Continuous improvement and innovation

Start by briefing groups on your performance strategies for improving and innovating. Innovation is essential to competition.

Promote continuous improvement as an essential part of doing business. Show leadership to foster a commitment to quality and an openness to innovation. Communicate the costs and benefits of innovations and improvements to all relevant groups and individuals.

Be flexible and creative so you can think laterally. Foster a creative climate and organizational learning by encouraging people to interact within and between work groups. Encourage new ideas and entrepreneurial behavior. This sounds easy, but it can take time and attention because you are changing your organizational culture.

Test new ideas. For each option/idea approved for trial:

1. Identify risks and manage them.
2. Do a cost-benefit analyses
3. Test ideas
4. Accept failure of ideas during trailing
5. Recognize and celebrate successes.

Manage any emerging challenges and opportunities effectively, and implement your contingency plans when any plans don't work out. Then follow up the failures by promptly investigating and analyzing the causes.

Get approval for innovations through your organization's processes and embed them into your organization's systems.

 

Your QA and continuous improvement system

Implement your QA and continuous improvement procedures as a routine. Be innovative and think laterally so that you design better ways of planning and of getting the job done.

Keep standards up, first, by being an example of good practice to all your staff.

Second, keep the message in their faces. Promote examples of good practice to them and regularly remind them of service standards for quality service, your organization's expectations, continuous improvement, and current good practice.

• Make sure that staff keep up to client service standards and codes of practice
• Confront workers about problems and develop an improvement plan
• Promote a focus on outcomes for the client
• Establish ways of telling team members the results of continuous improvement.

As you go, you'll need to monitor how well it's working, and its impact on the local community.

You can make any needed adjustments, but make sure you tell all your stakeholders. Follow your organization's procedures for information flow. Include a way of putting work team performance in writing, so that you can identify more opportunities for improvement and when you do more planning for the future, consider the areas that you identified for further improvement.