CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT

Tip of the month: Stand on standards to improve

When you hear “standard work”, does it bring up thoughts of rigid rules, bureaucracy, and constraints? Ugh, that sounds like the opposite of improvement! However, if we don’t know how the work currently gets done – or if the same process is performed differently across shifts, boats (of the same class), or months – we don’t have a foundation to improve on. Counterintuitively, the first step in improvement is therefore to identify the standard.

That doesn’t have to mean a 700-page binder of instructions gathering dust. The idea of embracing standardization is that we articulate and follow the current best known way to perform a given task. That way, the outcomes will be consistent and reliable (different people performing the same task will produce more or less the same results). So that when we decide those outcomes should be better (i.e. improved), we can try something new, and actually know whether our change worked! What’s more, everyone who was following the standard will benefit from the improvement.

Another way to think about standards is that they are like the chock that holds our prior improvements in place. If we spend a bunch of time figuring out how to do something better, the last thing we want is to discover 2 years later that the whole process we designed has completely fallen apart. Like a wedge behind a tire, we want to lock in each improvement, so that we aren’t sliding back to the starting point and solving the same problems over again. Each time we improve, we’re starting from where we left off, not back at the bottom. In other words, standards put the “continuous” in continuous improvement.

Want to learn more or talk about how to maintain the standards in your work? Reach out to Laurel at lmartin@saltchukmariness.com.