Growing your business? Apply improvement management

To keep up with an ever-changing environment, organisations need to continuously evolve. When an organisation engages in improvement, it can work more efficiently and avoid mistakes in the future. It is therefore important that improvement management is applied effectively.

There are various methods for optimising improvement management. We will tell you more about the definition of improvement management and its importance for your organisation.

What is improvement management?

Improvement management is defined as a process that involves gaining insights into incidents, processes, deviations and irregularities. Based on these insights, plans and activities can be both developed and implemented. This process is cyclical, meaning that the steps are continuously repeated. The purpose of this process is to optimise the efficiency and effectiveness of an organisation.

The importance of improvement management

Managing improvement within an organisation enables targeted improvement with actions at both individual and team levels. This reduces organisational errors and costs. In addition, improvement management also saves time. Furthermore, it can help an organisation prevent incidents and comply with certain laws and regulations.

Methods to apply improvement management effectively

When incidents occur repeatedly within organisations, it is important to find out why they occur and how they can be prevented in the future. There are a number of methods by which incidents can be analysed. The following three methods are often used for this purpose:

1. TRIPOD

The TRIPOD method focuses on analysing incidents with a serious outcome. The TRIPOD method consists of three parts. First, it looks at what happened unexpectedly. Next, it looks at how this happened. Finally, it looks at why this incident happened. This takes into account direct causes, underlying causes and conditions.

2. PRISMA

The PRISMA method focuses on investigating human failure within an organisation. This method often used by healthcare organisations. The PRISMA method visualises the occurrence of an incident by using a cause tree. The collected facts are arranged according to causes, then causes behind those causes are searched for, and so on.

3. SIRE

The SIRE method shares similarities with the PRISMA method. However, this method is more focused on investigating one stand-alone (serious) incident. This method represents a toolbox from which different techniques can be chosen. This is done based on the incident that took place within the organisation.

Matching software

The TRIPOD, PRISMA and/or SIRE method can be applied to build a database of incidents. Such a database can then be used by the organisation to turn incidents into concrete areas for improvement. In this way, organisations can apply improvement management effectively. The Zenya FLOW software offers a complete set of tools for collecting, analysing and learning from incidents within your organisation.