After you’ve improved a business process, can you just relax and move on to the next process? Not if you want to keep the strategic gains you made.

Continuous improvement (CI) may seem like a theoretical concept unless you have experience working with business processes. But this is far from the truth. You want to make sure you don’t move too quickly to improve the next process until you’ve created a CI plan for the process you just finished. Otherwise, you’ll find that the process works fine for a while. Then you’ll see it start to slide back a bit, then a bit more, until it becomes stale and you’re right back where you started.

This step is similar to losing weight. If you lost 20 pounds and never weighed yourself back, you’ll probably find that the pounds slowly come back. The “maintenance phase” of a business process is just as important as that of a weight loss program.

Much has been written about continuous improvement, and you need to think about the four steps of the improvement cycle: (1) evaluate, (2) test, (3) evaluate, and (4) execute.

Identify what you want to periodically assess: have your customers’ needs changed, are internal controls still working, or are you measuring the most important elements? Test the changes on a limited basis (test), determine if they worked (evaluate), and roll them out across the organization if successful (execute).

It is helpful to identify the following before abandoning a newly improved process:

• the key issues you will assess
• how often you will review each topic
• the time frame in which you will revisit topics

For example, you might choose to validate customer needs every 12 months and plan to perform that analysis in the second quarter of each year. Putting a plan and timeline in place will help keep an improved business process at the forefront of your mind and ensure that you look for opportunities for improvement on a routine basis.

Developing a continuous improvement plan and timeline is the tenth step in improving the effectiveness, efficiency, and adaptability of your business.

Copyright 2010 Susan Page