Top 10 Improvement Goals
What Are Your Improvement Goals?
Usually, you think about your improvement goals when you are setting budgets, or maybe at the start of the year. But you should be continually evaluating your goals:
- How much progress are you making?
- Do the goals align with new corporate initiatives?
- Do you need to add, subtract, or modify some goals?
- Is it time for a new approach?
To get you thinking about your goals and how you might modify or improve them, let’s start with the Top 10 Goals that would be applicable to most TapRooT® Users and see how they might apply to your company.
Then, once you have contemplated your goals, I have a suggestion for you to consider for each goal.
So let’s get started with the Top 10 Goals.
Top 10 TapRooT® User Improvement Goals
1. Improve safety to eliminate fatalities and serious injuries at our facilities. (If you are at a hospital, you might modify this goal to be: “Improve patient safety to eliminate sentinel events.” If you are responsible for equipment reliability you could say: “Improve equipment reliability to eliminate unexpected key equipment downtime.” If you are responsible for quality, you might say: “Improve quality before a major quality issue impacts a customer.”)
2. Improve management participation in improvement efforts.
3. Improve employee participation in improvement initiatives.
4. Motivate people to exhibit positive behaviors that result in success at work and at home.
5. Learn proven best practices from industry leaders that you can apply to your improvement initiatives to make them more effective.
6. Improve corrective actions so that problems never repeat once they are effectively investigated and fixes are implemented.
7. Learn how to stop “normalization of deviance” to ensure safety policies are effectively applied.
8. Develop proactive performance measures to better understand trends in safety, equipment reliability, and production performance.
9. Become a better TapRooT® User to continuously improve your root cause analysis initiatives.
10. Identify the gaps in improvement initiatives and find ways to turn those gaps into strengths in the future.
These top ten goals are rather safety oriented, but if you are responsible for equipment reliability, quality, production, patient safety, you can modify the goals with your improvement efforts in mind and the “safety” list can be converted into a patient safety list, an equipment reliability list, a quality improvement list, or a lean/production efficiency list.
Review Your Goals
Now, how many of these goals match your current goals?
Should you add some of the goals above to your company’s goals?
For your current goals, how are you doing meeting them?
Do you feel confident you will meet your goals in the next year or two?
Ideas to Help You Meet and Exceed your goals…
GOAL 1. Improve safety to eliminate fatalities and serious injuries at our facilities.
Stopping significant injuries and fatalities is a great goal. We all should be striving for this and making it the normal state of doing business.
You might ask…
What is the best way to stop serious injuries and fatalities?
The answer? Use advanced root cause analysis to analyze find the root causes of major incidents and precursor incidents. Plus, use it proactively to audit/assess areas with greater significant injury risk.
The first two (performing investigations) are easy. Read these article to see how you can apply TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis to precursor incidents and major accidents:
Precursor Incident Investigation
Major Accident Investigation Example
How about using TapRooT® proactively? Here are several ideas/suggestions…
And you can read our book about this:
Order it by clicking HERE.
Here are some additional ideas…
- SAFETY: Did you know that there is a “Proactive Use of TapRooT®” Course? It was developed to teach people how to become more proactive by using TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis to find and fix the causes of problems before major accidents happen. If you are trying to be more proactive, this just might be the course for you.
- EQUIPMENT RELIABILITY: If you are interested in improving equipment reliability by the use of effective troubleshooting and root cause analysis tools AND you would like to use those tools proactively, I have a suggestion. First, if you haven’t already attended an Equifactor® Course, sign up for the one. See:
https://www.taproot.com/course/taproot-equifactor-equipment-troubleshooting-root-cause-analysis-course/
These techniques come highly recommended and are based on a combination of the work done by equipment reliability expert Heinz Bloch and root cause analysis experts Ken Reed and Mark Paradies.
Also, consider attending the Achieving Excellence and Reliability Track at the Global TapRooT® Summit. - PATIENT SAFETY: Improving patient safety has been a focus of the Global TapRooT® Summit since the mid 1990s. If you haven’t already attended a TapRooT® Course, attend the pre-Summit 2-Day TapRooT® Course focused on patient safety. The TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis for Patient Safety Improvement Course. Then stay for the Global TapRooT® Summit and learn best practices from a variety of industries from around the world on how to improve performance proactively.
- QUALITY/OPERATIONS: If you would like to apply TapRooT® to improve quality or add it to your Lean/Six Sigma Program, then you should attend the pre-Summit 2-Day TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis Training and then attend the Achieving Excellence and Reliability Track at the Global TapRooT® Summit. Lean/Six Sigma improvement efforts can be made even more effective (and more proactive) when effective root cause analysis (TapRooT®) is embedded into the program.
GOAL 2: Improve management participation in improvement efforts.
Is your management involved in your improvement efforts as much as they should be? Many say that a lack of management support is one of the major problems they have when trying to improve performance.
One thing that improvement managers must realize is that it IS NOT senior management’s job to stay excited about an improvement program. It is the improvement program manager’s job to keep management excited by showing what the program is doing for them and how their involvement is helping.
This is especially true if there is an economic/industry downturn. People have told me that travel and training budgets get cut because management doesn’t understand the value the program provides. Senior management may unintentionally send the message that improvement efforts are NOT a top priority. If you don’t continually show management the value that improvements are producing, you will have to remind management that cutting back on improvement is expensive because of the costs of poor quality, accidents, equipment failures, and production upsets.
GOAL 3: Improve employee participation in improvement initiatives.
If your employees don’t seem to be involved in improvement efforts, maybe it is because you haven’t provided the opportunity.
Have you trained your employees to use advanced root cause analysis to solve problems and to use the same tools proactively?
If you need to get your employees fully committed to improving, give them the tools they need. Have an on-site TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis Course. Call us at 865-539-2139 or CLICK HERE to request more information about an on-site course.
GOAL 4: Motivate people to exhibit positive behaviors that result in success at work and at home.
Motivating people is a difficult topic. Part of motivation is making sure your folks achieve a work/life balance. That’s why we have the Work/Life Ballance Track at the Global TapRooT® Summit. Click on the Track list at the Summit Schedule page and find out more about the topics in this track. Or see THIS LINK or watch this video:
GOAL 5: Learn proven best practices from industry leaders that can apply to improvement initiatives to make them more effective.
How do you learn about new best practices from inside and outside your industry? Inside and outside your profession?
Two standard methods are:
- Industry/professional trade magazines.
- Industry/professional conferences.
There are some excellent conferences to consider in any industry/profession.
What I’ve found is that even at the best of these conferences, there tends to be industry or professional silos. For example:
- Oil industry folks tend to learn best practices from the oil industry,
- Nuclear industry folks learn from the nuclear industry
- Aviation … aviation
- Healthcare … healthcare
- Manufacturing … manufacturing
- Quality folks tend to meet and share best practices with quality folks,
- Equipment reliability … equipment reliability
- Safety … safety
Plus, we then tend to look inside our own geographic area/culture/language. US people attend conferences in North America. Europeans … Europe. Australians … Australia.
That’s why when we created the Global TapRooT® Summit. We wanted to do something different. We wanted to cross geographic, industrial, and professional boundaries. And we wanted to create an environment where benchmarking and sharing experiences are fun.
The feedback that we get from participants after every Global TapRooT® Summit is that we’ve done a very good job of that.
For example, a process safety person from a chemical plant learns best practices from a licensing engineer in the nuclear industry. A healthcare quality improvement professional learns best practices from a flight safety professional. And a nuclear safety engineer learns things from an equipment reliability specialist from a foundry.
Not only do they learn, but they have a good time doing it!
That’s why I’ve had many TapRooT® Summit participants tell me that it is the BEST networking experience that they have ever experienced. Better than any industry conference that they go to.
Watch the testimonials in this video from the 2019 Global TapRooT® Summit…
Thus, if you haven’t yet met your goal of learning valuable best practices that you can implement to keep your improvement program fresh and progressing, you should consider attending the Global TapRooT® Summit. See all the track schedules at THIS LINK.
GOAL 6: Improve our corrective actions so that problems never repeat once they are effectively investigated and fixes are implemented.
How is your CAPA program doing in preventing repeat incidents? If your goal is to improve, there are several ideas that I could suggest.
- Perform better root cause analysis. If you haven’t taken a TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis Course, take one SOON! See the course schedule by clicking on your region at THIS LINK.
- If you already use TapRooT® and want to improve your use of the technique, attend a 5-Day TapRooT® Advance Root Cause Analysis Team Leader Course. See the course details (which should convince you to attend) at this LINK.
- TapRooT® Users should also consider attending the Global TapRooT® Summit where there are several tracks that may be of interest including the Improving Investigations Track, Improving Human Performance Track, the Safety/Risk Management Track, or the Achieving Excellence & Reliability Track.
- There is actually a pre-Summit course – Best Practices in Mistake Proofing & Corrective Actions Writing Course – that is targeted toward people that want to develop better, more effective, corrective actions. See the details by CLICKING HERE.
At least one of those four ideas should help you jumpstart efforts to improve and meet your goals.
GOAL 7: Learn how to stop “normalization of deviance” to ensure safety policies are effectively applied.
We have written a series of articles on this topic and are working with a committee to write guidance on becoming a high-reliability organization. See the overview of the articles (and read each one) at:
Stopping the Normalization of Deviation with the Normalization of Excellence –
How Admiral Rickover Did It
Watch for future articles on this topic as the committee activity progresses.
GOAL 8: Develop proactive performance measures to better understand trends in safety, equipment reliability, and production performance.
We wrote the book on this topic. If you need to improve your efforts, read: Performance Measures and Trending for Safety, Quality, and Business Management.
GOAL 9: Become a better TapRooT® User to continuously improve your root cause analysis initiatives.
You can start your journey to performance improvement by simply attending a 2-Day TapRooT® Incident Investigation and Root Cause Analysis Course. But all TapRooT® Users know, this is just the start. Practice, coaching, and advanced training are part of the journey to becoming an expert root cause analysis investigator.
The 5-Day TapRooT® Advanced Root Cause Analysis Team Leader Training is designed to help you become a root cause analysis expert.
But what do you do to improve your skills after you have attended a 2-Day and 5-Day Course? There are several options.
First, every year we hold a Global TapRooT® Summit with Keynote Speakers and tracks to help you improve your performance improvement skills and learn the latest performance improvement best practices.
The 2020 Global TapRooT® Summit includes the following six tracks:
- Improving Safety/Risk Management
- Achieving Excellence & Reliability
- Improving Human Performance
- Work/Life Balance
- Improving Incident Investigation
- Becoming a Better Certified Instructor
This is an excellent source of knowledge to improve your performance improvement skills. But beyond the knowledge you learn, you will also make great contacts – friends – across many industries and professional disciplines that can also help you expand your performance improvement network.
Second, before the Summit, we hold special advanced training for performance improvement experts to help them refresh and broaden their skills. The 2020 pre-Summit Courses include:
- TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis Training
- Equifactor® Equipment Troubleshooting and Root Cause Analysis
- TapRooT® Analyzing and Fixing Safety Culture Issues
- Risk Management – Best Practices & ROBT Risk & Opportunity Based Thinking
- TapRooT® Software Implementation & Application
- Using “What if” and TapRooT® for Hazard Assessment
- TapRooT® Evidence Collection and Interviewing Techniques to Sharpen Investigation Skills
- Stopping Human Error
- Best Practices in Mistake Proofing & Corrective Actions Writing
- TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis for Patient Safety Improvement
That’s a great list of courses full of advanced knowledge to help you improve. Get more information about the courses HERE.
GOAL 10. Identify the gaps in our improvement initiatives and find ways to turn those gaps into strengths in the future.
On that last day of the TapRooT® Global Summit, we develop a custom Roadmap to Success. This will help you identify and fill any gaps in your performance improvement program.
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That’s it. Ten goals and the ways that TapRooT® Training and the TapRooT® Summit can help you meet those goals.
Don’t wait. Get your performance improvement program moving at the speed of light by getting the training and networking that you need to accelerate your program and your career.
