January 8, 2025 | Mark Paradies

How Do You Develop a World-Class Improvement Program?

What Are You Trying to Improve?

Before starting an improvement program, you must decide what you are improving. For example,

Human Performance
industrial Safety
Process Safety
Nuclear Safety
Traffic Safety
Patient Safety
Aviation Safety
Product Quality
Process Quality
Service Quality
Equipment Reliability
Maintenance Performance
Operational Excellence

Each of the performance improvement programs for the topics above will be different. Some will be slightly different, and some will have major differences.

The differences are partially due to differences in the industries involved. Some are different because of the technology involved. For example, driving a truck differs from operating on a patient in a hospital.

However, all improvement programs have certain similarities. The similarities include:

You will need management’s support.
You should develop a written program that is approved by management.
You will need a budget and a staff to support the program (or programs).
You will need a communication plan for management, supervision, and employees.
You will need participation by management, supervisors, and employees.
You will need performance measures and tools for trending performance.
You will need a rewards program for successful outcomes.
You will need a plan to benchmark your program and ensure continuous improvement.
You should think about a succession plan for key team members and management.
You will need an advanced root cause analysis system to analyze incidents and proactively improve performance using audits and assessments.

But there’s more.

Improvement Program Similarities/Differences

Once you have decided what you are trying to improve, you should be able to define clearly what needs to be improved. Usually, you start with an outcome in mind.

For example, if you decided to prevent fatalities (your objective), you might see that several of the topics above must be included in your improvement program. To prevent fatalities, you might decide that you need to improve the following:

Human Performance
industrial Safety
Process Safety
Traffic Safety

Your improvement program would include each of these topics, but you might take different approaches to each topic.

An Example Improvement Program with 4 Approaches

For example, industrial safety usually has a single individual (or a small group) as the target of a hazard. You might adopt Chevron’s GOALZERO program based on the Safety Wheel.

However, you probably would choose different approaches to improve process safety, traffic safety, and human performance.

For example, to improve process safety, you might adopt the CCPS’s Vision 20/20 and add elements of A dmiral Rickover’s Nuclear Safety approach.

You might use the tools from the National Safety Council’s driving safety program for traffic safety.

Finally, you might attend System Improvements’ Stopping Human Error Training to improve human performance and develop a custom program taking the best ideas from HOP and Human Factors.

Improvement Program Implementation

Because there is a danger of overwhelming people, you would probably roll out these programs one at a time (based on the risk involved in each topic and your data about past accidents and incidents).

For example, if your company had a major explosion (a process safety incident), you probably would start with the process safety improvement program and, next, roll out the human performance improvement program (an essential part of process safety).

You need to develop an implementation plan for each improvement initiative that includes managers, supervisors, and employees and targets achieving their acceptance and participation (you can’t do this alone).

Get Some Great Ideas

I have an idea for you if you are just starting a plan or have an existing program that you would like to improve (remember the continuous improvement part of any program). You should attend the Improvement Program Best Practices Track at the 2025 Global TapRooT® Summit.

What’s in the Improvement Program Best Practices Track? Here are the sessions…

Click on the figure above to see an outline of each session. And if one or more of these sessions don’t interest you, you can choose other Best Practice Track sessions to customize your Summit experience. See the complete schedule HERE.

However, the Best Practices Track sessions aren’t the only learning potential at the Summit. We also have five interesting, informative, and motivating Keynote Speakers.