Say what you do. Do what you say. Prove it. Improve it.
Those of you familiar with the Deming Cycle of Improvement will see Plan-Do-Check-Adjust in the above statement. It’s a great refresher on how each TDPartner can work toward continuous aggressive improvement and further our strategic goals both financially and culturally.
The following are some tips for your Plan-Do-Check-Adjust process:
- Set standards of what and how you want to accomplish. This might be an installation guideline, a process for billing of a service, or the measureable outcomes of a project.
- Develop your team, ensuring they have the high expectations, skills, and training to accomplish the plan as defined.
- Continuously monitor to see that the desired activities are happening, well before the installation, process, or project is finished. Don’t wait and verify only at the end, because any problem you find will likely cost much more to fix than the original planning and checking cost combined!
- Engage and facilitate our field and service Partners to understand and determine solutions to the problems they see each day. Use cross-functional problem solving to avoid a band-aid approach. Take the time to search and fix root causes. Don’t buy into the philosophy that there is never enough time to do it right, but there always seems to be time to do it again!
Then, start all over again by updating the standards and process and measures to an ever higher level!
