A major challenge for all improvement programs is to sustain improvement. In other words, sustain the performance uplift from the initial success when the initiative is first implemented.

This is particularly challenging for any initiative that involves a process change where the initial success can quickly fall away as people revert to the ‘old way’ of doing things.

What we would like to happen, of course, is for the performance to be sustained but this won’t happen for a process change without taking sustainability steps – and achieving ‘lock-in’ of the performance uplift.

Initiative sustainability should be addressed during all phases of an initiative to successfully sustain improvement but especially towards the end of the initiative before the initiative transitions back to ‘Business As Usual’.

Sustainability work steps need to be thought about during implementation planning. Five key sustainability steps that should potentially be planned for implementation are:

• Define processes and ensure the new way of working is well documented
• Implement ‘error proofing’ if possible. In other words try to ensure there is only a single ‘right’ way of completing a task
• Brief operators on the new way of working and ideally post at the work front ‘one pagers’ explaining how the new process will work
• Train operators if needed on the new process
• Set-up and start process confirmations – based on the new processes

When reviewing the plan at the implementation gate, try to ensure that these steps have been addressed as part of the plan. This will help set-up the initiative for long term success.