Monday, April 2, 2012
8 ways to incorporate continuous improvement in knowledge work
What constitutes continuous improvement in knowledge work?
- Continually root out all waste
- Knowledge work that doesn't involve judgement or expertise
- Use the five whys to uncover waste
- Rotation among jobs to spread knowledge
- Look for small forms of waste, not just big ones
- Periodically review the structure and content of each job
- Avoiding errors, especially big ones! When errors occur, find out why and take steps to avoid their recurrence.
- Reduce uncertainty. Experiment.
- Strive to make tacit knowledge explicit
- Specify the work; simple checklists are often sufficient
- Codify repeatable parts of the work
- Use the checklists or specified work. It often helps to involve two people to enforce the use of checklists.
- Use data about the benefits of improvements to get buy-in
- Establish measurable goals
- Make progress toward goals easily visible as with a dashboard
- Specify how team members should communicate
- What needs to be communicated
- Resolve disagreements with facts
- Explicit lists of errors and their descriptions. This helps differentiate errors from style preferences.
- Use the scientific method to solve problems quickly
- Ideally the person who created the problem should fix it
- Solve problems where they occur to comprehend contextual information
- Solve problems as soon as possible after they occur
- Recognize that your processes are always a work in progress
- Codify lessons learned
- Keep looking for new ways to work
- Lean approach doesn't apply to visionary work
- Improve knowledge and skills
- Continue to gain expertise with your tools rather than plateauing at a basic level
- Continue to learn in your field
- Have leaders blaze the trail
- Management must maintain interest and involvement over the long term
- Persistence is the key
- Because it is difficult, it makes it difficult for competitors to replicate
Posted at 12:00 AM
Keywords:
Continuous improvement
, waste
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