Let’s take a look at an example of continuous improvement practices at the company Atlassian.
Atlassian, a software company that offers products to product managers and development teams, has successfully created and sustained a culture of innovation and continuous improvement. Atlassian achieves this in a few different ways.
Firstly, to drive innovation, employees are given 20% of their allocated work time to spend on personal projects. [1] This is modelled on Google’s innovation strategy, where personal projects often can be transformed into creative new features or products for the organisation. This strategy requires Atlassian to allow their employees the time to work on these personal projects, which is an expensive risk for the company since 20% of employees’ time is given away to experimentation. However, to ensure that this time is used productively, employees focus their personal projects on the team, how it operates, and what they do.
Secondly, Atlassian cultivated a culture of continuous improvement to support innovation. Specifically, Atlassian split their employees into small teams and encouraged them to own their career path by embracing and identifying challenges and strengths. What they found was that successful teams handled challenges differently to other teams, so to help those who struggled, Atlassian implemented a workshopping resource called the Team Playbook. They gathered the practices that successful teams used and created short, purposeful workshops and exercises that enabled teams to learn and adopt these practices. [2]
For example, Atlassion’s Health Monitor [3] helps teams to assess their strengths and weaknesses. Once some weaknesses have been identified, teams and employees can use other plays to strengthen these areas.
Instructions: How do you implement continuous improvement practices?
Taking dedicated work time to innovate and find continuous improvement opportunities can be an expensive cost for an organisation. Considering what you have just learned, complete the following:
- Explain in a brief paragraph:
- How might you go about implementing effective continuous improvement practices?
- What might you do differently to Atlassian?
When you stop doing something, nothing happens. Continuous improvement should be an unending Process. The process of keeping, improving, keep doing and keep seeing results. So as a product manager, I must consider the cycle of PDCA- Plan, Do, Check and Act. Should be my guiding principle in effecting incremental change for the organisation.
Since the individual goals is in tandem with that of the company, I would allocate more time to them for more exploit, makes communication very effective, improve the process and encourage feedback. That way we can monitor our CI and of course make use of the incremental Continuous Process all the time.
Customers feedback mechanism is a very important tool that can be used for continuous improvement of a business or product. This system would tell the product manger the experiences of the users and in turn the product manger can use the information to further fine tune the product to what the customers make want an also attracts new potential customers.
What i would do differently is to allocate more time for the team work because it has shown to be an effective mean so adding more time can give them more time to explore ideas and do more as a team.
I will create a culture that encourages feedback mechanism.
I will make the product customer centricity and put in place employees rewards system
To implement effective continuous improvement practices involves creating a culture that encourages feedback, learning, and adaptation at all levels of the organization. This can be achieved through regular assessment of processes, identifying areas for improvement, setting specific goals, and implementing changes incrementally. Key components include fostering open communication channels, providing resources for skill development, empowering employees to research and make decisions, and also celebrates successes.
First step is having feedback loops so it’ll be easy to get information from current processes so that as a product manager, I can understand and assess the current state of the product quality and where it needs improvement, customer centricity ie improve on a products design or features so customers love it more, look at the ratio between the business income and its expenses to see where an improvement is needed to maximize profits and lastly look at the certain metrics that track the status of a business process to know the exact performance of certain business processes and procedures.
Foremost, I will create a system that allows customers to give their feedbacks about our project virtually, this will help the employees to also gain confidence when their experimentation is being analyzed by the customers and help them to build a better product as a team since they know the feedback will be opened and their project will be structurally look into by the people they are providing the service for.
What I might what to do differently is taking more risk by giving extra time for team work and implementation.
Firstly , I would have created a platform that allows users to give effective feedback on the product both virtually and physically. There will also be a suggestion platform for employees to give their opinion on the product that has been launched. The data from all these sources will be collated and analyzed either at the end of every week or month , depending on what the team agrees. After Analyzing, the goal for the following week/month will then be to work on how to improve on the feedbacks that has been obtained.
What I might do differently to Atlassian is that asides the 20% employee time, extra 10% will be spent within small teams for team projects. I believe strongly in teamwork.
In order to implement continuous improvement, I, as the project manager will do survey and make research in other aspects that will make the company/organization grow and also get ideas from my team to make sure there is customer’s satisfaction after using our product.
I will dedicate a team just for getting feedback from customers/clients in order to have ideas on how to improve in building or marketing our products.
To implement continuous improvement as a pm, I will list out all that is needed to achieve this goal and then make sure I have different people working on each aspect from my main team, and then we occasionally come together to put together all that we have gathered as team and then work on this.
Well since this has been atlassian culture and as well been working for them, I might stick to that culture and not do anything differently since is producing results. That’s all that matters.
Figure out a system/style that works and then stick to it.