Emma Hancock

Said the following about The Continuous Improvement Training Team IP Track:

“The Network Rail Infrastructure Projects (IP) Track team would like to nominate the Continuous Improvement Programme (CIP) team for successfully leading the business through a significant culture change programme and training over 600 colleagues in lean tools and techniques whilst demonstrating exceptional value for money and clearly defined benefits (including safety improvements, time saving and increased team morale).

The CIP has brought together the whole of IP Track to focus on continuous improvement and innovative ways of working in in everything they do. The team facilitated interactive Lean / CI sessions to help everyone in IP Track understand what their customer’s value, along with how to challenge waste and existing processes to deliver more efficiently, effectively and safely for their customers.

The ultimate goal was to train 600 colleagues in CI tools & techniques to:

• Learn how to challenge traditional ways of working and drive the CI culture-change in IP Track

• Provide everyone the opportunity to learn (or refresh) the Lean/ CI toolkit used to identify and articulate improvement opportunities

• Support colleagues in identifying and leading CI projects in their area

• Create a cross-functional and countrywide CI network

Over the next 18 months, the CIP Team over-delivered on all aspects of the aims above. Firstly, and most importantly, the whole of IP Track completed an anonymous survey with 75% feeling there was definitely a growing CI culture, strong evidence indeed that the CI ethos continued after colleagues returned to their day jobs.

Over 550 improvement projects have been launched over the last 18 months lead by a staggering 350 people – over half the number of people trained went on to roll out a project. Even more impressive is the fact that 100 of these projects have already been closed out resulting in financial benefits of £8.5 million and time savings of just under 900 working days a year. These tangible benefits sit alongside addressing countless minor frustrations as well as safety, quality and environmental improvements.

The CIP team have led by example by reducing waste and cutting costs wherever possible. Streamlining the training material to a handy A5 booklet (reducing printing costs by approximately £15 a delegate) and improving the training courses to reduce them down from three days to two (saving 100 man-training days) are just two examples of how many smaller projects and improvements have contributed to a return on investment of over 1000% (comparison between spend on training compared to costs realised from resultant projects).

With consistently high feedback about the trainers and the course content and over 90% positive feedback across the board, this is further evidence of the training’s success. Such has been the popularity that an extra 60 colleagues have been trained with 50 more on the waiting list!

With such tremendous training take-up across the whole of the business the entire IP Track team are demonstrating the enormous and varied benefits brought by CI – for both them and their customers.

All of these achievements have come about through the training team challenging the business to make improvements and leading by example. Through taking on accountability for the ultimate benefits of the training, they have successfully imparted a culture of continuous improvement in IP Track whilst demonstrating tangible business benefits (such as improved safety, time saving and cost savings) that go hand in hand with improvements.“