Free Facilitate Continuous Improvement Essay Sample
Organizations should meet and exceed their customer expectations. In addition to the effort to improve processes and products, organizations are always examining their business processes, streamlining their processes, increasing time to examine the already existing and new products and inevitably looking into new innovative technologies to provide quality products and services (Kotler, 2009).
Examining and streamlining helps create new products and services and even recreate the organization from time to time. An organization can rethink and streamline their business process to improve efficiency and effectiveness. They regularly assess the relevancy and appropriateness of their goals and objectives to attain quality products and services. This largely involves monitoring and evaluation for total quality assurance. To provide quality products and services, it requires an overall willingness to establish closer connections with everyone from suppliers to workers (Dodd & Roland, 2011). It requires an unwavering commitment to self analysis, improvements and aggressive approach to technology that can turn visionary strategies into reality. Business need a repeatable process for clearly defining their objectives and the means for achieving these objectives and this is done by improving business operations through streamlining business processes.
The challenge for companies nowadays is to deliver quickly and flexibly, new quality products and services, in order to be able to respond to greater and changing demands from clients. A high performance workplace focuses on increasing people’s influence on the business as well as the impact of processes, methods, the physical environment, and the technology and tools that enhance their work (Bucon et al, 2005). A high performance workplace invests in its human resources thus promotes good interpersonal relationships in the workplace from which the company can also benefit. The advantage of teamwork is significant productivity and growth in the spheres that require creative solving of different tasks, a high degree of adaptability and operational management. Teamwork also creates an environment that facilitates knowledge and information exchange and the so-called knowledge sharing. Other advantages are the ability of new forms of work organization to increase the potential for innovation that may add value to both products and services, moving them into less price-sensitive markets.
Benchmarking can be done within an organization or externally with other organizations. Internal benchmarking is a comparison of similar operations within an organization, while external forms of benchmarking include a comparison with competitors in terms of functional operations and performance. It systematically compares organizations performance with the performance of others in order to seek best practice. It enables identification of the areas where improvement is possible, how it might be achieved and what benefit it might deliver. Organizations compare and measure their policies, practices, philosophies and performance against high-performing organizations anywhere in the world. The process of benchmarking is used to identify useful business practices, innovative ideas, effective operating procedures and winning strategies that can be adopted by an organization to accelerate its own progress by ensuring quality, productivity and cost improvements. In other words, benchmarking involves investigating how things are done elsewhere and where they are done differently or better, to see whether a group could adapt the processes of another organization to improve their own processes (Kotler, 2009).
To monitor how well an organization is performing and evaluate performance, managers need to determine what the agency is supposed to accomplish. It is essential to formulate a clear and coherent missions, strategies, and objectives. Monitoring processes consist of two variables: organizational performance data and a benchmark that creates a framework for analyzing that data. For organizational information, focus on the outcomes of the agency’s performance, but also including input, environment, process and output to have a comparative framework for analysis. In order for organization to evaluate performance it requires standards to compare its actual performance against past performance, performance of similar agencies, industry standards and customer expectations (Dodd & Roland, 2011).
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Continuous improvement is an ongoing effort to improve products, services or processes. These efforts can seek incremental improvement over time or breakthrough improvement all at once. Incremental improvements is mainly involved with already existing products and mainly aims at passing the customers expectation for example the value added services which are aimed at taking the usage of the service to another improved level. It mainly improves new product development. Breakthrough is order fulfillment. It involves the identification of a niche and meeting the customers’ expectations. A case in hand is when a product is being prepared for release to the market. It focuses on reducing cost through process optimization while incremental is about meeting customers’ requirements and stakeholder expectations and improving quality by measuring and eliminating defects. It focuses on control forces to have processes and the people accountable to make sure the results are enduring
Employee autonomy is considered an important attribute of the quality of work. Team leaders can adapt some techniques that take little time or training commitment to ensure smooth running of their teams and individual team members.
Crowd contest - performance review requires a lot more than simply asking for meetings. Employee performance evaluation should be undertaken periodically and using the most appropriate method so that the employees know their strengths and weaknesses and can work upon them. Performance review goals help employees to know exactly what and how they should go about their duties. Employee appreciation and recognition is a hot topic in the corporate world. It is not just executed as a business formality but it is a way that helps increase the efficiency of the employee.
Crowd sourcing - looking for comments and ideas from the team itself ensures that the employees have a say to the decision making process of the organization. It enables motivation to the team and offers faster alternatives to the organization problems. Crowd sourcing is a way of making all the shortcomings into solutions. As a team leader seeking feedback from the team is one of the easiest and best methods of being in touch with the team. Through crowd sourcing you are able to know each of the team members.
Micro tasking - has been explained in great detail by Steve Pavlina in his article on Micro tasks. The article explains how focusing on just the next step can keep you going towards the end of the process with much less effort than thinking of the end itself. If procrastination is preventing you from reaching your goals, timelines, and due dates it might be time to develop a new strategy. Procrastination is usually the result of overwhelm; if you think something might take longer than expected or you just don’t know where to start, the activity or project is much more likely to be put off. Breaking apart larger projects into smaller tasks can really help one in getting one step ahead, and it’s a valuable skill for tackling the next objective. Visualizing the end is a great strategy when one is confident and motivated to get the job done. Sometimes you just need to get going on that first important step until the rest starts to flow.
In conclusion, organizational continuous development and quality enhancement has become an order of the day. Meaningful progress necessitates a vast array of business interventions without with competitors can impose cut-throat competition. For instance, teamwork, performance appraisals, benchmarks etcetera, are largely part and parcel of any business venture.