The Continuous Improvement Toolkit

This text contains practical information for continually improving all aspects of an organization. It presents real examples from all types of organizations including schools, hospitals and private sector companies. It is designed to be easy to use with clear step-by-step instructions.

Manufacturing companies work endlessly to make process improvements, yet they are often hard to implement and even harder to sustain. The reason: companies often stumble when communicating why the methodologies are being used and how to sustain the improvements. Communication for Continuous Improvement Projects demonstrates how to communicate change, create confidence in the new processes, and empower employees. It shows how to be an effective change agent by utilizing tools that make sense while being competitive in the business market. The book explores how the proper tools, communication, and management make the Lean Six Sigma methodologies work. It includes a Continuous Improvement Toolkit that is an easy reference for what tool to use and when and how to effectively teach the tools to employees who are not necessarily engineers. Communicating these tools is the most difficult part of using the tools. The author details the implementation of the actual tools that create confidence and explains Lean Six Sigma in a way that will make employees want to jump on board. Result-driven decisions can be made from the methodologies described in this book, making processes quantifiably better with sustainable results. Extensive and informative, the book takes the guesswork out of the art of continuous improvement through communication.

The School Portfolio Toolkit is a book that includes over 300 tools, strategies, templates, and examples for use in building school portfolios and for planning, implementing, and evaluating continuous school improvement. The Toolkit was written to support school personnel with the mechanics of putting together a school portfolio, as well as to offer processes and strategies to move whole school staffs into and through continuous improvement. The tools in the Toolkit will help staffs create, implement, and maintain school portfolios and begin the journey of continuous improvement. Each chapter deals with one topic related to the school portfolio and comprehensive school improvement, with related documents and tools. The School Portfolio Toolkit book provides templates, tools, examples, and strategies that will help you analyze your school's data, create a vision that is truly shared by the school staff, build a continuous school improvement plan to implement the school vision, formulate a leadership structure to implement the vision, involve parents, community, and business in implementing the vision, embed up to forty different powerful professional development designs into your school plan, evaluate your continuous school improvement work, and create a School Portfolio that will organize and serve as a framework for the continuation of this work

Manufacturing companies work endlessly to make process improvements, yet they are often hard to implement and even harder to sustain. The reason: companies often stumble when communicating why the methodologies are being used and how to sustain the improvements. Communication for Continuous Improvement Projects demonstrates how to communicate chang

• Aligns improvement efforts with two sets of standards, NELP and PSEL – no other books in the field do this. • To help ground the main points in this volume, each chapter features a case that presents a leader who is simultaneously leading a school while also learning about improvement science in their graduate class. • To help instructors use this book in their courses, each chapter includes teaching notes and an action inventory aligned to the case examples and chapters. • Uses Improvement Science as a method of continuous change and equity as a values framework—this book centers equity in every improvement effort • This book helps to reframe the conversation about how data can be used by leaders for improvement -- it emphasizes creating a data culture that allows for experimentation and learning from failure and does not limit emphasis on lagging accountability data. • This book is comprehensive with attention to foundational theory and research on continuous improvement, practical methods of continuous improvement, and the leadership of continuous improvement

This book explores the state of community radio, a significant independent media movement that began about two decades ago, in different parts of South Asia. The volume outlines the socioeconomic and historical contexts for understanding the evolution and functioning of community radio in an increasingly globalised media environment. It provides a ring-side view of how various countries in South Asia have formulated policies that enabled the emergence of this third sector of broadcasting (public and private being the other two) through radio, rendering the media ecology in the region more pluralistic and diverse. The chapters in the volume, interspersed by practitioner perspectives, discuss a range of key issues related to community radio: radio policies, NGOisation of community radio, spectrum management and democratisation of technology, disasters/emergencies, gender issues, sustainability, and conflicts. One of the first of its kind, this volume will appeal to scholars and researchers of community media and independent media studies, cultural studies, as well as sociology and social anthropology, and South Asian studies.

Software engineering is of major importance to all enterprises; however, the key areas of software quality and software process improvement standards and models are currently geared toward large organizations, where most software organizations are small and medium enterprises. Software Process Improvement for Small and Medium Enterprises: Techniques and Case Studies offers practical and useful guidelines, models, and techniques for improving software processes and products for small and medium enterprises, utilizing the authoritative, demonstrative tools of case studies and lessons learned to provide academics, scholars, and practitioners with an invaluable research source.

These two volumes offer a commonsense approach to creating and sustaining quality-improvemnt efforts. Your process improvement problem-solving teams and self-managed work teams will function better with the tools and techniques presented in this book.