Every company strives for continuous improvement, but if you take a close look at the operational and strategic teams, you will notice that there is often an important ingredient missing for a truly lived continuous improvement. Thus, according to Deming, this process consists of four iterative steps: plan-do-check-act.
In the operational rush, we are quickly tempted to skip the check, the review. In many cases, the result of this failure is actionism that does not do justice to the complexity of digitization projects.
One of the reasons Scrum is such a successful framework (see Scrum Method) is because continuous improvement is mapped as an integral part of the process. The check is represented by two meetings: Review and Retrospective. The review is feedback on the product, whereas the retrospective is feedback on the process. Therefore, a structured and moderated reflection of the collaboration takes place in each iteration. Now it does not always make sense to work according to Scrum, nevertheless every company and every team can define suitable iteration lengths according to the example of Scrum, after which a structured reflection takes place – whether agile is worked or not.