Lean Six Sigma Source

Why Your Business Needs a Continuous Improvement Blog

Posted on11. Jun, 2009 by Monique.

Sharing online can be the source of tremendous rewards for many businesses and organizations.  A blog is an excellent way to connect with people outside your facility, location, department, or division.  Whether you decide to share via the internet or intranet, there is no better way to chisel away the walls of communication.

Here are four reasons why you should start a continuous improvement blog.

1. Connect with Multiple Locations: In order to avoid feelings of isolation, you can have a common platform to share successes, stumbling blocks, best practices, or benchmarks.  Within a large organization it may be easy to become disconnected from locations in different times zones.  Your company blog can be a medium for collaboration as well as a tool to help reduce variation in standard operating procedures. 
2. Develop Unity in the Organization:  As Forrest Breyfogle III teaches at Smarter Solutions, there should be two levels of planning within the organization – Enterprise planning and Project Planning.  Enterprise planning is the 10,000 foot view of the organization or the high level processes.  The project level is more of the functional, daily operations planning.  Whatever you are working on the project level should be directly tied to key enterprise level strategic goals and objectives.  The enterprise level metrics should be the same for the project level.  Everyone should be focused on the same goals.  Communicating on your blog would be an easy way for satellite locations to get direct feedback from corporate to confirm that you are indeed working on the right things, at the right time, and avoid project duplications.  Employees can stay up to date by subscribing to company RSS feeds via email.
3. Upload Training Materials:  With business process improvement projects you will map out new standards of work or establish new procedures for a particular function of the organization.  When you present project updates or tollgates, you will be responsible for releasing the details of the changes implemented.  Keep stakeholders and process owners in the loop of new expectations by posting the new standard work on the blog.  Get instant feedback to ensure the message was understood and clearly communicated.  Videos are also a great way to format training and accommodate multiple learning styles.  This training will also archive your steps toward meeting strategic goals and objectives.
4. Shareholder Value:  Publicly traded organizations can benefit from blogs by keeping shareholders up to date on improvements and having a medium to evaluate their return on investment.  You will always have to submit SEC filings, but what a better way to add value to the relationship than by providing a multimedia portal for two-way, transparent communication.

WordPress.org  is an excellent place to start to get your own continuous improvement blog started today!

I would love to hear your feedback on this post – Does Your Organization Currently Use a Blog?

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