Then it turned out that using continuous improvement software was a rousing success, and so you want to roll it out to the rest of your organization.
Now the real question stands: How exactly do you do that?
Step-By-Step, Just Like How You Started
Giving your entire organization access to a new program without instruction could lead to trouble. Having the entire organization pepper your continuous improvement team with questions about the software because it has not been properly implemented isn’t an effective use of time. Bringing continuous improvement software to one department at a time allows them to gain experience with the platform and allows you to coach them effectively in that process. However, once a few departments have been brought on board and your team understands what problems or bottlenecks may occur in the rollout and how to fix them, you can slowly start to open the floodgates and bring bigger groups aboard.
Make Continuous Improvement Software Part of the Routine
Getting people to actually use continuous improvement software could prove to be an additional challenge, even if they understand how to use it. Make it part of your daily routine so as to replace a previous task with continuous improvement software, rather than posing continuous improvement software as yet another thing to do. For example, instead of adding notecards to boards or doing daily Kaizen on paper, have them do it on the continuous improvement software platform instead. This leads to good habits of using the platform and makes continuous improvement software a regular task instead of just adding another tool to the toolkit.
Utilize Leadership
Get help from your organizational leaders. You'll be a lot more successful if they add using continuous improvement software to their list of organizational goals and have local department leaders stress the importance of adding improvements and inputting the data from their experiments. Hearing the importance of the software from multiple organizational leaders can have a big impact on getting staff excited to implement continuous improvement software, especially if the organizational leaders also use this new software.
Listen to Your Staff
Staff members are the most important part of a continuous improvement culture. Making sure that their voice gets heard is crucial in rolling out a new software program. When listening to staff, any concern that they have needs to be recognized as a legitimate. A culture in which staff members can come to leaders about issues and are confident that the leaders will listen and work to resolve these issues is important and will lead to trusting the process that leaders want to implement.
Have a Plan
What's the most instrumental part of your continuous improvement software rollout? Having a plan. That plan could be to start using continuous improvement software in the departments that need the most attention and supervision, or to start deploying continuous improvement software in departments that are the most technologically savvy. You could start with the smallest departments and work your way up to the bigger ones. Regardless of where you start, make sure that there is a plan in place. Don’t be afraid to make changes to that plan if you find a better way! That’s what continuous improvement is all about.
Want to start planning your continuous improvement software rollout? Contact us for help!