Continuous process improvement (CPI) is a thing. But what is it exactly? And what does it mean to a Learning and Development (L&D) professional or team? After all, we just take direction on what to work on from leadership and the project requests that come in (a.k.a., one offs).
Let’s tackle the answers to those questions. Not necessarily in that order. And possibly a few more while we’re at it.
What Is It?
Here’s the definition, with some help from an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant:
Continuous process improvement is an ongoing effort to enhance products, services, or processes by making incremental improvements over time.
The goal of continuous process improvement is to ensure that feedback and evaluation data are used meaningfully to make necessary changes and improvements.
What Does It Mean to an L&D Professional or Team?
Depending on your unique circumstances and work product, continuous process improvement may look different from other circumstances. And opportunities may not jump out or be obvious. However, when you look, you will find opportunities tucked into many areas of your work and work product.
Here are just a few:
- Courses that are built and uploaded to a learning management system (LMS). Ownership for assignment and completion is handed off to another team or area. And you or members of your team never think about them again.
- Safety and risk management training content that no one can even remember whether it has ever been updated, refreshed, or overhauled. Sound familiar? Anyone? Anyone?
- New employee orientation ends and attendees are sent off to be successful, mostly on their own. Since there has never been a request for creating it, the attendees (who are new employees) are not provided refresher training and an opportunity to get their questions answered—and more.
- New products, features, or benefits training was quickly delivered to meet the request of the business. Has anyone determined whether it is still valid?
- xAPI has been out there gathering all of the data, but no one is doing anything with the information.
So What?
Continuous process improvement is essential and a key aspect inherent in the various methodologies L&D professionals rely on to do their work, whether your team adheres to the principles of ADDIE, Agile, or SAM. Or maybe your team takes its cues from the product or software development industries and builds minimum viable products (MVP) and takes a “stage/gate” approach to managing projects and avoiding scope creep. Your organization might employ other method(s), too.
This is also true whether referring to the overall learning strategy, design process, development of the product(s)/learning content, results, and evaluation. CPI should undergird updates to any, or all, of these aspects of the work.
A brief word about only “taking orders” from your leadership and others in the organization: You have more autonomy than you think you do. It is all in how you consider the importance of what you do and how you go about doing it. Read on for some food for thought.
And Then What?
Consider: Why ask for feedback? Why conduct a results, outcomes, and evaluation process if developing plans for doing more than just reading that feedback and considering what can change isn’t a thing? If you’re not planning on doing much of anything differently, the feedback and results and evaluation data is meaningless (and gratuitous performance art). Don’t waste people’s time.
Consider: Maybe you and your team could apply the principles of the Japanese philosophy, Kaizen. It means “change for the better.” Rooted in the idea of incremental progress, Kaizen fosters a mindset where small, consistent refinements lead to transformative results over time. Kind of seems like the foundation of continuous process improvement, doesn’t it?
Consider: Do it because it is the right thing to do. But how? A few thoughts to get you moving into Kaizen mode of your work product:
- When beginning to plan a new project, the scope, schedule, etc., include development of a plan for reviewing the feedback. Also include a plan for deciding whether updates are needed, what those updates involve, or sunsetting the finished work product.
- When reviewing feedback, accountability for change must be a key aspect of any discussion. So should making notes of decisions (only) with dates and “by when” recorded. Use a process such as:
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- Start – Stop – Continue. Everyone in the group weighs in on each feedback item with one of these three elements.
- Plus/Delta exercise. Plus: What produced value during the event? Delta: What could we change or update to improve the process(es) or outcome? Add a Minus “vote” for work product that is already agreed and expected to undergo radical transformation.
- Reverse Feedback. Ask people to work through areas of feedback rephrasing any negative items into constructive and actionable statements. Doing this moves the group from defensive posture and explaining why to how to apply the feedback instead.
- Schedule a full review of courses, or subsets of courses, in the LMS to determine things such as:
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- Is the content current?
- Are people still completing the courses? Is there a reason they aren’t?
- What might be a better approach if aspects of the material are still needed?
This is just the beginning. You’ll find ways to implement small, but significant improvement when you begin to look for opportunities. Instead of viewing learning as a one-time event, Kaizen encourages incremental, ongoing enhancement to skills, training programs, and professional development strategies. Whether in manufacturing, healthcare, technology, or service industries, Kaizen transforms challenges into opportunities, turning businesses into agile, resilient, and forward-thinking enterprises.
True excellence is never a one-time achievement—it’s a continuous journey.
