Recommendations

Here are some ideas for how to create a “culture of kaizen” in your business.

Collaborate

Collaboration is extremely effective for finding ways to improve. Collaborate to improve designs, code, processes, and other aspects of the business.

Focus on all areas

• User research: Find ways to make it faster and more flexible, or to go without it and still design great products. Speed means spending less money on projects that will fail, and it means generating a return more quickly on successful projects.
• Code: Don’t judge developers by how much code they produce, judge by quality and speed. Heck, create contests to see who can create the most effective and clean code in the least amout of time.
• Waste: Figure out what causes the most wasted time and where the company wastes the most money and fix these things.
• Customer experience: Improve aspects of the customer experience other than the product itself. Focus on how customers encounter the product, how customer support interacts with customers, what it’s like to cancel, upgrade, transfer, and so on. Focus on how customers are notified of changes in the software and how to make a killer first impression. Focus on the complete customer experience.

Communicate

Use public or internal forums, discussion lists, and blogs to talk about the things being done to improve your projects, products, and the customer experience. This way, everyone has a chance to contribute and everyone has a chance to learn so the company and the software industry can keep moving forward.

Offer incentives for suggestions

Offer incentives for new suggestions that improve something. Make it worth peoples’ time to help the company in a meaningful way.

Always recognize the greatness that is right in front of you.

Build a kaizen team

Create a team of “change agents” to manage change and make it less interruptive.

One team, in fact, can be dedicated to improving the whole customer experience. Staff from different parts of the organization – marketing, development, management, etc – can all be part of this team. The team should have a clear goal of keeping an eye on the big picture of how customers experience the company and improving it in every way possible.

Supply the Kaizen Pocket Handbook

Keep copies of the handbook around to give to all existing and new employees.

Start an internal blog

Call it the “Improved!” blog and talk about what teams have done to improve their processes and performance. Make it a community blog so anyone can post to it. Encourage people to post by offering incentives for the best improvements. Perhaps make it a tumblelog, so blogging is fast and easy (Tumblr is good for this.).

Give people ownership

Giving individuals the ownership they need to implement changes means cutting through the red tape of a leadership hierarchy.

Trust the experts

Trust the people you’ve hired to know what they’re doing. Trust them to make decisions. Don’t force teams to reach a consensus. Rely on the experts. Use them for what they do best.

This alone will help improve the performance of your company, because decisions will be made more efficiently, and you’ll know decisions are being made by the people most qualified to make them.

Also, employees who feel respected in this way will perform better on a consistent basis. That said, make sure individuals trust other team members to also make changes and decisions.

In other words, hire people that want to be great and then get out of the way and let them do their jobs.

Don’t document, present.

Don’t write specs or vision docs. Create presentations.

Use pecha kucha presentations to review designs, go over demos, describe the vision for a product, etc.

Don’t rely on documentation other than presentations, designs, and design description documents.