Continuous Improvement

Effective organizations continuously look at what they do and how they do it. This helps ensure they are performing effectively and achieving results.

The City of St. John’s invests in continuing to do things better. In fact, it is one of our core values as an organization. We check our service delivery processes to identify and remove inefficiencies or waste. The goal is to make processes more efficient and in turn to deliver more value to the citizen.

We focus on awareness and training, projects, tools, methods, governance and metrics.

To demonstrate the impact that continuous improvement is having at the City, we use a data collection tool to capture annual outcomes from continuous improvement (CI) projects.

The figure opposite shows the outcomes from a variety of projects, some of which are small in scale but still yield significant results.

Total lead time/process time saved (hours per year)

108,349

Cumulative outcomes from a subset of CI projects

Average improvement in lead or process time

45% 6,553

$368,851

$64,562

Total sta time reinvested (hours per year)*

Sum dollar value of sta time reinvested

Financial reinvestment as a result of CI projests

*When processes are streamlined and waste removed, the amount of time that employees working in the process need to complete tasks is also reduced. This time can then be reinvested or, in other words, used to complete other tasks.