Continuous Improvement Strategy: The Hybrid Way PM World Journal (ISSN: 2330-4480) Vol. XIV, Issue I – January 2025 www.pmworldjournal.com by Tororiro Isaac Chaza Advisory
We are at the time of the year when most companies are planning the year’s activities. Strategic plans are being reviewed and new initiatives are being fashioned. Most companies undertake formal strategic planning sessions. This article looks at a specific concept that companies can adopt to come up with strategies. The concept is called “continuous improvement.” What is this “continuous improvement”? Let us start by looking at the definition of the concept. Continuous improvement is defined as an ongoing process of identifying, analyzing, and making incremental improvements to systems, processes, products, or services. Its purpose is to drive efficiency, improve quality, and value delivery while minimizing waste, variation, and defects. The continuous improvement process is driven by ongoing feedback, collaboration, and data.
https://businessmap.io/lean-management/improvement/what-is-continuousimprovement/ Continuous improvement is about identifying opportunities always to do better as time progresses. In the VUCA (vulnerable, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) environment we are in, driven by rapid technological advancements, the quest for superior customer experience, and ravenous competition, it is imperative to adapt. Organisations that do not adapt will soon be dodos. The question is how to master the art of continuous improvement to tame the tempest of uncertainty and complexity. My experience spans Strategic Planning, Operations Management, and Project Management, principally in the ICT sector. My observation, supported by many other pundits, is that organisations are undertaking more projects than operational day-to-day activities. It is said that in the early 60s the ratio between operational activities and project activities, measured by a combination of resources, budgets and management time, was about 80/20. The ratio is now flipping towards 20/80 denoting a highly projectized environment. To quote Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez, “HBR Project Management Handbook – How to Launch, Lead, and Sponsor Successful Projects,” 2023. “Soon, senior leaders, managers, and employees, regardless of their industry, will spend at least 60 percent of their time selecting, prioritizing, and driving the execution of projects. All of us must become project leaders—despite never having been trained to do so!” This then calls for the organisations to craft strategies to harness this thrust towards project orientation through process improvements, people skills upgrades, and adopting the appropriate management and technological systems both in operations and in projects.
Again, I repeat, organisations that do not adapt will soon be dodos. Starting at the Strategic Planning Level, an organisation uses the VMOST framework to decompose strategic vision into actionable tasks as follows:
- V is for the Vision statement crafted to cover a long-term aim for business improvement. This is cast for perhaps three to five years.
- The M for Mission statement follows. This embodies the organisation’s mandate for the current period, that is, what business the organization is in, how it achieves its mandate, and why.
- From the Vision and Mission statements, the organization comes up with the O for key objectives, which are then specific goals that guide the Strategic Plan.
- The objectives direct the S for the Strategic Plan, which lays out the roadmap to be followed for the organization to achieve its goals.
- The Strategic Plan is further decomposed into the T, the tactics, which are the activities, both operations and projects, that will be carried out in pursuit of the Strategic Plan. Hence the acronym VMOST.
It is important at this juncture to assert that strategy is achieved mainly through projects. It is important to clearly understand that the initiatives that are put forward for continuous improvement are most likely projects. It is good at this juncture to see the difference between operational activities and projects. Operations are the day-to-day routine and repetitive tasks aimed at maintaining and sustaining the organization. Projects, on the other hand, are unique, temporary efforts to produce a product, service, or result. Temporary means that a project has a distinct life cycle with a start date and an end date. Another way to look at it is that projects change the business while operations run the business. Projects are therefore the main method for executing the strategy of continuous improvement. It is imperative to understand how continuous improvement is achieved through project management practices. Among the various types of project management practices, there are two distinct methodologies that I want to describe for the purpose of linking continuous improvement to positive project outcomes. The first method is the Waterfall or Predictive framework. In this framework the project has a life cycle from initiation, to planning, followed by execution, monitoring and controlling, and finally closing. This is the traditional way of carrying out projects with highly predictive environments where upfront planning is fairly accurate in the scope, schedule and budget estimates. For instance, in the construction industry, the quantity surveyor converts the architect’s drawings and the structural and civil engineers’ inputs into material and resource requirements. The project managers put the construction project plan together with a level of accuracy of date of completion. Estimations are easily done through analogous estimation using data from past projects of a similar nature. ‘Go no-go’ decisions are done at specific milestones or phase-gates. Change is acceptable at minimal levels and carefully managed. Strong governance structures are also put in place. The software industry does not have the same luxury of predictability as the construction industry. There are too many unknowns in this field, hence the Predictive project management methodology is not ideal here. Enter Agile Project Management. Agile Project Management is suited for projects requiring rapid change response, high customer involvement, iterative development, flexibility and adaptability, all of which is buttressed on continuous improvement. The Agile Manifesto puts forward four values, thus:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools, signifying that the people are foremost in considering the project.
Working software over comprehensive documentation, signifying that the need for documentation should not get in the way of developing and testing software.
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation, means that the customer is involved throughout the development. Contrast with the predictive methodology where the customer is involved at specific milestones.
Responding to change over following a plan, implies that change is anticipated and welcome. Contrast with the predictive methodology where change must be minimised. The values are supported by twelve principles which display the embodiment of continuous improvement at the plinth. The twelve principles embrace the following: Customer satisfaction,
- Adaptability,
- Collaboration,
- Communication,
- Simplicity,
- Continuous improvement,
- Technical excellence,
- Sustainable development,
- Trust,
- Break down silos.
When working in most industries such as financial, health, information technology service providers, insurance, manufacturing, etc, software is procured from developers and then adapted to the organisation’s specific requirements. In this case, the predictive methodology would be too rigid because of minimizing changes, and the Agile methodology would flow negatively. A sizable portion of certified project managers were earlier trained on Waterfall methodology, and most likely their respective companies have entrenched this methodology in their project management processes. Therefore, they would find it challenging to switch to Agile. Enter the hybrid methodology, which attempts to extract the best from Waterfall and Agile through tailoring. The traditional way of project management depended on a prescribed project management methodology. Most Project Management professionals were schooled on the Project Management Institution’s Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMI’s PMBOK) framework or Prince2 (Projects in Controlled Environments). These are well-documented and well-practiced methodologies. But the environment is rapidly changing towards Agile frameworks. Tailoring suggests balancing Predictive and Agile methodologies to suit a particular project. The idea is that there is no longer a “one shoe fits all” approach. The project environment in which continuous improvement is pursued demands that each project be unique and hence requires a customized project management methodology to suit the needs of that specific project. Lessons learned from one project can be used to improve the tailoring of the next project. I will relate to a specific experience I have had as the Project Management Office (PMO) consultant for an ICT company undertaking a complex project to replace a legacy core business system. This involved more than 20 teams which we termed streams. The average stream was composed of about 4 specialists or subject matter experts, giving a total team member count of about 80 persons. These covered core technical streams including IT infrastructure architects, data specialists, testing specialists, security experts and many more. Combine these with business streams such as Procurement, Revenue Assurance, Risk and Fraud, Legal, Commercial, and Change Management, among others. Also add to this the external parties made up of the main vendor, and associated third-party service providers, and you have a good mixture of uncertainty and complexity. The main challenge was to introduce Agile concepts in an organization used to the extant traditional flow. The project was planned with a Gantt Chart following the Waterfall methodology. This gave the intended baseline and proxy-roadmap for the project. However, the project was run in Sprints using the Agile incremental flow, each sprint about 4 weeks long on average. Many challenges were encountered. The first one was the matrix structure, where team members involved in their day-to-day operations, were also demanded to carry out project tasks, report at daily standup meetings, and follow up with problem-solving meetings. The second challenge was tailoring to incorporate the vendor’s own project management methodology. The third challenge was the need to rebaseline the project schedule to suit the more elaborate Sprint cycles. The fourth challenge was keeping track of project artifacts given the Agile Manifesto value “working software over comprehensive documentation.” Skipping appropriate documentation was considered risky. The fifth challenge was to ensure executive buy-in of the tailoring. There were many more challenges. We overcame these challenges by onboarding every stakeholder to the hybrid project management methodology. The project is still ongoing and about to be closed. The main lesson learned was the need to be sensitive to, and to attend to stakeholder painpoints. The pain-points were elicited through daily stand-up scrum meetings and periodic sprint retrospectives. The pain-points were then addressed in follow-up meetings. The team members expressed appreciation for the hybrid methodology but acknowledged the challenges. Follow-up skills upgrading in Project Management is necessary for such an organization that is heavily into Digital Transformation. In the spirit of continuous improvement, I advocate for every PM to acquire tailoring skills, among other power skills, as I foresee a rising demand for these skills. Such skills will be critical as invariably, strategic plans are influenced by the need for strategic agility. This will enable the organization to respond nimbly to new opportunities. Hybrid methodologies also facilitate proactive risk management.
The final point of advice is that the best way for a PM with Waterfall skills to understand the hybrid environment is to first undertake lessons in Agile in its raw form, and then apply it to hybrid tailoring. I reckon this is easier than trying to master both Waterfall and Agile in the same breadth. The two need to be separately understood first and then combined through championing of tailoring on a case-by-case basis.
