Improving Your Business - An Introduction to Continuous Incremental Improvement

What is Continuous Incremental Improvement?

A Taylor'd Design uses a method called 'Continuous Incremental Improvements' to work with businesses, such as yourselves, to help you get a better understanding of your how your business works, what it means to be sucessful and to identify and make improvements. Continuous incremental improvement is something that you already do, probably without realizing. It is the ongoing adjustments you make to the business.

1. Start out by determining how frequently you want to do a review. A typical frequency is between one and six months
2. Start out with small things, to get comfortable with the process; and then expand. Keep a record of what you are planning to do
3. For each cycle, be prepared to start from scratch. Conditions are likely to have changed

Define Sucess Criteria

With this being a continous process, you can start anywhere in the cycle. A Taylor'd Design recommends that you start with describing some of the things that you want to see from your business

1. Write down as much, or as little, as you want
2. Write each item as a problem statement, try to be specific on what the problem is
3. Note how important each item currently is

For each cycle, as you review each item, determine

1. Is the item equally as important or more/less important
2. Are there any other changes to the item
3. Is there anything new that you want to add

Collecting Available Information

This is not as frightening as you might imagine.

1. It is just collecting the information that you already know about your business
2. Items such as sales, inventory level, web traffic, customer inquiries, advertising responses, etc. are typical of what you already know about your business
3. Over time you may collect less, or possibly more, information as you gain a bettter understanding about your business

Analyze Results

Analysis of the results can be a very eye-opening exercise

1. Map the information you collected against the sucess criteria that you have defined
2. Compare what you are seeing against what you have a sucess. Rate/Rank the comparison
3. Make a note of where you don't have information to map against a sucess criteria. This is not an issue, it gets covered later in the process

Plan Improvements

Rather than trying to plan a 'fix' for everything that is not working, be selective about what changes you want to make; and how much you want to change. If you try to do too much, you run the risk of achieving nothing

1. Pick a few, say no more than three, items that you noted as being important from your sucess list
2. Plan out changes, even partial ones, that you can make during the improvement cycle
3. Include in your planning any (partial) changes you want to make in the information that you want to collect

Make Changes

You may find that it is not possible to make all the changes that you have planned for, Cost, timing, resource and other factor can make it difficult to do everyting that you had planned for

1. Keep the changes simple, and be sensitive to the disruptions that they might cause
2. If necassary go back to plan inprovements, and split out the improvements to smaller/different elements
3. Stagger the changes out over the period of the improvement cycle

At the end of the improvement cycle, go back and take a fresh look at your Sucess Criteria