Over the past couple of weeks I have had numerous conversations with my clients about getting started with improvement activity , when a 'perfect' solution is still quite a long way off. Getting started is often one of the biggest hurdles when it comes to making process improvement changes within a business. Getting started anyway can bring with it several benefits.

... and not a shot gun. It is written time and time again that having focus in any walk of life is important, and this is certainly the case with  Continuous Improvement .

Delegation and abdication are two words that often get confused when it comes to effective management.  When a process has been improved, there is always an ongoing need to manage the process (delegation). Just walking away and hoping everything is fine is fatal (abdication!) Why is this distinction so important?

When you are starting out on a Continuous Improvement adventure there is always a risk... that our view of the world doesn't include the best that we could have. Knowing what 'good' looks like is invaluable when we are charting our course of action.

When I was driving to my client yesterday I was listening to an interesting debate on the radio about GPs being paid to diagnose dementia ( you can read more here ). The reasoning behind this is to increase the number of people on a 'dementia register'. This is good example of how measuring a specific feature of a business / organisation can affect the outcome. In this case they have added an incentive too. So, how would this relate to your business?

Do you use checklists in your business? I do, many of my clients do, and many other businesses do. They use them for one very good reason; they help to drive up productivity .

When you are changing a process you need to get 'buy in' from the people who are key to operating the process. What do you do when everyone is 'too busy'?