Creating guiding principles for your improvement projects

Creating guiding principles

for your improvement

projects

What is a guiding principle?

“A generic idea, or truth, that can help us steer our day to

day decisions.”

…how do we apply this to ourcontinuous improvement projects?

Generating your productive truths

Start by brainstorming generic truths for your business. For example:

Productive

Truths

Planning is

first

The capacity

plan is king

Meetings

have agendas

Productive

Truths

No booking,

no move

Lead by

example

Maintenance

isn’t

negotiable

Preparation

is vital

Living by your productive truths

Once you have between 1 and 10 principles (a good quantity tohelp you focus!), use the principles whenever you need to reflecton a situation. For example:

Issue:Order delivered late

Principle:“The capacity plan is king”

Verdict:Order book overloaded

Action:Revise contract review process

Using the principles with your CI projects

A few common options are:

1 2 3Vetting your new

improvement ideasCreating a gap analysis Using as a brainstorming

tool

Option 1 – Vetting your improvement ideas

When prioritising your CI opportunities, identify how manyprinciples each project will cover. The more principles covered bya project could indicate more ‘bang for your buck’.

Opportunity#1

Opportunity#2

2/9 5/9

Option 2 – Creating a gap analysis

List out all of your principles, score each one out of 10 (10 =living and breathing it, 1 = ignoring it). Prioritise your focusbased on the lower scores and aim for 10/10 on all principles:

Principle #1 Principle #2 Principle #3 Principle #4 Principle #5 Principle #6

5/10 7/10 2/10 8/10 4/10 6/10

Start here!

Option 3 – Using the principles for new ideas

When you are looking for new improvement ideas, reflect on yourprinciples and use them to direct your brainstorming:

Principle #4

Idea #1

Idea #2

Idea #3

Idea #4

Idea #5

…and use option 1 to prioritise them!

Remember:

• Don’t keep the principles to yourself, share them.• Don’t worry about only having one or two:I once used just one principle – one factory, one schedule – to help my teams get their on time delivery performance up from

22% to over 98% in just three months. The production lead time dropped from 18 weeks to just over 3 weeks in the same time

period.Focus = results.

• Don’t have too many.• Use them!

Put your principles to best use

Combine the guidingprinciples idea with theImprovement AcceleratorFramework to speed uphow quickly your businesscan improve its performancelevels.

Find out more here:https://goo.gl/FaYB1Q

About Giles Johnston

Giles Johnston is a Chartered Engineerwho consults with businesses toimprove their productivity and on timedelivery performance. Giles is also theauthor of Business Process Re-engineering and the creator of theMaking It Happen toolkit.

To keep up to date with Giles’ ideas,follow him on Twitter -@BetterFasterNow.