In writing this article, I wanted to provide you with the most useful continual improvement resources currently available.
These ten articles all take different approaches to continuous improvement, from tips, to methodologies, to different business analyses that succeeded and failed in their improvement projects. It's a veritable smorgasbord of all the improvement you can handle.
Image sourced from: dataconomy.com
Here are our ten picks for best continual improvement articles. If you have any other great resource recommendations please tell us in the comments section at the bottom of the page.
Tips:
- The Huffington Post blog is worth a read. In their article: If You Want a Culture of Continuous Improvement, Create a Culture of Recognition, the value of creating a culture of praise is the major theme and encouraging our teams and employees, even if their efforts aren't an immediate success, is highly encouraged.
- In: 5 Ways To Build A Workplace Culture Of Continuous Improvement, the prevailing idea is that everyone is after that new edge in business making it important to be faster and better at adapting to implemented changes than the next guy. Change should come in small doses that are measurable and underpinned through support for your employees.
- If you're looking for sites that have a wide readership, you should take a look at Entrepreneur. This business publication posts articles on the regular. Their article: 3 Ways to Drive Continual Improvement offers preparation, observation and accountability as three of the key factors driving continual improvement.
Business Analyses:
- Steve Olsen, Executive Vice President of Camcraft shares his personal: 10 Steps to Create a Continuous Improvement Culture - an insight into the inner-workings of an organisation which has had success with continual improvement.
- Recently, I wrote an article called: The Dangers of Implementing Process Management Systems: An Analysis. Although not technically a continuous improvement article, it looks at the other side of the improvement coin - improvement failure. I analyse an organisation's failures in implementing a management system. In my opinion this can present even more value than improvement tips because it helps you steer clear of the rocks when navigating the waters of improvement project implementation.
- In: Develop a culture of continuous improvement and growth like Toyota, the article acknowledges Toyota's past quality failures calling it a 'blip', but does not take the opportunity to relate these past issues with their improvement in spite of their previous quality problems (preferring to add it as a brief notation). Nevertheless, the article shares practical and illuminating insights into Toyota's continual improvement process approach which is definitely worth a read as long as you are also fully aware of their past issues with quality failure.
Methodologies:
- Innovation is a key component of continual improvement, so, with that being said, here is: Innovation in the Work, an article from Lean highlighting the value that innovation plays in continual improvement and a very good article on Value Stream Mapping that outlines the importance of this particular methodology to continuous improvement in the workplace.
- How to Build and Sustain a Continuous Improvement Culture was a LinkedIn article written last year by Henrik Kjærulff, who states that respect for people is "the most important supporting principle of a Continuous Improvement Culture." He advocates the MIMI (Motivate, Involve, Measure, Improve) model for continuous improvement and lays out the model in a very practical and compelling manner.
Our Continuous Improvement Articles:
Obviously, an article on great continual improvement resources wouldn't be complete without adding some of the stuff we have written. Sure, it's sort of cheating but they all deserve to be on this list and provide valuable tools for continuous improvement.
- Victoria Glancy's article:
