The Improvement Guide: A Practical Approach to Enhancing Organizational Performance

This new edition of this bestselling guide offers an integrated approach to process improvement that delivers quick and substantial results in quality and productivity in diverse settings. The authors explore their Model for Improvement that worked with international improvement efforts at multinational companies as well as in different industries such as healthcare and public agencies. This edition includes new information that shows how to accelerate improvement by spreading changes across multiple sites. The book presents a practical tool kit of ideas, examples, and applications.

The Improvement Guide

In today's tumultuous global marketplace, making effective changes in how organizations are run has become more important than ever. Performance improvement continues to be a key focus for leaders in business, healthcare, education, and government concerned with long-term success and sustainability. Executives, managers, and workers need practical methods and techniques that produce lasting results.

This second edition of the best-selling book, The Improvement Guide, offers an integrated approach to learning and improvement, one that is designed to deliver quick and substantial results. Using straightforward stories to illustrate core ideas, the expert authors introduce a flexible model for improving quality and productivity in diverse settings. They draw from research conducted in a variety of areas—manufacturing, healthcare, government, and schools—to present a practical tool kit of ideas, examples, and applications.

Since the book was first published more than a decade ago, the authors have expanded the use of their Model for Improvement¿through work on improvement efforts at multinational companies as well as in different industries such as healthcare and public agencies. This thoroughly revised and updated edition includes new information that shows how to accelerate improvement by spreading changes across multiple sites—for example, spreading improvements in cardiac care across multiple hospitals; spreading set-up efficiencies across multiple manufacturing sites; or spreading approaches to reducing homelessness across multiple cities.¿In addition, the book contains an explanation of how other approaches such as Six Sigma and Lean production are related to the Model for Improvement framework.

Designed to be highly approachable, the book's Resource Guide to Change Concepts is updated so that even beginners can utilize the tested techniques of some of the world's most experienced practitioners. Like the first, this second edition offers a practical tool kit filled with dynamic ideas, illustrative examples, and useful applications.