7 elements of an effective improvement project on shop floor

You’re on your lean journey or at least thinking about starting one. Why? You might have reasons unique to your situation. But more than likely, you’re pursuing lean manufacturing for at least one of three reasons: your business needs to be competitive, your operations need to be safe for employees, and your company needs to be financially viable.

One way you can impact business performance is through improvement projects. The project structure should help you effectively deploy resources, work on items that matter, and maintain momentum. Since improvement projects have high potential return on investment, let’s go back to the basics and uncover what exactly makes an improvement project so effective.

The Big Picture

Improvement projects come in many different forms. One may have a broad scope, another a narrow scope. Some deal with technical matters, others process issues. One has a small team, while another has a larger team. You get the idea.

At a conceptual level, success will depend on how you plan, start, execute, and close the project. That provides a framework, but the real key to effectiveness comes in the details.

Not all improvement projects look alike. You might be shortening changeover time in welding, increasing throughput in painting, reducing errors in quoting, or performing a takt time/cycle time analysis to better balance flow. Regardless, every effective improvement project shares a few common elements.

The Specific Elements

Each of these elements is part of a puzzle. When you address them all, your project has a better chance of success. Leave part of the puzzle out, and you won’t see the whole picture or reap the benefits from the improvement effort.

1. Create a project charter. A good project charter should be just one page long. Conciseness and brevity are the goals. Sections of the charter include identifying the business case, the problem statement, project goals, scope, and team members.

You create the project charter before the project starts. It seems odd needing to clarify this, but too many make the mistake of diving in to “just start improving something.” Without adequate planning, you put your improvement project at risk. The charter spells out expectations and creates clarity. As a wise plant manager once said, “Well begun is half done!”

2. Create accountability. Accountability must be shared among different parts of the organization. The project team is accountable to perform analyses, identify root causes, find solutions, and implement improvements. They work in a project and carry out the hard work.

But leaders also have accountability. They are accountable to vet the issue, understand how it affects the business, ensure the project team has the resources it needs, and clear any roadblocks or organizational inertia that may impede the team’s progress. If an improvement project lasts several weeks or more, try instituting periodic project updates (probably weekly) between the project team and leadership. Such updates ensure both the project team and leadership can hold each other accountable.

3. Set a clear timeline. The project timeline should be highlighted upfront in the project charter and then reinforced throughout the life of the project. Sometimes unplanned events or other issues necessitate revisiting the project timeline. That’s OK. In this case, the project team and leadership can reset the timeframe and keep moving forward. Still, they need to do so in an objective, data-rich way. That is, you prolong the project timeline based on facts, not opinions.

4. Set clear expectations. The project charter and the accountability updates help clarify expectations, but you can identify specific, further effort, such as discussions during a leader’s gemba walk or integrating project expectations into normal, daily business.

All these efforts reinforce leadership’s commitment to the improvement project. Think of them as ways for leadership to demonstrate by action. These efforts help provide air cover for the project leader and his or her team as they initiate change and challenge the status quo.

5. Ensure resources are adequate. This element addresses time, people, funding, specialized knowledge, and whatever else the project team might need. As you have already learned during your lean journey, early efforts focus on doing all you can with what you have. So the starting point for project team members will be to find low-cost or no-cost improvements before they look for capital expenditures on new machinery and equipment.

When project teams have the time and accessibility to study the targeted process (defined by the scope in the project charter), they should be able to drive out non-value-added work and revise the remaining value-added work to improve flow and rhythm. Leadership must make sure the resources are available.

6. Be open to new ideas. This can be the most challenging and intimidating element, both for the project team and leadership. Project team members might resist trying something different because it has always been done the current way. Or they might hold such a narrow view of their work that they do not see or understand the larger value stream. The project team leader, lean sensei, and leadership will need to coach these people so they understand that they are really empowered to make change.

Leaders also might need to work on their own openness to new ideas. Short-sighted leaders who “know it all” can have a dampening effect on any improvement project. Good leaders set the direction and parameters, then let the project team do its thing. Sure, there may be course corrections along the way based on what leadership sees or knows, but leaders need to give project teams room to succeed.

7. Build trust. There can be mistrust among team members, particularly if they work in a cross-functional team and there are silos within the organization. Mistrust can also go both ways between the leadership and the project team.

If there is a history of behaviors that foster a lack of trust, whether real or perceived, then demonstrating trust may be challenging. Both the project team and the leadership may have to act intentionally in ways that exhibit trust. At some point the intentional acts of trust turn into behaviors of trust, and those behaviors eventually become the norm. This is easier said than done, but it is extremely important for an effective improvement project.

Power of the Collective Elements

These elements are the building blocks of a successful improvement project. Some projects are formal, like five-day kaizen events; some are less formal, like a six-week project to streamline the flow in a particular production area. But both types of projects benefit from the structure described here.

It’s easy to loosely organize a project team, set them free, and hope for the best—but do this at your own risk. Without structure and attention to specific elements, project teams might lose focus, efforts will become fragmented, and scarce resources will be spent for naught. In the end you won’t achieve the expected results, which can frustrate all parties involved.

When all the elements of effective improvement projects are attended to, you can expect higher return on your improvement investment; better performance for your customers; and more productive engagement from front-line employees, supervisors, managers, and leaders. In short, you will fulfill the three main reasons for improvement projects: Your company will be more competitive, safer, and financially viable.