Chapter 5

Sustaining Improvements

According to a survey of 769 global CEOs, excellence of execution is the top-ranked concern for CEOs worldwide.1 This finding reflects that only about 30 to 40% of reengineering and Six Sigma projects achieve their stated objectives and also a deep concern with sustaining gains from operational improvements.

Operational improvement projects, by definition, have a clear beginning and an end. When it comes to sustaining these gains, the emphasis needs to evolve to governance and continuous improvement from project management. Here, we appear to have less clarity on the historical level of sustainable performance, but the general sense is that organizations’ track record in sustaining the gains from improvement ...

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