I can hardly believe a year has passed since I attended the Continuous Improvement (CI) team’s Annual Planning Day and started my secondment with them. As you’d expect from a team that has continuous improvement as its core function, every member of the team actively engaged with this process. They were buzzing with ideas, an animated discussion ensued and there were (of course) many different coloured post-it notes.

By some wizardry, these were all expertly collated and organised by Graeme Gilkes, the Lean mean annual planning machine. They were cross-checked with strategic goals, then projects were identified for the year with team members volunteering to lead or assist with each one. It was, in a nutshell, how an Annual Planning Day should look like. 

But it didn’t end there. I was also impressed by their weekly structure. The team work on a hybrid basis and remain connected through a Daily Stand Up Teams call at 9am every morning. Not only does this make sure everyone is safe and accounted for, it replaces that kitchen chat you miss out on when working from home, and it really helps to get a sense of what everyone is doing.

Some key items on their agenda that I think could be useful for a lot of teams:

• Resource Plan: Who is out of the office today/next week?
• Rota for the week (Monday)
• Mailbox cover: Is person on the rota ok to cover the mailbox today? Anything to watch out for?
• How was yesterday for everyone? Any highlights, points of interest to share?
• Safety and risk: Any safety, risk or cyber security issues to discuss?
• Reminder to update weekly trackers in advance of the staff meeting (Monday)
• Communications: weekly post content (Tuesday)
• Today’s Plan for everyone: What are you working on today?
• Improvement/Sustainment idea
• Lessons learned, successes and recognition
• New items for action
• AOB

Obviously as a communications officer I was delighted that creating content was just on the agenda as a standard item. You’ll also see that every day the agenda includes ideas for any improvements, recognising each other’s contributions and successes, and items for action. The meeting lasts all of about 15 minutes, but I found it such a helpful start to the day. Everything is recorded so it’s not lost, and it helps inform their weekly staff meeting where they decide what needs to be taken forward based on what benefits the piece of work might have.

The team uses Power BI dashboards and SharePoint Lists  to help inform the work that they do and are constantly striving to improve them to make them even more user-friendly (something that Jacquelyn O’Brien does an incredible job of).

The motivation in the team, the sense of purpose and feeling of there being a clear set of goals to work towards makes for an inspiring work environment. I’ve really enjoyed the experience and am looking forward to bringing some of my learning into my work as I return to the Research and Knowledge Exchange Services directorate.

If anyone at the University is interested in continuous improvement, I would highly recommend signing up for the Strathclyde CI Network. This will add you to a dedicated Teams channel and give you access to a variety of workshops a year that I have found both incredibly fun and genuinely useful.

You can also request support from them to help streamline your work processes by emailing continuous-improvement@strath.ac.uk. This is available to both University staff and external organisations.