Operations and Technology Anagement

A fundamental difficulty associated with improvement is the tension between the business perspective requesting and imposing improvements and the claims and values of the current owners of the working practices which are often threatened by change. Neither party easily understands the other. An additional difficulty is to know how to attribute the business and operational performance achieved to the individual investments made in improvements. This paper proposes two separate frameworks for managing incremental and radical improvement which address the above difficulties. The need for the frameworks have been deduced from longitudinal case observation and the development of a participative simulator which reproduces the experience of managing improvements.