Quality through continous improvement: The Basics

There is one philosophy for quality control that we can apply to our personal and professional lives, and that is Kaizen, or continuous improvement.
To apply Kaizen, we first have to understand that continuous improvement is not a series of steps, it’s a permanent cycle. It’s the revolutionary idea that we never stop changing and improving, this is an on-going process and what was good yesterday may not be good today, since the only constant in the world is change.

Here is a list of Kaizen concepts that we can apply to any personal and professional projects:

– Before you start your project, establish a clear goal: You have to make sure what is that you want to achieve. It’s easy to make a decision because it is something good, when that direction may not be good for your objective or may even work against it. A company that sold candy spent millions of dollars in improving an attribute of the product, only to find out years later that consumers did not care about that and didnt even notice.

– Think of how you can measure your efforts and objectives: Everything can be measured; to think only straight quantitative aspects can be measured is a myth. The most important measures for a brand, for example, are the ones that reflect the impressions in the mind of consumers.

– Determine a reasonable time before reassessing: It is easy to think that if we have been successful, now our strategies and process are written in stone; this is not true. We have to consider things such as changing environment, needs of customers, what the competition is doing, etc. When these things change, we have to change with them. For example, a supermarket has to change its strategy on how to sell yogurt and what to sell, now that the new thing are frozen yogurt shops.

– Keep in mind that small changes matter: It is not just about the changes for which you need to plan with months in advance and invest a lot of money. If there is a small thing that you can do to give a better service, to save time yourself or to offer a better product, just go ahead and make the change. For example, If a store eliminates one unnecessary step in the check-out process, this saves time to both customers and employees.