What is Continuous (Internal) Improvement?
Continuous improvement implies gathering improvement suggestions and best practices from employees in order to utilize them across the organization. Everyone from management to the front line has good ideas and valuable tacit knowledge to share regarding whatever it is that they do on a daily basis. The idea is that these changes are often quite simple to implement but the effects are cumulative, leading to dramatically improved operational efficiency and/or customer satisfaction in the long run.
When there's a place where it's simple to write these ideas down to whenever they occur, it's much easier to systematically work to implement these ideas and to create a company culture of shared responsibility and operational excellence.
When to choose Continuous Improvement?
Continuous internal improvement is perfect for environments in which you wish to incrementally develop your products, services, or processes through incremental improvements. It's a great way to run a much leaner process than is typically required for making decisions on new initiatives. Virtually any company will benefit from continuous improvement, at the very least in some parts of the organization.
When to try another use case?
If you're looking for larger ideas, you might want to check out Innovation Management. If you need to find areas of improvement inside your organization or want to find solutions to specific challenges, you might want to check out Idea Challenges.
What does it mean for the Viima board?
Access controls
For Continuous Improvement, we've specified the access rights on your board to "Allow listed users and users with an email address from the following domains" This means that only people who have been manually added to the list of users or have an account from the domain(s) you have specified can access the board.
From the login options, we've disabled all authentication methods except for Office 365, Google, and Viima. This means that your board can only be accessed with an Office 365, Google, or Viima account from the allowed domain(s).
From user restrictions, we have made it so that only those who have logged in can comment, like, or add new ideas.
Sharing options
From the sharing options, we've enabled email and Yammer, both common channels for internal communication.
Categories & Statuses
We have set example categories and statuses for what your process for Continuous improvement might look like. However, these are only templates, and as such we recommend you take the time to create your own process and model that by using categories and statuses.