When considering any effort toward performance improvement, you should always start by looking at the organization’s principles and culture, and making sure these are aligned so they not only permit positive changes to occur, but also ensure that the changes will be sustained over the long run. By “principles and culture,” I mean things like respect for people, fostering a no-blame environment, and reducing wastes such as excess inventory and duplicative systems that destroy flow across value streams.

Once the right principles and the right culture are in place, the quality improvement practitioner will want to move on to the tools that will guide and support performance excellence. There’s no shortage of tools to assist in pretty much any improvement job necessary, from 5S to root cause analysis to leader standard work and dozens more.

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