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Reduce costs with Continuous Improvement

Failure happens all the time. It happens every day in practice. What makes you better is how you react to it.
-Mia Hamm, first female FIFA World Player of the Year

Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect.
-Vince Lombardi, head coach of the Green Bay Packers

We would all like to get it right the first time, but that’s of course unrealistic. In sports we practice the same things over and over in an effort to improve our effectiveness. But there are also game day adjustments. The coach switches plays when he sees what the opposing team is doing.

In software, we understand that building great products is iterative. We work toward having a continuous feedback loop with our customers. To complete the cycle, organizations that strive for excellence embrace Continuous Improvement. We try something for a while and then examine what does and doesn’t work. The key is to build on success and constantly seek to reduce friction and enhance our ability to respond.

In  this video, I demonstrate some of the Continuous Improvement features provided by the IBM Rational solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management.


Why do we care about Continuous Improvement?

  • Are non-creative, repetitive tasks performed manually by team members?
  • Is your team frustrated by process they experience as a burden? Or worse, are they conditioned to accept the status quo?
  • Do they spend too much time either adhering to the process or fighting with it?
  • Are you able to recreate best practices across multiple projects?

Not only does Continuous Improvement improve your product delivery, it empowers the team to take ownership. Team members will “do the right thing” when enabled to do so. Instituting Continuous Improvement for a team has a positive snowball effect that increases morale, productivity and quality. All these factors reduce the cost of delivering software.

Institutionalizing Continuous Improvement in your organization requires tools that support ongoing refinements to ensure that you are providing the right data to guide a team. The key to successful Continuous Improvement is a solution that supports both incremental improvement during each project as well as facilitating breakthrough improvements with automation and  reuse of best practices.

Continuous Improvement reduces costs by:

  • Ongoing adoption of best practices and automation to reduce manual, non-creative and error prone tasks
  • Helping your teams establish a working rhythm that cuts down on unexpected problems
  • Promoting incremental improvement that unblocks the team right now
  • Shortening development cycles and improving productivity

The CLM team seeks to provide you with a great experience. To do so, we invite you to collaborate with us through the multiple channels we provide such as:

Check out these links for more information on the Five Imperatives:

Thanks,

Monica Luke
Strategic Offerings Lead

Carolyn Pampino
Program Director Strategic offerings for IT, and Jazz team member