provide leadership and direction and valid improvement ideas are delivered in the organisation

There is high involvement and high commitment from all parts of the organisation. This is crucial and should be developed by effective communication by the organisation.

Trust between employees and managers must also be developed. We must be a learning organisation.

Continuous Improvement cannot be delivered in a vacuum and must be linked to operational resilience. Continuous improvement must improve the resilience of an organisation. It cannot be any other way!

Continuous improvement does translate directly to better organisational resilience.

The processes of continuous improvement need to take account of organisational resilience and their methodologies should also be applied to rhe organisational resilience process!

So if we undertake continuous improvement many of the mechanisms for achieving organisational resilience already exist!