CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT - DESIGN, ORGANIZATION AND MANAGEMENT

The paper analyses and describes strategies for designing, organizing and managing systems for Continuous Improvement (CI). CI is defined as a broad change program, planned, organized and systematic, and distin guished from project based models of change. Based on case studies and survey research, four basic strategies for the design and organizatio n of CI is identified; three team-based strategies and one individuall y based strategy. These, in turn, depend on the basic task design (ind ividual or group tasks), and whether the improvement task is integrate d or parallel. It is argued that the design largely depend on the defi nition of process, goals and content of the improvement tasks. Further , it is shown that companies tend to move from expert-oriented strateg ies to more organic strategies as maturity evolves, and that Swedish m odels for CI seems to be more organic in nature, as compared to the mo re expert-oriented Japanese approaches.