The magic of continuous improvement

Continuous improvement: the basics

As the name suggests, continuous improvement is all about constantly striving to get better, not just in terms of products, but also in work processes and overall quality.

Some people have a negative feeling with continuous improvement. This is because it doesn’t look like you're focussing on the most important tasks, despite you still having a lot to do. But in In the long run, it’s one of the best ways to keep a business evolving and improving.

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Ways to improve

There are two primary approaches to improvement: incremental changes or breakthroughs. Continuous improvement primarily focuses on incremental improvements, often using the PDCA cycle:

• Plan: Identify opportunities and plan the changes.
• Do: after the planning phase, Implement the change on a small scale.
• Check Monitor progress and analyze data to see if the change is effective.‍
• Act: if successful, roll out the change more broadly. If not, return to the planning phase.

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Kanban as a cornerstone

One of the most widely used methods for continuous improvement is Kanban. It’s an accessible and straightforward way to introduce continuous improvement within any company.

The core of Kanban is the Kanban board: a physical or digital board that displays all tasks a team is working on. Typically, the board includes at least three statuses: to do, in progress, and done. Each task is assigned to one person responsible for its complet

Because Kanban has a short learning curve, it’s the perfect way to start implementing continuous improvement in your organization.