What I Learned About Agile Process Improvement
In many organizations people are satisfied with just getting things done without regard to more efficiency or higher quality results. Anyone who is merely competent looks heroic when firefighting.
Improvements should be based on:
- Small changes, not major paradigm shifts or new inventions.
- Ideas come from employees.
- Inexpensive to implement due to incremental improvements.
We want Employees to take ownership and be accountable for improvements. They are closer to the processes and directly impacted. In addition, improvements could result in elimination of steps and processes all together. This needs to be identified early to let the employees impacted know how they will be redeployed.
Factors necessary for success:
- Tone from the top.
- Focus on fire prevention rather than firefighting.
- Not a one and done situation but a long term focus.
- A quarterly dip in performance may be tolerated if it means the organization is better off in the long term.