Improve before starting

“Preparation of work is also work.”
This was one of the quotes from our change manager, with whom I had the pleasure of collaborating for several years. At first, I didn’t fully grasp its significance, but over time I realized the enormous potential that lies in preparing work.

For us this means transparency, the right structure in terms of size, urgency and decision making abilities in order to carry out a high performance meeting. Its like a 5S for the work we need to do.

During our Lean implementation efforts, we tried to embed this principle into processes and, more importantly, routines. A phrase that often emerged was: “Routines are more important than boards.” This challenged the common expectation that Lean implementation simply meant having boards with KPIs. After all, what is the value of transparency if the information is not systematically utilized? Preparing the work in the best way and routines are deeply intertwined.

Typically, organizations have processes or routines for continuous improvement (CI). Yet, routines for preparing work are equally critical. They reveal and enable small, incremental improvements rather than endless, large-scale projects. Whatever the source of a problem or improvement idea is, the first step should always be to classify, refine, support with data, and analyze root causes before taking action. This was one of our biggest lessons: investing a fraction of time in preparation can save hundreds of wasted man-days on unsustainable efforts.

One of the most significant experiences i made is that a huge amount of problems or issues are cumulating to something bigger with time whereas the right structure of work combined with dedicated routines helps effectively to nip problems in the bud.

Categorization and Decision-Making

Improvement ideas must be categorized by size, scope, and complexity also to be handled at the appropriate management level. Equally important is identifying who can make decisions within the defined scope. Not every issue needs to be escalated through all management layers. Empowering teams to act self-driven reduces bureaucracy and boosts a culture of continuous improvement. Of course, this depends on leadership preconditions such as psychological safety, collaboration, motivation, and a shared vision but as we agreed before we will not touch leadership qualities here.

For me, preparing work—structuring it before it begins—is the first step toward doing the right things. Structures vary across companies depending on culture, organization, and business model, but the right structure helps overcome resistance, excuses, and obstacles and it makes efforts digestable.

Real-Life Example

One of our first steps was to create transparency through a prioritized backlog of actions and problems. This shifted habits from verbal, siloed agreements to visual team board meetings. However, we noticed that many necessary activities were neglected because urgent tasks always dominated the backlog. Even when firefighting decreased, lower-priority tasks were often ignored due to resource or knowledge constraints.

To address this, we refined our team board by adding categories for "low"-priority, "low"-impact actions, and by estimating the time required for each task. We also specified who could execute them (e.g., mechanics, electricians, operators,...). This ensured that whenever free time arose, colleagues were obliged to pick tasks suited to their skills and availability in this particular category

The results were striking:

• Higher utilization of idle colleagues
• A paradigm shift from “highest importance first” to multidimensional prioritization
• Elimination of excuses for inactivity ("waiting for urgent tasks", "next item takes longer than i have time now")
• Natural development of time estimation skills, as teams learned to better predict task durations

This structure proved equally effective in the office environment and it represents just one of the extra structures in addition to a simple backlog list.

Broader Lessons

For many practitioners, these ideas may seem obvious. Yet focusing on them early makes a real difference in delivering value and gaining acceptance for change. You cannot always start with advanced tools, as CI maturity is usually low at the outset. Many organizations mistakenly believe they are already continuously improving, when in reality they are simply evolving over time or reacting to problems. Others equate automation and digitization with CI, and struggle to understand Lean or Toyota Kata. But especially automation and digitization brings other challenges while solving certain problems, or lets say rather improving certain KPIs. And those other challenges also have to be tackled and improved. One of the few rare methods here is Toyota Kata as it aims to continuously develop knowledge...better than "wait and see" and then work on fighting the fire.

Compounding this, today’s economic climate has led to downsizing. A senior manager once told me their staff was so “thinned out” that they lacked the resources for working on improvements. I believed him—without sufficient human capacity, who is supposed to sustain or improve processes?

And this is exactly the reason to implement or adapt to a systematic and structured way of CI instead of a sporadic and individual based, siloed approach.

The reason of implementing it lies and the same reason why we can't work on CI, namely the challenge of doing more (valuable) work with the same staffing.