Process improvement ideas
Teams stop seeing the processes they live inside. These prompts target the three places waste hides: waiting, rework and handoffs.
10 starter cards you can use today
- What are we waiting on most often, and who are we waiting for?
- What work gets done twice because the first version was not usable?
- Which approval has never once resulted in a rejection?
- Which handoff loses context every single time?
- What do we do because we have always done it, with no current reason?
- Which recurring question could be answered once in writing?
- What manual step happens more than five times a week?
- Where do we discover a problem later than we could have?
- Which tool do we use only because switching seems hard?
- What would we simplify if an auditor were not watching?
Target waiting time first
In most teams the time work spends idle dwarfs the time it spends being done. Fixing a queue usually beats making a step faster.
Change one thing per cycle
Pick a single change and run it for a sprint. Five simultaneous changes make it impossible to know which one helped.
Revisit on a schedule
Set the board to repeat monthly so the improvements you agreed on are visible next to the new complaints.
Frequently asked questions
How do you get a team to admit a process is broken?
Ask about the work, not about people. Cards about waiting, rework and handoffs get honest answers because nobody has to name a colleague.
How is this different from a retrospective?
A retro looks at a specific time period. A process session looks at the recurring machinery and usually pulls in people from more than one team.
All brainstorm topics