UNDERSTANDING PROCESS DEGRADATION: WHY DO BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PROCESSES?

摘要

Continuous improvement efforts are often an exercise in repair of things that have gone wrong in a process. In order to promote a theory of continuous improvement, a taxonomy of process degradation is presented. Process degradation is classified into wear, diminishing slack, and disalignment. Disalignment is further sub-classified into knowledgebase corruption, path growth, line disbalancement, entropy, and diminishing congruence.