Something that I have seen a lot of over the last three months is people trying to juggle numerous lists: To do lists. Action lists. Continuous Improvement lists. Project lists. Issues lists.

There is a section early on in Stephen Covey's excellent book 'The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People' where he talks about balancing your time between production and production capability. This is of course the essence of continuous improvement and carving out some time for improvement is essential in the longer term. We all talk about developing our businesses, but how much time is spent on doing so? Are we proactive with improving our operations; do we do it by design or by complaint? What would happen if we spent the first part of our working day working solely on improving how our business worked? It is essential that we ensure that our 'production' is completed fully, to the right quality and delivered on time. It is also essential that we improve our 'production capability' over time so that we are fit for the competition of the future. In most businesses production capability loses out but this is not a chicken and egg dilemma . If

How long does CI take? That's a good question, particularly if you split continuous improvement into two parts; the thinking part and the doing part. If you have this clear distinction and you are short on time then fifteen minutes of CI thinking can take you a long way on its own. I know when some of my clients are getting bogged down with their day-to-day work that even just a few minutes of thinking and decision making still moves them forward. They don't ever 'lose a week' by adopting this basic strategy.

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A project that I have been involved with came to an end this week. It is part of an ongoing, larger, piece of work and I got some surprised looks when I said that it was completed. This is something that I do experience once in a while, it seems that many people don't actually end their projects. The surprise came from me declaring that the project was finished. Most of this organisation's project don't conclude, they fade. There is no definite end point.

The other day I got into a good conversation about trying to get the last pieces of the shop floor performance puzzle put in place. Utilisation and efficiency are up, but the on time delivery performance is just lagging a little bit behind. We had done some good work at the management level of the business with regards to the MRP system and now the production team had decided it was time that they had to put their mark onto the system too.

When it comes to making changes it can sometimes be difficult to engage certain members of our team. Falling into the trap of doing it all yourself is not the answer though. I remember one particular client who felt uncomfortable with communicating what the changes were going to be with his team. When they had gone home he would then go out onto the shop floor and make the required changes.

During a recent root cause problem solving workshop I was running I had three people who were fixated on 'the answer'. This fixation was causing friction with other departments and it was clear from speaking to them that they didn't have all the answers.

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I sat in a really good meeting the other day. Ideas were flowing and the team taking part in the workshop were really getting into the swing of things. Apart from one person. The people taking part in the workshop ran different departments within the business. As one person explored an idea two of the other four would build on the idea, developing how it could work for their departments too. The other person however didn't seem to respond in the same way and I was curious as to what they would take away from the workshop.

At the weekend my home computer's hard drive told me that it was 'bad'. As I have sufficient backup methods in place I was able to swap over the hard disks and be up an running a few hours later. However, when I came to reinstall some of the software I chose not to install all of it. Over the last few years I have introduced other pieces of software and made my computer life more complicated than it needed to be. So, I took the opportunity to simplify and this is just the same as continuous improvement in the workplace.

Do you ever keep your improvement action plans to yourself? If you don't then I salute you and you can stop reading here. If on the other hand you tend to keep them for just your own enjoyment please read on.

During a meeting last week I found myself getting stuck with the team I was working with. We were discussing some process re-engineering that I was doing for them, trying to get five different business arms to fall in line with each other. Whilst presenting my proposal on the way forward there were a number of comments made telling me about how complex the problem really was and that I hadn't allowed for these additional complexities. Before I could respond other members of the team were offering suggestions as to how we could cope with these variations.