But, We Keep Abandoning Them?

Productivity improvements are viewed as small, discrete, incremental shifts that aim to increase the performance of a specific function, usually done on a project basis to attempt to solve the above problems.

However, when viewed as a collective set of improvements the company’s productivity improvement projects often lack coordination across departments, and thus fail to achieve long term system-wide productivity improvements. The ROIs obtained are often limited to local functional measures.

To an outside observer, and distant owners, or both, such projects appear to be a slow and costly way to cause system-wide improvement. This perception raises stakeholder questions as to the wisdom of the investment.

From experience, stakeholders predict that these projects will not actually deliver system gains.