The good old suggestion box for collecting employee ideas for improvement has been around for decades, if not even longer. Employers know that not every person is willing to speak up publicly when they see an opportunity for good change, so a point of collection for these ideas makes a lot of sense.

Like everything else these days, the suggestion box is migrating from the analog realm to the digital one with more companies opting for an online approach.

Is moving your suggestion box online the way to increase employee engagement and get more great ideas for improvement?

The approach certainly has some advantages.

We’ve yet to run into an organization that doesn’t want to find ways to improve. Everyone wants to reduce costs, improve customer satisfaction, get more efficient, and maximize revenue generation.

The difference between organizations that are successful at achieving these objectives and becoming better over time, and those that fail to make progress, often comes down to the structure upon which improvement initiatives are built.

That’s why choosing the right continuous improvement system is so important, but how do you tell them apart? Most people don’t make this type of investment very often, so it can be a challenge to select the best one for your organization.

Your organization may have some unique needs that should be considered, but almost every situation calls for evaluating continuous improvement systems based on technical infrastructure, features, and vendor support.

For more help on this topic, download this improvement software comparison matrix. Fill in who has what features, decide how important each is to you, and objectively calculate which platform will best suit your needs. Download it here.

We’ve had lots of great conversations with our clients over the last few weeks about the successes they’ve seen in 2018 and their plans to make 2019 even better. We are often asked what additional continuous improvement techniques we would recommend that they add in the new year to further challenge the team and maximize the impact of positive change.

One that we recommend to everyone who isn’t already using it is an online idea board. Even organizations that currently use a physical idea board can benefit immensely by taking the concept online. Here are the top 10 reasons we’re so confident that a digital idea board is the right way to go.

1. It is accessible, anytime from anywhere

When you implement an online idea board, you take all of the friction out of submitting or working on opportunities for improvement. People who spend time working away from the office can participate as if they were sitting right there. I don’t know about you, but sometimes my best ideas hit me when I’m driving home from work or singing in the shower. With an online idea board your team doesn’t have to remember to submit the thought the next time they are in the office, they can do it right away. The best digital boards even have mobile applications to make it even easier.

Whenever I think about the process of buying software two quotes, come to mind. The first is, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” The second is from Henry Ford on the invention of the car. He famously said, “If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” These lines explain why buying software is so complicated. If you don’t know what’s possible, it’s hard to know if you’ve found the best solution.

Change management software is something that many organizations are looking to implement for the first time, so it’s no surprise that many of the people we chat with don’t really know what they should be looking for. They wonder if regular project management software is sufficient - as well as what sets the most complete solutions apart.

We want to help. This post will break down the capabilities and technical requirements of change management software into critical categories and identify the specific functionality you should consider. We’ve also put it all into a spreadsheet that you can use to compare solutions and determine the essential items for your organization.

Download the comparison worksheet here.

Hoshin Kanri is a Lean technique for strategic planning. The goal is to get everyone rowing in the same direction, at the same time, to achieve an organization’s breakthrough objectives in a 3-5 year timeframe. This is accomplished by aligning strategy, tactics, and daily operations.

Developing a strategy and effectively executing it are two very different things. In order to be successful with such a long-term proposition, leaders need access to the right tools. Every organization that uses Hoshin planning does so in a unique way, but we’ve found four Hoshin planning tools that are frequently used by teams that get results.

Strategy deployment, often known in Lean circles as Hoshin Kanri or Policy Deployment, is a technique for ensuring that the strategic goals and objectives are the drivers of every activity throughout the organization. Strategy deployment software supports this effort by serving as the management platform for projects related to the goals. This post covers the benefits and capabilities of the best strategy deployment solutions.

The Lean business management methodology prizes an optimized flow of value to the customer with as little waste as possible. Waste is defined as anything that the customer would not volunteer to pay for. Lean practitioners have identified eight types of waste and work tirelessly to find and minimize them.

Lean is a popular approach across many industries because it is easy to understand and effective at improving business results when it is properly executed. Lean got its start in manufacturing, but today is used in healthcare, construction, software development, retail, professional services, education, and other industries.

Specialized Lean project management software has been developed to help organizations dedicated to the approach get the most out of it. Every organization has its own reasons for investing in technology to support Lean, but most find three substantial advantages.

We just rolled the clocks back, so chances are you are either getting started or are well into your strategic planning exercises for 2019. Unfortunately, the chances of successfully deploying a strategy and achieving stated goals are low for most organizations. In their book The Balanced Scorecard, authors David Norton and Robert Kaplan note that 90 percent of organizations fail to execute their strategies successfully.

What accounts for a 90% failure rate? Why do so many companies put a ton of effort into developing a strategic plan, only to miss the mark?

In developing the KaiNexus platform for strategy deployment, we’ve had the chance to chat with leaders in many industries about the planning process. We’ve talked a lot about what works, but also about what doesn’t. When it comes to strategy deployment, there are some common pitfalls that our clients have learned to avoid. Here’s what not to do.

What does perseverance mean to you?

Six Sigma is a business methodology focused on improving the quality of goods or services an organization produces by reducing variance in the production process. Six Sigma leaders know that when a production process lacks the stability to create high-quality output consistently, it will continue producing defective products until someone intervenes and improves the process. Reducing variation requires constant monitoring and measurement as systems tend to erode if not kept in check. Over the years, Six Sigma practitioners have developed a set of tools and methods that address control, and problem-solving and improvement to eliminate defects and waste. Here are a few of the most essential.