Continuous Improvement with Kaizen

As a growing, successful IT support and consulting provider we are faced every day with an onslaught of new and exciting challenges. These challenges can be internal or external but they often share similar negative mental outcomes such as stress, anxiety and frustration.

One of the things that has enabled us to succeed, particularly through the past few years of tremendous growth, has been embracing and applying the high level concept of Kaizen in our business. From Wikipedia:

Kaizen, Japanese for "improvement" or "change for the better", refers to philosophy or practices that focus upon continuous improvement of processes in manufacturing, engineering, supporting business processes, and management. It has been applied in healthcare, psychotherapy, life-coaching, government, banking, and many other industries. When used in the business sense and applied to the workplace, kaizen refers to activities that continually improve all functions, and involves all employees from the CEO to the assembly line workers. It also applies to processes, such as purchasing and logistics, that cross organizational boundaries into the supply chain. By improving standardized activities and processes, kaizen aims to eliminate waste. Kaizen was first implemented in several Japanese businesses after the Second World War, influenced in part by American business and quality management teachers who visited the country. It has since spread throughout the world and is now being implemented in many other venues besides just business and productivity.

So, how does this apply for us? Basically, whenever we run identify a process or communication gap within the team we embrace the idea of Kaizen. Put simply, we can't solve the problem overnight but what we can do (in a nutshell) is:

1) Identify the root cause
2) Make a small, incremental change at the source
3) Rinse and repeat

Often times, just gaining awareness of the gap immediately reduces the stress/anxiety associated the situation. This can often be boiled down into a simple thought I like to use: "We will do better next time."