Stealth CPI: Managing Work Products to Achieve Continuous Process Improvement

摘要

While identifying, defining, and organizing activities into graphical process diagrams is helpful during Continuous Process Improvement (CPI) planning, it's not very useful to our managers and their teams during implementation. Most managers understand -- and therefore manage -- through work products (WPs). Managing WPs has proven to be simpler and more intuitive than managing processes, dealing directly with the end-products themselves. Stealth CPI centers on existing WPs, permitting organizations to implement process improvement (PI) incrementally, purposefully -- and even stealthily. Defense organizations will find that Stealth CPI is much more intuitive and cost-effective than traditional CPI because it approaches the problems from the perspective of real-world work products rather than abstract processes. This article steps the reader through the set-up and implementation of Stealth CPI with the use of its central tool, the Capability Waypoint Matrix. Stealth CPI saves time and money over more conventional approaches because it requires less process-specific training, fewer people dedicated to the CPI project itself, and therefore less overhead to achieve the same results. Better-managed WPs foster better reuse, result in more efficient implementation, and are easier to improve than abstract processes.