Rapid Improvement Events

A project lead takes responsibility for the planning and preparation that is required to ensure that the right people and inputs are available for a successful RIE. UCD Agile guide them through this process and also serve as facilitators for the event.

The project sponsor will typically open the Rapid Improvement Event, handing over to the Agile facilitator who will take participants through the current state to the future state using Lean tools and techniques. At the end of the event, participants will have (i) designed the ideal future state; that will be recommended using the appropriate channels/procedures; (ii) (ii) designed an interim solution  (iii) developed and agreed an implementation plan for the interim solution.

It is critical that the right people are involved in the Rapid Improvement Event, as the implementation plan will be acted on immediately following. These are low cost/high value actions that will typically take place within 2-4 weeks. The key principle is that the improvements are rapid. The project lead and Agile facilitator are available to participants during the implementation phase, should support be required. On-going progress updates for all stakeholders through an action tracker that participants keep up to date during the implementation phase.

The project is concluded with a follow up in which the project sponsor reviews the changes, recognises the efforts of the participants and signs off on the final report produced by the project lead.

Rapid Improvement Events are kept focussed and effective, in part, by limiting the number of people who participate. Ideally the number of participants will be between 8 and 12 but in some cases this may be extended to a maximum of 18 to accommodate representation from wide ranging stakeholder groups. Each stakeholder group will usually have a single representative.

The person who attends the Rapid Improvement Event must:

• Have practical, direct experience of the topic of the Rapid Improvement Event so that they can be an effective contributor
• Be authorised, either through their role or delegation, to make decisions within the scope of the project to ensure that decisions relating to the short-term solution will be upheld and implemented immediately following the event

Given participants are required to both have direct experience and the authority to make decisions, it is important that the project is discussed in their area/office prior to the event.

These discussions are required to ensure that local management/colleagues and the nominated participant have a common understanding of:

• What the process/topic means to their area
• Identify any artefacts (e.g., documents, reports, etc) exist that may be useful to bring to the event
• If it is a process, map it out
• How it currently works
• What works well
• What doesn’t work well/what are the negatives
• This is important to enable improvements to be made. Questions to consider include:
• What is difficult or frustrating?
• What takes up a lot of time?
• If you could remove or fix 2 things in the process what would they be?

In Lean, a Rapid Improvement Event (AKA Kaizen Event) is a short event during which a team map out, analyse and improve a process – resulting in actions that are taken immediately following the event to streamline the process. In UCD, we are now applying this framework to projects. These are not always strictly Kaizen events (i.e., not always focussed on streamlining a single process), but the overall framework is the same.