Why Bother?: Why and How to Access Your Continuous Improvement Culture

This book focusses on the importance of creating an internal assessment program to periodically assess the maturity of the organizations transformation journey. It discusses the best approach to designing and implementing an assessment program by answering key questions posed when people resist.

The book begins with selecting the positioning of the program not as an audit but as an opportunity to review strengths and opportunities, through to selecting senior leader support to design of the program and developing the assessors. More than 10 case studies are documented to show how organizations have approached their assessment programs, lessons learned, and successes and challenges faced.

The book leads the reader through the process of selling the concept and importance of transformation and Lean assessments to embed the desired behaviors within workplace culture. With many case studies, the reader is guided to design their own programs and develop their own assessors. This increases the probability of sustainability of the transformation program by focusing on and maturing the behaviors the transformation programs are trying to drive.

For example, one of the most well-known assessments is the Shingo prize -- This book explains the thinking behind the Shingo model and shares examples of assessments that support it. Other examples of assessments are covered, such as process maturity, quality and business assessments.

Morgan Jones has more than 30 years experience in Lean and 20 years in Six Sigma, a pragmatic and experienced improvement Leader, delivering over ＄2.1 billion in hard savings to organizations and improving customer and staff experiences and improved Health and Safety. The legacy capabilities of Business Improvement has resulted in over 23 international awards and chairing 27 international conferences around BI. Morgan is an international award winning author . He is also a Chartered Engineer, Certified Master Black Belt, Lean Master and Executive Coach working across many industry sectors including Utilities, heavy engineering, Oil and Gas, Maine, Mining, Government and Financial Services . His previous books includes the Shingo-Prize winning, 4 + 1: Embedding a Culture of Continuous Improvement in Financial Services. Chris Butterworth has been with S A Partners for nearly twenty years. Prior to this, he had many years’ experience of operating at senior management positions in several multinational organizations, including JCB, Jaguar, and Corus. He was part of the team that set up and ran one of the earliest Lean factories in the UK in the early 1990s. He was the overall program manager for the work with Cogent Power described in the Shingo Publication recipient book Staying Lean, and has spoken on the topic of ＂Lean Thinking＂ at many international conferences. He has published papers on Lean Thinking in various journals and in 2017 co-authored the widely acclaimed book 4+1 Embedding a Culture of Continuous Improvement in Financial Services, which is based on a case study from a Shingo Medallion recipient team at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, as well as the approach taken at the Bank of New York Mellon. He facilitates Lean Thinking and Shingo workshops for executive management teams globally and is a certified Shingo Institute facilitator and examiner. In 2014, he was honored to be awarded Best New Speaker of the Year (TEC: The Executive Connection) for his executive talk on Lean Thinking. Chris lives in Australia and when he is not on the beach or walking the coast paths, he spends his time writing and learning about continuous improvement from all the people he has the pleasure of meeting in his job.