The technology industry works on a continuously evolving mechanism, with new advancements every day. While many product development companies are more focused on producing results, a few actually believe in the importance of creative practices in the organization.
The Japanese word ‘kaizen’ means a business philosophy of continuous improvement is working practices. A healthier practice is for businesses to invest in the improvement of the process and people rather than the end product, which is bound to give better results.
The Kaizen Model
Companies are evolving their processes of making products, preferring to use agile development to save time. Also, with agile, the increasingly popular approach is of the Kaizen model which companies are adopting. The model involves software development companies to encourage employees to develop new skills and focus and learning and improvement rather than just delivering.
The approach first originated in Japan in which everyone must continually evaluate his or her work at each step helping them with a chance to look back and understand where they could have done better. The Kaizen approach proves to be more collaborative giving every individual a way to become smarter employees.
Advantages of the Kaizen Model
1. Reduction in Costs:
As employees review their work at every step, they detect errors and shortcomings at the right time. Traditionally reviews were done at the almost end of the cycle, meaning in case of errors the software development services team needs to work from scratch all over again.
2. Smarter Employees:
Regular evaluation and feedback encourages the team members to interact and share knowledge with one another resulting in a smarter workforce which is open to innovation.
3. Enhanced Quality and Efficiency:
Reviews from peers and seniors tend to establish a healthy competition among employees which, with encouragement from management, boosts up performance quality and efficiency. The approach focuses on employee and their skills which converts into better delivery of services and products.
Implementation of the Kaizen Model
The model can be integrated with software development in many ways. A few are mentioned below:
1. Daily and Special Meetings
Set up a schedule for team meetings to discuss opportunities and improvement. Every employee must be inspired to come up with their share of problems and solutions which the team can get to know. This knowledge sharing platform can address many difficult issues within the company and help create better strategies in the future.
2. Individual and Team
Another sub-concept comes into play here, known as Teian. According to this, each individual must come forward with a proposal of improvement which can be applied after deliberate discussions within the team. This includes the improvements one should make to their personal self. The ultimate goal is continuous improvement which must be achieved.
3. Process of work
Kaizen cannot be implemented on the whole process but on components of it or the sub-processes. Working upon the sub-processes indirectly improves the whole work model, thus, delivering a better product than ever before.
The key to get this model work is encouragement. If an employee reviews his shortcomings and a works his way through them, encouragement is crucial. Only then he and others will want to work dedicatedly towards the common goal, serving the client in the best possible way.
Via octosglobal
