Implementation of continuous improvement cells: a case study from the civil infrastructure sector in the UK

Abstract

The interest in lean management in the UK's civil infrastructure sector is on the rise. In parallel with this interest, a team-based, participative management technique called Continuous Improvement (CI) cells has been widely adopted by the sector. The research on the technique has been scarce even though it has been adopted widely in some sectors as part of lean management. The study presented in the paper explores implementation characteristics, benefits, challenges and roles of CI cells in other management strategies through a case study conducted at a large public client organisation in the infrastructure sector in the UK. Both qualitative and quantitative data were collected through interviews, participant observation at CI cell meetings, and from organisational and team records. It was found that CI cells show some similarities and differences in application with other participative management techniques in lean management. A large set of CI cell benefits and challenges were identified. CI cells were also found linked with Visual Management, kaizen, hoshin kanri, work coordination and planning, and employee training at team level.

Digital Last Planner System Whiteboard for Enabling Remote Collaborative Design Process Planning and Control

“…The second main recommendation is to implement the plan-do-check-act method (PDCA) in the project context [11] and continuous improvement cells [79] in an organizational context when planning, developing, and testing the implementation of the digital whiteboard for remote LPS and visual management strategy. These two different approaches are recommended because organization and project needs are different.…”

Broader use of the Modern Methods of Construction (MMC) in the UK public sector: A Business Model Canvas (BMC) perspective

“…Public clients are considered part of an influential social system in the construction context (Coenen et al, 2022), dominating over private clients in their expenditures (Adam and Lindahl, 2017), and equating to over three times the size of private construction demand (Taylor, 2020). Literature is pronounced to distinguish public clients as influential in driving the adoption of innovations (Tezel et al, 2021), being referred to as change agents (Rosander, 2022). The low uptake of a construction methodology that is widely nominated to triumph over traditional methods, consequently, strengthens the rationale for more focus on the dynamics contributing to public clients' adoption-indecision.…”

Key facilitators to continuous improvement: a Spanish insight

“…In these works, the experience of a specific company is described with a rather informative purpose; the main objective being the presentation of experiences that can serve as an example for other companies. Some recent examples may be the works Khan et al (2019), Rossini et al (2019), Bresciani et al (2020), and Tezel et al (2021), amongst others. In some of those studies, the concept of CI is related with other management philosophies such as lean management, total quality management or theory of constraints, amongst others (Scott and Migliaccio, 2009;Lee et al, 2010;Chen et al, 2010;Gupta et al, 2010;Van Looy et al, 2011).…”