The Myth of Continuous Improvement

Continuous improvement is thrown around as the best way to stay ahead of the competition in business. It's used as a talking point for consultants, senior management, engineers and a wide range of others who have responsibility over a process. Six sigma is the king of continuous improvement still today. Take a documented process and set up metrics and means to improve it incrementally. By definition the process is known to be below standard.

Focusing on continual incremental improvements reduces the flexibility to implement the big changes that could take a process to the next level. Measuring against improvement gives managers a reason to never achieve optimal. If you know that you have to perform 5% better next year, you're going to make sure that you have enough capacity in the system to achieve that performance. The question becomes if you can't fix what you don't measure, how should you actually measure improvement?

Improvement is a relative term. Continuous improvement methods oversimplify the concept. Within business terminology improvement can mean anything from reduced costs, increased profits, better customer service, higher performance accuracy or quicker turn around time. Measuring performance should therefore take into account all the important metrics associated with that process.

The example I always look at is a department of 10 people that is in charge of customer sales:

Year 1: they set the performance baseline that everything will be measured against.
Year 2: department grows to 13 people. Productivity per person goes down, but profitability goes up.
Year 3: department grows to 15 people. Productivity per person goes back to Year 1 levels, revenue per person goes up and profitability stays flat.
Year 4: staff stays at 15 people. Productivity and all other metrics show improvement.

If you choose one metric to judge this department against there would be a down year at some point: productivity went down year 2, profitability didn't improve year 3. That doesn't mean it wasn't successful as a group, only that the situation was such that they improved in varying and changing areas.

Be open with your concept of improvement and make sure that overall things are directionally heading in the right direction. Just because one metric goes down does not mean that everything did. There may be a reason for the decline that will mean when it improves back to the baseline everything should rise proportionally with it.

Six Sigma and the Workplace

I am an active participant on LinkedIn and particularly LinkedIn Answers. One of the most frustrating topics I see come up again and again are various company managers asking if Six Sigma is right for their particular issue. Almost as soon as the question is posed there will be five or six responses from either Six Sigma Black Belts or
others who work in a Six Sigma environment that say of course it will work for you and by the way...would you like any help implementing it? Usually I am the only person who steps in to ask what the reasons behind looking at Six Sigma are and that there are other options beyond Six Sigma (and its many, many offshoots).

Six Sigma is a set of practices that is used to eliminate defects within a process. It was originally intended to improve manufacturing processes but has since been adapted to improve any system or set of processes. The latest trend is using Six Sigma as a way of improving office functions or specifically the operations within a given department. To implement Six Sigma you first have to define the process that is going to be improved and then measure the on-going metrics. Herein lies the biggest problem with Six Sigma.

There is an inherent assumption made within a Six Sigma process that the baseline process is an effective starting point to improve against. Many times it is the existence of bad process and procedures that drives a business to implement Six Sigma in the first place. Companies with the worst base processes are the ones looking at improvement strategies and often find Six Sigma. These companies will see almost no significant help.

Most companies somehow make it along without the help of Six Sigma. For some reason they don't need a bunch of Black Belts evaluating their processes to recommend changes and fixes to stay successful. If you are looking into a process improvement methodology, first look internally to see if it is simply bad processes that are driving the issues. If you feel the issues go beyond what you are capable of diagnosing and repairing on your own then bring in an outside consultant to help. Their job is to identify problems and help you fix them.

I'd love to give more information on this and probably will at some point, but I want to really emphasize that most issues are internal and not something that can be fixed through a Six Sigma program.


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