Do you have plenty of time to spend on completing your improvement projects ? Unless continuous improvement is your full time job it is unlikely that you would answer 'yes' to that question. So, if you answered 'no', how about you take a holiday instead?

At first glance you might be thinking that this is an obvious question to answer for your business. Over the years I have come to realise that many people try to tick things off their 'to do' list early, just to get the feeling of achievement from having them ticked off. I see the same effect taking place when businesses report internally (and even externally, in some cases) on the progress of projects and production.

How do you measure your business processes? Do you have a good feel for how well things are going, or does your experience tell you something else?

How many times have you started an improvement project , handed it over and then watched it fall over? Too many?

How many times have you wondered what the tasks need to be in your improvement plan? You know what you want, but you just aren't quite sure what the actions need to be. I have a simple suggestion.

Did you know that if you subscribe to my monthly emails that you get more than just a copy of my on time delivery improvement guide You're Late ?

This is a question I often pose to my clients. Many businesses will organise their standardised daily meetings   around a slot in their diary that suits the people attending, but not necessarily the business.

Do you find that the workloads in your business are becoming more volatile? Do you find that what your business was used to doing on a regular basis and what it does now aren't the same? Many businesses are finding themselves with a lot more variety on their order books, especially in terms of how quickly customers want / expect things and the mix of the orders. So, how can you handle this?

Do you find that your continuous improvement projects are progressing as quickly as you would hope? If you're not, it might be worth considering what time of day you undertake your improvement activity.

We all know that if you change a business process you should change the procedures to match, don't we? When we are being formal about the change this is easy to do. When we are trying out new ideas this can lead to inconsistencies in how we update our formal procedures, unless we are prepared to handle this situation.

We're faced with choices every day, and many of those are related to the improvement of our how our business operates. With each choice we hopefully are able to choose from a range of options, not just the choice of do nothing versus one alternative, During the last week I have seen two different situations where the right choice was being avoided because it didn't seem to be viable at that point in time.

I have just added my various process improvement kits to the Making It Happen  toolkit as part of the normal membership package.

When we re-design our processes it can be easy to get carried away. New ideas, new changes and new opportunities are all around. How do you keep your enthusiasm under control, just long enough, so that you end up with a really good new process design?