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Case study: Developing a continuous improvement culture

Customising problem solving tools to support a mobile phone company’s quality improvement culture

A mobile phone company wished to fully embed their quality improvement culture and provide ongoing reinforcement and support for their implementation of the six sigma methodology. The goal was to provide departmental managers with on-line access to a range of continuous improvement tools which they could download for use in improvement projects and use in management or brown bag meeting for knowledge and skills development.

Echelon customised a kitbag of continuous improvement tools from theirwww.learningmatters.com resource, re-authoring it in the mobile phone company’s cultural language and publishing it on their intranet.

Echelon’s approach

An analysis of organisational learning culture was undertaken to determine the most appropriate style and structure of instructional design. Additional work was required to understand the capabilities of the organisation’s intranet in terms of learning delivery.

An important element in engaging the intended audience was to script the materials using the language and style of the organisation’s culture. The content was developed in a highly modular format that enabled managers to easily and quickly dip in and out of as they needed.

The process developed is a structured method for selecting, analysing and solving problems in a sequence of steps called DMAIC - Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve and Control. This set of improvement tools ensured the company’s staff were able to identify the real problems within the organisation and implement the best possible solution(s) and to apply a consistent approach to problem solving across the business.

Managers and staff were encouraged to seek help and advice when needed, by seeking out the Green Belt or Black Belt 6 Sigma experts in their area. 

That the content was able to sit within the company’s intranet was down to the capabilities of Echelon’s IT developers who were able to redesign their learning management system so that the content could be effectively searched and usage tracked.

The project illustrates one of Echelon’s main business capabilities: the competence of designing content to match an organisation’s specific cultural needs, to source some of that content from our established learning resource and to customise bespoke software to ensure its successful adoption.

The site was launched via the company’s internal newsletter which was circulated in html via the intranet and in printed format. It was promoted as a collection of problem solving tools and techniques to help managers achieve effective and sustainable improvement on a day-to-day basis, rather than as a training programme or specific methodology.

A particular emphasis was teamwork, encouraging people to share their successes with other teams and to make it easier for them to jointly fix the things where they interact.  

The company’s green and black belts (quality assurers) were trained into the value of using this toolkit and spread the word to managers looking for ways of improving performance through quality review.

The company converted what was a license arrangement into outright purchase of the content as uptake grew and the content proved highly popular.