You can find A Better Way using the Framework, but how will you ensure your systems operate effectively and your workflows continue to improve?
Margin
Changes to inputs provided, outputs required, team dynamics, and many other factors can increase the cost or decrease the value of your work. Standards may become less relevant or be forgotten as teams change, and systems that support your work may break down. All of these problems can reduce your margin over time.
Reactive Improvement
If you notice your margin decreasing, you can use the Framework to find areas for improvements, design new workflows, and implement new standards and systems. These changes can decrease cost, increase value, and therefore increase your margin in the future.
But in order to make improvements you will need to spend some time away from value-generating work. Improvements and systems to support them may also have up-front costs. Both of these factors will decrease your margin in the short term, but the improvements should more than make up for this in the long run.
Reaction Time
The longer a problem goes unresolved, the more potential margin is lost. Small problems may also cause larger problems in the future that could have been avoided. The faster you react, the less total margin you lose.
No Time
If you and your team are focused on generating value, you might not notice a decrease in margin until it drops significantly. Once you notice, you might feel too busy to do anything about it. It will seem critical for you to keep generating value, but without fixing the problem you will continue to work in this critical state.
Recovering from Critical
The only way out is to trade some amount of margin to make an improvement. Even if your margin is negative, it will need to drop further to accommodate. The good news is you may only need a small improvement to get started. You can then spend more time on improvements as your margin increases. It will take longer to dig your way out of a critical situation, but the sooner you start, the better off you’ll be.
Continuous Improvement
Instead of trying to react quickly, a better approach is preventing a problem before it occurs. If you can find potential areas for improvement before they become problems, you might be able to avoid dips in your margin entirely. To do this you need to dedicate a regular amount of time every month to improving your work. As your work changes, these proactive improvements will mitigate the risk of problems developing and keep your margin from dropping.
Sustainable Work
What if you went a step further? Instead of mitigating risk, you could trade a bit more margin to look for improvements that will not only keep your margin level but increase it in the future. Continuous improvement is exactly what it sounds like: making improvements continuously to ensure long-term sustainable growth.
R&D
Working on improvements is often referred to as research and development (R&D), but you can use R&D to achieve other goals as well.
Internal R&D
The goal of internal R&D is to increase margin by improving workflows, standards, and systems for existing products and services.
External R&D
The goal of external R&D is to grow, change, or diversify your work by creating new products and services.
I use the term R&D to refer to internal R&D as this is the focus of A Better Way To Do and continuous improvement. I can help you improve how you do, but what you do is up to you.
Balance
The amount of margin you trade for continuous improvement is up to you. It’s a balance between immediate margins and improved margins in the future. If your margins are critically low, you have even more reason to sacrifice a small amount to make improvements, or you risk losing your margins all together. A small amount of time spent making improvements enables you to allocate more time in the future.
Implementation
How do you implement continuous improvement? If you can use the Framework to improve how you work, you can also use it to improve how you make improvements.
Improving R&D with the Framework
- Analyze workflows to see when and how you’re making improvements now.
- Design standards to help you set aside enough margin to achieve your R&D goals.
- Build systems to support these standards and ensure they stick.
If you want to adopt a strategy for continuous improvement, it needs to be more than an idea. It has to become a part of how you work, through standards and systems.
A System for Continuous Improvement
Without knowing your team, workflows, or goals, I can’t design your ideal system. What I can do is describe a core set of standards and recommend systems to support them. It starts with defining a high level standard for continuous improvement itself.
This standard clarifies your intentions and helps to measure your success. Did you dedicate any time last month? How much? You could make it more specific by writing an amount of time into the standard itself.
A high level standard is a start, but it’s not enough. You will need to implement additional, more specific standards and systems to support it. To do that you’ll first need someone to take ownership of this standard and the goal of continuous improvement.
R&D Lead
Finding an R&D Lead is the first step in building a system for continuous improvement. It’s up to them to ensure time is spent on R&D. They will define your R&D strategy and guide the development of any further standards and systems.
The role does not have to be full time, but be careful giving it to someone who’s already juggling several other responsibilities. R&D work is important but often less urgent than other project deadlines, so it might be ignored.
It might be tempting to split the role, but if people share ownership, it’s easy for them to assume someone else is taking care of it. With one person working as R&D Lead, that person has more reason to own their responsibilities since any success or failure is up to them.
This role may not be for everyone, but some people (including myself) will really enjoy it. If you can find someone who already spends spare time looking for improvements, they might appreciate a role devoted to that work. If no one on your team is interested, you should look for someone with these qualities to add to your team.
Standards
It’s easier to learn, remember, and share your workflows if standards are written down. By keeping all of them in one location it ensures clarity as everyone is literally on the same page.
You can use any number of systems as the infrastructure for your set of standards. It could be as simple as a shared folder or your own custom platform. Accessibility and ease of use are the most important criteria, so make sure your team can find what they’re looking for and make edits without any extra effort. I often recommend against wiki pages as editing them requires more steps and expertise than a Google Doc.
R&D Project List
With an R&D project list, you and your team can capture ideas for potential areas for improvement, choose projects with the most potential, and track progress on those projects. If you only spend a small amount of time on R&D every week or month, a project list can help you pick up right where you left off.
Depending on the scale of your projects and the size of your team, you can track as much or as little info as you need. Like the standards library, accessibility and ease of use ensure the system is used. Task management apps like Trello can work well, but if you don’t want to overcomplicate things, a simple spreadsheet can be a better, lightweight solution.
Regular R&D Meetings
These meetings provide an opportunity for everyone on your team to step away from their work and think about R&D. Together you can discover areas for improvement, prioritize R&D projects, and share ideas for workflows, standards, and systems. The length and frequency of these meetings will depend on your needs, but you can probably spare 1 hour a month, and often that’s enough.
For some of your team, this meeting would be the only time they talk about aspects of their work that could be improved. Without it problems will often go unaddressed as people are too focused on their work to think about them or communicate them to others.
Regular R&D meetings will become a habit over time, but starting them can be hard (even for the R&D Lead). If you and your team already use calendars, then a recurring event will help. Not only will they notify everyone before the meeting, they block out time months in advance so other events can be booked around them. If you aren’t using calendars yet, you may want to look into it as an area for improvement. As a system they can support many standards and help you build habits.
Build Your System
A system for continuous improvement is a collection of roles, standards, and systems that support a standard for continuous improvement. The collection you build is up to you, but with an R&D Lead, a standards library, an R&D project list, regular R&D meetings, and supporting systems, you can ensure you’ll always find a better way to do.
- Ryan Lintott
- 2019-06-05
