Agile Methods and Continuous Improvement: An Organisation That Grows at Every Stage

Continuous improvement is the discipline of making the way you work better through small, regular steps. Its roots lie in lean thinking and the Japanese concept of Kaizen, “change for the better”. In agile methods, it becomes part of daily work through retrospectives, short cycles and feedback.

What brings lasting results in agile and lean transformations isn’t the big changes of the first months, but the small improvements made every week afterwards. In this article we look at how continuous improvement works and how to make it last in your organisation.

How does continuous improvement work? The PDCA cycle

The best-known model of continuous improvement is the PDCA (Plan – Do – Check – Act) cycle:

1. Plan: define a problem, understand its root cause and form an improvement hypothesis. (“If we lower the WIP limit, cycle time will get shorter.”)
2. Do: try the change on a small scale, for a limited time.
3. Check: measure the results with data and compare them with the hypothesis.
4. Act: if it worked, make it the standard; if not, plan a new experiment with what you learned.

The Sprint cycle and retrospective in Scrum are essentially a team-level application of this cycle.

Seven principles of a lasting improvement system

1. Move in small steps

Instead of big transformation programmes, run small, reversible experiments that show results quickly. Small steps reduce risk and speed up learning.

2. Make things visible first

Improvement starts with seeing the current situation. If you can’t see where work waits, which steps add value and where work is redone, improvement rests on opinions. You can’t manage what you can’t see.

3. Decide with data

Flow metrics (cycle time, throughput, work in progress and the age of waiting work) are the compass of improvement. Only with this data can you tell whether a change worked. To start your retrospectives with data, see our Sprint Retrospective tips.

4. Get to the root cause

Treating symptoms makes the same problem reappear somewhere else. Use techniques such as the “5 Whys” and fishbone diagrams to get beneath problems.

5. Reserve capacity for improvement

If all of a team’s capacity goes to delivery, improvement always stays something to do “later”. Put improvement work in the backlog and deliberately make time for it.

6. Involve everyone

Continuous improvement isn’t the job of an expert team but of everyone who does the work. The best improvement ideas come from the people who live with the problem every day. Leaders’ role is to remove the obstacles in front of those ideas.

7. Grow what works

Improvement isn’t only about solving problems. Spreading a practice that works in one team to others is one of the fastest ways to improve.

From team to organisation

Continuous improvement works at different levels, with different rhythms:

• Team level: daily flow meetings and retrospectives.
• Across teams: flow reviews where dependencies and end-to-end flow are reviewed regularly.
• Organisation level: regularly re-evaluating the portfolio and its priorities against strategic goals.

When these levels aren’t connected, teams improve internally but the organisation’s end-to-end performance doesn’t change.

Common mistakes

• Not following up on improvement actions. Writing new actions in every retrospective but never measuring any of them.
• Looking only inside the team. If most of the work waits in other teams, improving inside the team has limited effect.
• Treating improvement as a project. Continuous improvement has no end date.

Conclusion

Agile and lean methods give organisations a strong foundation for continuous improvement. But what makes that foundation work is visibility, data, capacity and leadership support. When improvement is part of daily work, the organisation keeps growing at every stage.

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Related: Moving to Kanban, Five stages of becoming an agile learning organisation. To build a lasting improvement system, have a look at our continuous improvement services.