Continuous Improvement

KEY TAKEAWAYS A management Obeya is the leadership team’s operating system made visible. It tracks the health of the business, not project deliveries. Seven boards on the walls of one room replaced opinion-based meetings with weekly data-driven sessions in 60 minutes. The agency director continued to run the Obeya after the engagement ended. The boards evolved, the weekly rhythm never stopped. An IT services agency director wanted to change how his management team worked together. He had a strategy and objectives. He also had talented people running operations, commercial development, and client delivery. What he did not have was a way to see it all in one place, discuss it factually, and solve problems before they became crises. ...

KEY TAKEAWAYS A BI team managing nearly 20 projects across several continents built an Obeya room and doubled on-time delivery in 3 months. The Obeya surfaced milestone collisions, quality failures, and ownership gaps that no status report had ever shown. Three PDCAs run inside the Obeya rescued a go-live, halved defects per delivery, and created a standard that the team still uses. Get the Full Project Obeya Template with all the boards layout: Strategy, performance, macro planning, and problem-solving. Ready to print and fill in. [Download Free Template →] ...

KEY TAKEAWAYS Lead time measures a process from start to finish, at any scope. Cycle time measures the duration of a recurring process. The scope you define determines which lead time or cycle time you measure. Define it explicitly, to have meaningful numbers for improvement leverage. High cycle time variability makes reliable delivery impossible. Reducing it is what turns a capable team into a predictable one. A product owner adds a feature request to the backlog. A developer picks it up 38 days later. He does the coding, then the testing, and pushes it to the deployment team. All that takes 7 more days. In the end, it takes the client 45 days to see anything. ...

KEY TAKEAWAYS A DevOps team cut its infrastructure deployment lead time by more than half. The team followed Agile practices well. The blockers hid in cross-team handoffs where no ceremony could reach. Value stream mapping revealed about half the lead time lost in a single queue due to unclear routing and missing documentation. Simple interventions drove the result: checklists, front-loaded requests, early handovers. No new tools. No reorganization. The Problem A DevOps team at a large enterprise handled cloud infrastructure deployments. A small DevOps team, working across multiple projects, supported development teams who needed environments to build and test their applications. ...

A financial software case study. How visual management, daily flash meetings, and team-led PDCAs replaced rework with ownership. KEY TAKEAWAYS A 15-person COBOL team at a financial institution reduced defects from 93 per month to 8 in two months. The team ran their own PDCAs using visual management and daily flash meetings. The method works the same for different tech teams: software development, testing, tech support, IT operations, and project delivery. Results from real coached teams: 91% defect reduction in financial software, 160% testing productivity gain, 94% backlog cleared in e-services support, 70% on-time resolution improvement in energy sector IT operations. Does Your Team Have the Same Problem? Take the 3-minute Delivery Scorecard to find out: Where your delivery system breaks down Whether you’re fixing symptoms or root causes Your biggest improvement opportunity right now Find Your Team’s #1 Bottleneck (Free) → ...

KEY TAKEAWAYS A 13-person billing test team increased productivity by 24% in three months by making work visible, setting daily targets, and solving problems one at a time with PDCA. Diagnostic before action: observing testers at their workstations revealed hidden waste like seven help requests in three hours, repeated tests without conclusions, and two-hour solo investigations. When the project manager changed mid-project, the new manager walked into a team that ran itself. Visual boards, tracked indicators, and clear action plans made the transition seamless. Get the Lean Testing Quick-Start Kit. 4 practices, real results, a two-week plan to start Monday. Get the Kit → ...

KEY TAKEAWAYS The product vs. productivity debate creates a false choice: Delivery capability is not separate from your product—it’s part of what customers buy and experience. Product ≠ offer: A product includes features, delivery system, quality level, and support experience. Toyota never separated “the car” from “how the car is made.” Customers experience your delivery system directly: They pay for speed, uptime, and responsive support. Amazon’s product isn’t “stuff online”, it’s “stuff online, delivered tomorrow.” Speed enables learning, learning finds value: Faster delivery creates faster feedback loops. Teams that ship quickly learn what customers actually want. Slow teams guess. Most teams don’t lack ideas—they lack delivery capability: The bottleneck is rarely “we don’t know what to build.” It’s “we can’t ship what we know we should build.” I keep hearing the same advice: focus on your product, not your productivity. The argument sounds strategic: focus on what matters rather than internal mechanics. Stop rearranging deck chairs. Build something customers want. ...

KEY TAKEAWAYS Lean Testing makes testing problems visible so teams can solve them at the root, instead of hiding waste behind status reports. One team cut false defects from 44% to 4% and nearly tripled productivity by using visual boards, andon signals, and PDCA. Teams that practice Lean Testing are ready for AI. Teams that don’t will automate their waste instead of removing it. Get the Lean Testing Quick-Start Kit. 4 practices, real results, a two-week plan to start Monday. Get the Kit → ...

KEY TAKEAWAYS False defects dropped from 44% to 4% by implementing an andon system where testers call for help before reporting uncertain bugs Testing productivity more than tripled (from 1.5 to 8 tests per person per day) through a pull flow system with daily targets Failed corrections dropped from 23% to 10% using a quality wall with expert verification Client satisfaction recovered after years of complaints, with the client noting clear improvement in service quality This case study was co-presented with Arnaud Cailleau, then Director of Testing Services at Sopra Steria. [Download the original presentation (PDF)] ...

A Lean approach for startups growing faster than their support team can handle KEY TAKEAWAYS On-time resolution jumped from 40% to 68% by switching from push-based assignment to a pull system where technicians take tickets when they have capacity Escalation rate dropped from 20% to 11% through quality standards and visual management Client satisfaction improved from 7/10 to 8/10 with no additional headcount 44-ticket backlog cleared by making flow visible and enforcing a 24-hour assignment rule Your inbox is a disaster. Tickets are piling up. Your support team is stressed, working late, and still falling behind. Customers are getting angrier. Response times are slipping. ...